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I hadn't thought about that, but its a good point. This change makes drone management more of a pain in the butt, for ZERO increased reward. While I understand putting an end to afk missioning, punishing ALL drone users for the abuse of some isn't sound reasoning to changes.

Again, for Tsukinosuke let me reiterate: Wormholes and Incursions were built from the ground up with the bevhavior of the NPCs in them in mind, so they work fine. The older content (everything from belt rats to missions of all kinds to anoms and DED complexes to COSMOS ect ect) was created with the original NPC behavior in mind (thus the 20 battleships neuting you to death and back in the Blood Raider 10/10, never mind the ship killer torps).

What ccp is talking about doing is changing the bevahiors of NPC ships in content NOT DESIGNED FOR IT. What happens to a loki or Tengu in the 5th room of Angel Cartel Naval Shipyard when the npc battleship that shoots the torp change starget to you, along with just a handful of webbing and TARGET PAINTING Angel frigs???? Have you pro-change guys even considered that (or even experianced the content)?

One more time, we're not saying don't change, we're saying change it the right way or risk screwing up large swaths of the game for many player who don't deserve it. i'm not sure why this message is so bloody controversial around here.

Quick question on the ai changes; say 2 friends and I decide to do a level 4 mission. Between the 3 of us; we have a frigate, a cruiser, and a battleship. Does that mean after the new changes frigate rats will prioritize the frigate, cruiser rats prioritize the cruiser, and battleship rats will prioritize the battleship?

dont like it

it is a really super simple easy developer rule:

If you ever come to the point where you want to change a game mechanic that existed in the game for more than 3 years, hit you head agaist the wall, think again about it. if you still think you need to change it, hit your head again against the wall ....


You can add things

You can tweak things that are new in the game

You can fix things that a broken

BUT DONT FIX THINGS, THAT ARE NOT BROKEN !

You say so.. and people have an idea about what kind developer you are.. unnecessary *sarcasm* took you to here..

there is no rule like "DO NOT UPDATE/UPGRADE/IMPROVE THINGS, EVEN THEY ARENT BROKEN OR SOMEONE SAYS SO"..

As the previous poster pointed out... Eve Online has sooo many sucking chest wounds begging for Dev attention, and this is where they spend their money? There are more things that were half-implemented, or utterly abandoned, or just plain broken that could use Dev attention first.

Heck, how about some of the "That's just the way it is" items we all deal with every damn day that we're just used to, because it's been broken since forever.

Two or three Dev's brought us Tiercide, and while that's not universally loved, at least it's a worthwhile change. Heck, if these two Dev slots were used by Dev's working on that we'd be nearly finished with that project, instead of looking at another expansion cycle or two before we see balanced BS's and T2 ships (which, as an added bonus would mean we wouldn't see people shying away from T2 ships because they're too weak compared to their T1 brethren).

This is just a stepping stone to some future bit of 'awesomeness', assuming they don't get pulled off to do something else and it joins the ever growing list of abandoned features.

The "obvious flaw" is the way the game was designed. It is not a flaw, rather, it is the way the game works. The WH AI is appropriate for that environment, and by the same token, we should be leaving the mission/belt, etc AI alone.

As for "random ISK appearing in the wallet" and pretending, why doesn't CCP just randomly destroy drones and we can "pretend" the new AI has been implemented. It would save them a lot of work.

Honestly, I do not get the motivation to change this now, and maybe ever. Rat AI is so fundamental to the game, that by changing it they are essentially creating some other game.

But as this type of thing goes, we will get these changes whether we want it or not, whether it is a good idea or not.

Fun? IMO, all changes should be to make the game more fun. Seems like this change is going make it a lot less fun for drone boat dudes like me. This is NOT balance for the drone boats. This is imbalance. And most likely, CCP will botch it, and we'll have another super nerf, this time for drone boats, that may or may not ever get fixed.

I want to start cussing in here and using the words "bozos" and "CCP" in the same sentence. But I'll restrain myself.

Yea, we can tell you're new, because you don't seem to understand what's being said.

There is no issue of "scaling", there is the issue of a thing (old pve content) that was designed one way not working correctly when you change only one key aspect (npc behavior) without changing the other aspects (numbers of various types of ships for example).

What we are saying is: If ccp wants to change npc behavior, great, change the content to fit that, don't BREAK old content by making a piecemeal change.

As you are new, it's a safe bet you've never even been in a null sec DED complex. Null sec DED complexes use the same "rats" as missions so this change would affect them too. plexes like Angel Cartel Naval Cartel Naval Ship Yard has rats that web, scram and TARGET PAINT + an npc battleship that fires a torpedo that does 160,000 points of damage to anything battleship sized (which means EVERY ship because of the target painting).

With the above plex, it wouldn't be a matter of "bring more people", it would mean "now EVERY ship you bring has to be able to tank not only the explosive/kinetic heavy angel rats, a few of whom shoot thermal damage at you as well, but EVERY ships has to be able to withstand full 160k EM torp hits"! I don't know too many ships that can do that AND do more than 100 damage per second lol. It would make that plex un-doable.

Not to mention all the other consequences (like how the new AI could dampen null sec pvp, hell if I were getting chased by neutral in null, I might warp to a sanctum and let the chips fall where they may). And all for a change that won't even be noticable to someone like my (I dual box a machariel and Tengu in missions, meaning I never have to use drones and don't care if npcs switch aggro).

Frankly, you don't seem to know enough about the way the game works to offer an opinion, and should maybe gain more experience and then form an opinion.

So I just ran The Maze with two RR Domis and had absolutely no problem. In total I lost 3 light drones, but that was primarily because I was not paying attention. If I was I could have done so without a single drone loss.

To be honest, I actually think this change makes it to easy. If one of my tanks was failing because I got distracted I could activate the remote reps or ewar on my other ship and then they would switch to it. Yay for actually being able to control aggro! :D

Once we have a date for getting Duality back up I will let you guys know and you can test it for yourselves. Back to testing more missions and PLEX. :)

You tanked the final room of the MAZE with 2 RR Domis? How did your tank hold, did you send both into the 5th room at the same time or 1 at a time? Tech2 fit or what?

They were not dev hacked domi's. They were T2 fit.

For the final room:
I warped both in at the same time, activated a smartbomb on both killing all the frigs within range, and then I released two flight of light drones to kill off the ships that were still just outside of my range. I then sent one flight of light drones in close to base, even if they were not really doing any damage. Turns out the citidal torp has a low signature and likes to shoot things that are also low sig. Hence it spend the entire time shooting my light drones and doing jack **** while my other domi killed the other stuff.

I was not able to fully tank the full room, but was able to get the room to switch targets by activating specific modules that they don't like when one tank got low.

What was really hard was the room with jamming rats. That hurt. :(