Test Server Feedback

For those that are responding to Tippia, don't.
He / she is a known troll with zero credibility.

He / she has come down many many times on the side of the anti-mission/ anti-high sec faction, and the vast majority of his / her posts are propaganda.

If you (someone?) could get it to actually work this way, that would own bones. I'm not gonna say I'd be super excited about the changes in this case (since if it worked this way it would only serve to make PvE-- a necessary but totally awful activity that I already hate-- more annoying), but at least I wouldn't hate them and want to bash my head on my keyboard when I thought about them! As long as PvP isn't harmed, I'll pretty much be happy.

No, I'm a person who gets called a troll when people who try to make opinion pass for fact gets those opinions shot down with actual facts. Now, I'm sorry that I've manage to run L4s with pretty much zero issue and without any impact on my completion times, since this fails to entertain your highsec persecution complex, but that's just how it is.

The fact remains: the impact this change will have on L4s is negligible since it's so easy to keep aggro off your drones, much as expected. The only issue would be that whole “newbies tag along in bad ships” business, but then, L4s are most commonly not run like that. Ad hominems and more paranoia will not change this fact.

One annoying part is the randomness of the hate towards drones.
Sometimes they go for instapop on deployment even if I use guns.
Sometimes they stay on my battleship even when the frigs are doing all my dps (and guns are off) for minutes.

FoxFour:
The Tengu + Rifter comparison was a bit off, since the Tengu has a small sig radius, and many folk like the lumbering feel of battleships, were the greater sig difference becomes a greater problem.
Also, in the same expansion you are nerfing the Tengu, so it may become less used for such, again makes the example a bit flawed.

This agro mechanic is sounding interesting in the sense that trying out new strategies is always fun and planning things out is good. The extra micro I don't particularly like but that' mostly cause I triple box lvl 5's in low sec and that takes a hell of a lot of micro management already. I understand it's unrealistic to expect ccp to balance around people running 3 acount at once but please don't add micro management just for micro-mangement/anti-afk sake aiming at high sec, there are extra things to micro in low sec or even in any sec (trade, chat, etc.) if the player wanted to not play afk.

My other concerns about this agro are:

How much randomness is there in this system?
I like the idea of clever knowledge and manipulation of mechanics giving you a better result but the thought that a RNG in the background comes up with 'f*ck you logistics' and causes me to blow up when 99% of the time what I was doing would have worked just doesn't sit well with me.


I'm also worried about how easily manipulable these systems seem.
From what I hear it sounds like 1 ew or 1rr is the same as fitting out a ship specialized in that. This isn't much intelligence and it leads to some pretty ******** strategies. I was bouncing around in my head the thought of a eos dual wielding target painters to increase it's agro and put dps bs's out of sig range while it tanks... it just seems wrong.


And lastly future changes to AI.
Seeing as your reaction to rather radically changing a core mechanic of a bunch of different player occupations despite heavy complaints about them is "adapt or die" it's pretty safe to say any changes to the AI mechanic in the future will be implemented entirely at your discretion. This could be good if it's say improvements to the system (it now agroes based on number of ew/rr modules) or slight tweeks towards the future goal (different sliders for different racial/security areas, minor slider adjustments). I would love to see general improvements towards a good balance. I spent 4.5 years studying AI and game design in uni so it's hard to explain how excited a true learning and adjusting AI would make me.

However constant maintenance/minor tweaks and balancing towards a well defined goal are not traits that ccp are known for.... Instead it seems to be your style to make large sweeping changes to a variety of areas with little investigation into the long term effects. There's also a long, long, long history of abandonment of game features for years at a time only to come back and make radical changes with an entirely different goal in mind than the previous work done. From this I see a lot less improving the system and a lot more f*cking with the sliders every time they feel AI/pve needs some love.

I don't mind AI that adapts towards a goal or upgrades to the system but if all that changes is every couple of months a dev comes along and f*cks with the sliders so they operate completely differently and we have to go back and relearn new tactics to work against them. Add to that training time to get the new ships/tools for the new strategies rewriting guides and more and more 1 off missions popping up where the AI just doesn't work seems like an absolute piece of ****. I'd like to think it goes for constant improvement but history is against us in this case.



Either way hopefully I'll have some free time on the weekend to get in and test it.

You're one person who hasn't noticed that rats 'occasionally' destroy drones. There seem to be other people who have run tests that have found other things. Your findings suggest you didn't run enough missions. The vast majority of the missions I ran (probably not 60%, but seemingly more than 20%) seem broken where the rats do exactly that. They don't touch your drones regardless of how AFK you are.

It's the few outlier missions where the AI actually seems to be implemented where people are finding other things.

So rather than some shining beacon for the masses, I'd just say you didn't do your homework properly... and now you're just sperging about it since no one can do any testing.



Since FoxFour is already working on other things? I doubt there will be much iteration here.

No. I'm the person who have had no problems keeping my drones safe if and when they get attacked. To me, this has been an occasional occurrence because I have previous experience with Level-1 AI and know how to keep it properly annoyed.

That is all: yes, they were attacked. Yes, they were also easy to save. Yes, ewar (and, by the sound of it, remote support) is a high priority for the rats. So no, it is not the dronepocalypse people are claiming it is.

It's fortunate that he's not even remotely suggesting anything of the kind then, isn't it?

I spent this morning breaking down how the AI actually works and the exact forumulas for how they calculate threat, comparing that to what the design said it should be, compared to what you guys and the rest of the players are saying they actually do, and then coming up with a list of things that need to be done.

One of the primary gallente combat frigates, which (assuming this change doesn't destroy the play-style) will likely be the most common starting gallente mission-boat, is a full Tech-1 drone boat now. While there's not really enough time to train up a newbie alt over the weekend, I'll give some L1s a shot with a badfit/T1 tristan next weekend and see if I can't come close to replicating the newbie experience.

So the facts are, you showed up late to the party (Post 216), and according to your post, you ran "a couple" missions. And saw results completely opposite from almost everyone else who has been posting feedback for days while they were testing via many many missions.

Just making sure I have the facts.