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This will create an awesome flood of tears, wailing and pulling hair and beards (if present).

It will make it harder to just use the same old and well documented ways/fittings/tactics over and over again.

Think the awesome amount of dead ships (some very shiny) followed by huge amounts of tears when incursions was released, but at least 10x more ;)

No longer will npc rats just follow the script and let themself be slaughtered without actually forcing the player to assess the situation and react.

It will be harder to just grind the same series of missions/deds/plexes over and over again without even bothering.

Some will see this as an annoying way to make it harder to farm the isk they want/need for having fun (which most likely doesn't include PvE stuff).

But I'd say that this change is well overdue, and like it was with incursions, people will assess, analyze and adapt.

And those who can't or can't be arsed to, will leave or find another way to fund their habit.

But drones will be an issue, ctrl-r is nice, but sentries move quite slowly ... ;)

Making pve more "engaging" makes pve more tedious than it already is, making the time sink to make isk to fund other adventures more difficult giving us less fun, and more work, grrrrreeeeaaaattttttt.

I guess CCP wants us to quit the game, and perhaps I will when this change comes.
It takes a long tedious grinding with drones. Even with them not being targeted, each mission will take an hour to complete, also preparing the mission, and moving my ship there.
I guess this game won't be worth my time anymore if spending all these hours to lose ships in some L4 missions.
I am not playing this game as a labour, I played this game for fun.

I studied a class in Artificial Intelligence at the university faculty of computer science, some 20 years ago. Still remember our professor that started the first lecture by defining what AI is in mathematical terms, one definition more boring and dry than the other. But near the end, he put up a picture with the definition he said that he liked the most:

"Artifical Intelligence is when you make computers behave like they do in the movies".

Guess we now could include "..and in EVE" to that ;-)

Good job CCP! Shooting artificially smarter rats is more fun than shooting artifically stupid rats! I playe EVE to get a challenge, if it was no challenge I would quit. Mostly you get challenges from other players (social aspects, pvp, cooperation in corps and alliance, different people from around the world with different languages and culttures etc etc). But when they are not around, AI rats will give you a substitute and make the boring parts of EVE less boring.

FYI, drone launch button would actually be pretty easy to implement

The current issue (I assume, at least) is "how do you decide what drones to launch when the hotkey is pressed"

The solution is simple -- allow us to drag a drone group onto the hotbar. Then, the existing [ctrl|alt] F1-F8 keys can be used to launch drones, removing any ambiguity in the command.

So much this lol.

Well heavy drones are very slow, so you will loose drones. Smartbombs are not good in high sec as you will get concorded if someone warps into your mission in a cloaky and sits 2km off of you cloaked.
Capitals / carriers are also not allowed in high sec....

So yea, please program npc's to leave drones alone at least in high sec.

I think you're taking the change more serious than it is. Feel free to proof me wrong, but what kind of encounters are we talking about? Let's say there's a Battlecruiser doing a Level 3 in low. So you sneak in and start attacking the Battlecruiser with an Assault Ship. What happens now is not having every second NPC start shooting you immediately or anything like that.

There's a chance that they start shooting you, however only the small NPCs flying frigates as well might do so immediately. The bigger ships will still most likely continue shooting the Battlecruiser. You might even be able to use the whole change to your advantage, especially in the case the NPCs start shooting the Battlecruiser's drones rather than you.

I would certainly hope so. Player drones are currently dumb as a rock.

Wait, WHAT? I totally missed this.

You're thinking about making changes to content you're not personally familiar with?

Are you familiar with any of the DED 10/10s and 9/10 equivalents (Fleet Staging Points), like especially the Blood Raider one that not only throws a citadel torp at you but neuts you so dry the only way to tank it is with a totally passive and expensive armor tanked low sig high EM resist ship supported by squishy logi because reps on a battleship or two isn't enough?

As politely as I can manage may I say please don't screw around with content that your players enjoy that you know nothing about until you know more about it please. This is how things get broken, does ccp normally let people who don't know the content inside and out make changes?