Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Bringing back drone loot in a meaningful way is pretty high up on a lot of peoples' lists for fun game features that have been eliminated instead of rebalanced properly. I was thinking of a decent way to bring them back into the game, and here's what I came up with.

Basically, it would bring back a kind of reprocessable drone loot to give minerals, but be ordered more strictly on drone size and power, scaling to more profit from low/nullsec farming of drones, but with less overall return than direct mining to balance concerns out somewhat.
Each materials are ordered into three categories: Construction materials, fuel materials, and advanced materials. Spawn rate is ordered on difficulty, so you'd see simliar distribution of alloys and materials based in simliar ways to how ore and whatnot is distributed along system security level. from high to true null. or depending on missions.


Construction Materials:

Basic Alloy: 40% tritanium, 40% pyrite, 20% mexallon

Complex Alloy: 40% mexallon, 40% isogen, 20% noxicum

Advanced Alloy: 40% noxicum, 30% zydrine, 30% megacyte


Basic alloys would be most common in hisec for bc-sized down drone rats; you'd see complex alloys on advanced npcs and occasionally battleships, but not that often. Advanced alloys would be a lot more common in heavy lowsec sites like a lvl 5 or combat site and null areas like the drone regions to reflect the resources available that the drones are mining.


Fuel Materials:

low-grade fuel: mix of ice products with more emphasis on stront, oxygen and water. 60% ice products and 40% tier 1 PI materials

medium-grade fuel: mix of ice products with more emphasis on liquid nitrogen, liquid ozone. 40% ice products, 25% tier 1 PI materials, 25% tier 2 PI materials, and 10% moon goo

high-grade fuel: 20% of random ice products, 20% tier 1 PI materials, 20% tier 2 PI materials, and 40% moon goo with good chance for high-variety moon goo yields


Fuel materials would drop regularly with construction materials, although in slightly less amount, especially in highsec. Highsec NPCs would normally only drop low-grade fuel in any instance, as the grade would follow similar progression lines with high-null generally. High-grade fuel would have a decent chance of yielding tech or vanadium with a decent enough frequency, and allow small-scale manufactures a good way to get moon goo without moon mining.


Advanced Materials

Complex Crystal Network: 30% ice products, 30% random moon goo, 20% gas after refine, 20% megacyte and zydrine

Elaborate Crystal Relay: 20% ice products, 40% random moon goo, 40% gas after refine

Transcendent Crystal Artifact: 40% random moon goo, 40% gas after refine, 20% fullerenes after refine.


Advanced materials would mainly found in nullsec, and only occasionally be found in lowsec, either in lvl 5 missions or decent drops. All of these materials would not drop with regularity for most npcs. While more would drop than not, generally the idea would be that if you're directly mining any of these minerals/materials you'll be getting a higher yield with them. The main point is access. Opening up minerals players wouldn't normally have access to not only incentivizes people to go after drones if they want to build more t2 items without buying off the market or mining for long stretches while still getting their pve in.

Note that the scaling for drops is directly related to system sec status, and yield progressively becomes better the lower the sec you go.

EDIT: For drone regions, how would you like to see drone loot ordered among the rats in combat sites?

Or we could leave mining for the miners? Lets not bring back gun mining. Mining already makes less income than drone ratting. Lets not make it even worse.

The average mineral yield from this per hour will be adjusted to be less than solo strip mining. The issue from last time was the copious amounts of minerals EVERY drone dropped, and as I stated, while you would make a lot more from killing drones in lower security systems, mining planets, rocks, or moons would yield more overall, so mining would remain the primary resource-gathering occupation. The drop hield for loot would be closer to 2/3 or 1/2 the rats dropping loot rather than every single one.
This would just be supplimentery, and a way for people to get a foot in the door for advanced manufacturing without investing a lot into infrastructure and skills.

Any more ideas for how to integrate this?

Why not both? if you have decent bounties along with this loot, it balances out the return you get from them along with actually having useful loot. Since drones don't prefer a particular technology from any faction, if we were to pick a logical type of loot drop from them it'd either be totally random, something unique like special loot, or nonexistent as it currently stands. The latter is the least favorable because while bounties and loot aren't mutually exclusive, loot returns do matter in the long run if you factor in bounties, the former of which drones have none and the latter of which as you said, they need more of.

So yeah; what would be wrong with giving them special loot and boosting the bounties, since the two technically don't have much to do with the other?

I think one of the things getting rid of drone alloys did that was overlooked that really drove inflation up was the "I'd rather have fun shooting things, but I like to build stuff" crowd that got marginalized by taking them out of game. Sure mining is a holy and indispensable aspect of the game and all, but finding different routes to get to the same result is one of the core things that makes this game appealing.

I actually LIKE S&I despite being an FW brat, and while I enjoy building a few t2 ships and mods here and there, I wouldn't be caught DEAD mining. As someone who specializes in making other people explode, I would like to be able to manufacture more stuff from the loot that gets dropped, since not only is that money I can write off from building my next ships and modules (or ammo), I kinda enjoy making things after being so focused on destroying things all the time.

like meta level mods? An "arbalest" hornet or something like that? hahaha that could be pretty fun if they had bpcs for those drop now that you mention it. +1

I'd rather have more drone faction mods or basic meta variants of the basic drone mods implemented.
Maybe drone armor reppers and prop mods or other things like that.
drone faction remote repair and ewar drones, and other misc drone types.

The, "Drone isk returns suck so what can we do to improve them" was a core part of the argument anyway, so while we might be getting off the initial feature idea, I still consider it relevant. I liked the idea of meta level mods though, especially if they do the same thing they do with launchers and have certain meta levels use less cpu. Same thing would go for faction "sentient" shield reps or drone mods or whatever.

Let's not forget that despite the improvements to the mining profession, getting rid of the drone poo heavily impacted the mineral market. I'd have no doubt that one change alone was the cause for the 2x increase in ship prices I saw in the year that I returned after that nerf. So yes, it did improve mining for everyone who does that. But it inflated ship prices for EVERYONE.