Issues, Workarounds & Localization

It appears that while doing a mission drones become confused as to what target they are tracking.

For example, if a target is destroyed, or I issue a new attack order on a different target. All five drones will respond and approach the new target to get into firing range. Sometimes between 1 to 5 drones will drop out of attack mode.

What I think is happening is that, some of the drones are still in coldown on their turrets. So when the drone comes out of cool down the turrets are still looking at the old target, even though a new target was specified. The turrets attempt to fire at the old target, which no longer exists. So no target, a stop order is issued by the server and the drones go into a ready state.

So 5 drones are attacking target, 3 have just fired weapons and popped the target, I issue a new attack order, all five drones respond. As drones head into range on new target, 3 come out of turret cool down and realize the target no longer exists. This is interperted as the new target no longer exists, those three go into standby, the other two continue on to attacking new target. Or those three may travel back and attack the old target if it stil exists if I issued a new target while they are in turret cooldown.

That is how it appears to me.

Strangely, yesterday evening during some missions my drones were very alert (I was assisting a corp mate who had drawn all aggro, dont know if that makes any difference).

I was multi clicking as usual, but then I noticed they all were attacking at once, and after one click.

Same thing with trying to close windows by clicking on the little "x" in the top right corner. Most of the time the "x" disappears but the window stays open, but yesterday it was working flawlessly.

Why this behaviour would change every so often is beyond me. Is the client lagging at certain moments, for some reason?

Mobs need to shoot you before you are under attack. Mobs targeting you wont cause drones to engage. This is working as intended.

This sounds rather good estimation about what is going on. Facts are that drones will not disengage from 1st target they are ordered into. Buggy behauviour starts always when 1st target has died/depleted and drones are commanded to 2nd+++ one.

You misunderstand. The scenario:

I put drones out.
I target someone and engage the drones.
The drones MWD to the target and start shooting it.
It is going very very fast (drones are able to keep up while MWD but just).
Drones decide, fuckitall and give up.

Throughout the entire scenario both the target and drones remain within my drone control range.
The target is an NPC and is shooting at me so its not a case of burst ECCM or the like
This is the first target out of the gate for the drones so this is not (though similar) a case of the switch aggro issue.
It only seems to happen this way on fast targets.



Fact is this is not true in all cases. It is true of the behavior the previous posted described, but there are issues with 1st targets in certain situations. Facts are that there are probably several things wrong with drones.

this

In addition to the problems already mentioned I'd like to also point out that drones used to act as a solid unit. Somewhere between dominion and incursions, drones stopped functioning as a solid unit. What I mean is that whenever a target was destroyed when drones were set to agressive and focus fire, all the drones would for a split-second become idle, then they would all start microwarping to the next target at the exact same time and once they arrived on target they would all fire in unison on that target. They had a sort of "volley damage" effect that they lack now and it's really made killing elite frigates in missions take quite a bit longer. Now it seems that when a target is destroyed one drone out of the pack will lead the charge while the others at their own pace try to catch up: Drone 1 starts engaging target, up to a whole second later Drones 2 and 3 start to engage, split-second later drones 4 and 5 start to engage. When these drones are finally all on target they have all started firing upon arriving and they are not in any kind of unison, in effect operating much like ungrouped turrets. I'm glad to see a response from a CCP employee on the matter, I thought the day would never come. I can only hope that the issue is tested for more than just a few minutes as it can take some time for the problems to manifest while other times it's right off the bat.


Also, I'd really appreciate it if when I take the time to type out a semi-long post, that when I hit the post button I wasn't immediately brought back to the "Post a reply" page and the whole of my post gone forever without even being posted. Having to copypasta my posts into notepad before hitting the post button just to be safe every time is really getting annoying.

BTW this is post attempt #4

Today we received the second patch to fix invisible Barbies. Another patch day has come and gone without so much as a word from CCP on the drones issue. We did get one Dev to ask for a reiteration of information that was already posted on the forums and already contained within bug reports. Then nothing since. Nothing. It raises the question: Just how useful are bug reports?

Why is it so hard to answer the question in the OP?
Why did CCP choose to break drones? What was the big “feature” that was added to FiS that caused drones to go idle?
Why does CCP choose to remain silent on the drones issue?

CCP if you think basic FiS mechanics are lower priority than non-alphanumeric characters in file paths causing inviso-Barbie then you demonstrate an out of touch with the player-base mindset.

Not to bend over too far to defend it, having submitted a bug report in the past on the subject and talking to the person who responded to it, this appears to be a difficult problem to nail down. I can definitely understand how that could be given how drones function.

As for why did CCP choose to break drones, etc... This has been a problem for well over two years and it waxes and wanes in severity. I think this is definitely the most reproducible and noticeable it has been in years tho, so if we can get dev interest in the problem, we may stand a chance of having them figure it out.

Ok, so the three things I'm seeing repeatedly are:

* Drones picking their own targets/going idle (based on aggressive/passive setting I'm assuming) after a fairly consistent delay once you've issued a command
* Drones failing to focus fire
* Drones catching a fast target, dropping to normal speed and immediately getting left behind

Am I missing something or are those the major problems?



I mainly fly Amarr, we don't usually get a whole lot of drones