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From what has been said, you can't hold aggro via DPSing, otherwise known as threat. Compared to other games, aggro management in EvE is in the stone age. If you are tweaking AI, we really need a complete set of tools to manage aggro. Skills or techniques that affect the threat tree or aggro list. In most games, tanks have all manner of tricks they use to maintain aggro, while wimpier toons have threat reduction tricks. I don't believe there is any such dimension to PvE play in EvE. Flame me if I'm wrong, of course.

I'll play with this on Duality. My initial impression is that "better AI" without real tools for aggro management is not going to be optimal. I promise, I'll keep an open mind.

An interesting change that I see a couple downsides to;
1) It makes life harder for new players.
2) It complicates life for most PVPers.

1 - I can tank the sites well enough myself, but this is going to mean the young members of my corp will no longer be able to participate in nullsec DEDs with us. New players often join their more expereinced corp mates in difficult missions in empire and null alike. As they are new, they of course must use ships that could not handle agro on their own. They dont have the skills yet, and they dont have the isk to pay for the faction ships fit with faction hardeners necessary to take agro. I forsee new players being left behind while their corp goes out to do a difficult site; loosing the human connection and also loosing ISK that new players need to get started.

2 - There is a large community of players in EvE whose sole interest in eve is PVP. For these players the Belt Rats, Anoms, and DEDs of their homes are simply a means to an end; a way to pay for their pvp activities. By making these sites more difficult you make a pain in the butt more of a hassle.

If the issue is that High-Sec players are bored of monotonous missions with Rats that behave like idiots, and this group of players likes the idea of rats that switch targets - let them have their own AI layer. Make it layer based on sec status. And leave the nullsec rats as is please. Maybe the nullsec rats just think that focus fire on the first thing they can lock is the best route.

Perhaps there is a community of players who live in high sec who sit around in faction BS fit with a dozen officer modules and X-Type hardeners who are thinking - cool, the NPCS are going to do stuff. But not me - I just want to pvp and for me, rats that are more work to kill means less time doing what I really want to do in eve - PVPing.

Thanks for reading.

That is null sec player AI, not null sec NPC AI.

NPC podding with this patch, equals, bans not seen before. So easy to abuse the mechanics, with warping people into drone heavy made missions. Then killing them absolutely.

It may come as a surprise to you, but some people are simply put off by the immobility of sentry drones. Deploying, scooping and redeploying immobile gun platforms is simply not what I wanted when i decided to play a drone boat.

So far I'm compensating for some of the shortcomings of heavy drones by using a navigation computer or two, which i can afford to do on my DPS alt.

If the AI changes are going to be implemented more or less unfixed, I will be forced to run a double spider sentry BS setup. Since I don't like being forced into something, I will seriously consider quitting the game at that point.

I agree that we should have some idea about how to manage aggro if the rats are going to be switching targets all willy nilly. For missions ? Pah. Who cares ? Missions aren't relevant to this really, just a few drones will get shot down.

The relevance is in DED 8/10 through 10/10. I have run most of these sites at various times, and it is ABSOLUTELY the nice helpful thing to do to let newer guys or poorer guys tag along in non-specced out ships to join you. The site runs faster and you have someone to talk to. Not a bad exchange.

If those guys are just going to start randomly picking up full pocket aggro with little to no warning then there's no way that you can have them tag along. There's also no way that you can bring a logistics ship either come to that, unless you bring two or more.

Think about certain sites... Like the Sansha 10/10 and Station Ultima's citadel torps. Are you seriously telling us that now EVERYONE has to run the site in sig tanked lokis or face one shot death ? C'mon. That's not cool.

Essentially the changes, if they are as aggressive as it seems, will mean that you can only run 10/10 plexes in WH fit remote repping tengus.

That means LESS interesting PvE content, because a decent amount of it just became basically the same but with loot instead of t3 parts. And I don't like that at all.

These changes will also essentially obsolete heavy drones with sentries being the only sensible option for doing serious damage with drones. Smalls you can always pull back fast, and mediums have a good chance, but Ogre II's trying to run 50km while they get shot at ? No. Not happening.

So everyone get t2 sentries if you haven't already, because if you fly a ship that uses heavy drones at all as a source of damage, you are going to Fed in the A.

how true
no matter what u do to rats they will never be exiting after u met them for the third time

what makes pvp interesting is that u never know how many ar what ship designs u will meet
and then come tears, cursing and some amusing chit chat

so if devs aint inventing a true AI with human behavior
all of it is pointless

and the work on trying to make rats not boring is simply an exuse to say "we done something"

You should probably test this. I'm pretty sure scout and EW operation give range bonus to all drones (except fighters).

From a developer point of view I can not see why on earth this is being done and being done the way it is being done.

Here is the best way to implement your new AI if you are really hell bent on having a new one:

-Do not implement the new AI on ANY old content.
-Create entirely new missions, encounters, experiences, and rewards based around your new AI.

The benefits:
-As a player you retain the sandbox experience. Players continue to have a choice about their game experience and which kind of content they wish to participate in.

-As a Dev you don't have to examine and tweak every individual mission, complex, and site for problems and forum complaints.
-As a Dev you can start by creating an example mission where people can test the newly introduced set of missions under a controlled scenario with different ship setups, drones, and player compositions.
-As a Dev you don't have account for every single situation where your new AI changes have broken parts of the game that you did not think of, ignored, or missed.

-As a company you retain the player base that actually enjoys the way content is and has been for near a decade.
-As a company you bring in new players and retain old ones because you are actually releasing new content.

Any other way and your looking at losing customers and in the process creating a nightmare of work for yourself by having to retweak every single mission and each individual mission scenario.
In addition you risk breaking many parts of the game that obviously were not considered, such as PVP mission ganking, ninja salvaging, and much more. By creating an example mission, every player class and every play style from PVP to PVE to anything in between can run and gank this mission, bring in lower level friends, ninja salvage, test and plug grief tactics and identify and plug possible exploits.

If I decide to quit it won't be because I dislike the proposed new AI system, but because of the way it is being implemented. In its current form it breaks existing content that was previously not broken and takes away attention and Dev time from issues in the game that are clearly still broken such as the inventory system, bounty system, alliance and corporation system, medals system, black ops, and the list endless. The forums are ripe with issues from the player community that remain to be addressed and with these proposed changes and in the manner in which they are being proposed is just begging for even more player discontent based on mission bugs or its effect on their style of gameplay.

I hope you take these suggestions as a player who really does not want to quit and has stated the obvious not out of criticism but as a genuine way to retain your player base and better the game.

Actually, having to lock your own drones is silly anyway. Why in the world would you need to use your targetting systems on an object that you are already tracking and is already reporting its position and telemetry?

I'm of a similar mind concerning fleets and ships on your watch lists. At the very least these should have minimal lock times just because of logic.

Might make for a cool warfare link, the ability to lock fleet targets near instantly.

Such a thing could be part of the tools to deal with the new aggro scheme we will have to deal with.