Test Server Feedback

I only wish more players actually logged onto duality to test. The majority of players on duality are going to get blindsided by this. A lot of mission runners are going to lose ships worth many billions of isk when this goes live. And telling them it was on duality for two months and they should have tested it will only infuriate them further. This A.I. change is going to create an outrage when it goes live. Yet CCP just refuses to see the negative side of this change.

The first testing period with the change really showed everyone what was to come. The 2nd one still had faulty code, and was using faulty code from the HUD changes, so was even worse than the first. Further testing won't do much until FoxFour adjusts the code however he's going to with regards to drone aggro.
I'd personally still go with scrapping it until it can have more work and more testing done. Retribution 1.1 or 1.2 with 3 or 4 more months to tweak it wouldn't be a horrible outcome.

I actually expect the CCP Dev's are hoping this happens... It'll probably fuel a few more 30 PLEX sales on release day as well.

CCP is becoming famous for doubling down on terrible (and not very terrible in some cases) changes... regardless of the outrage of the player-base. They still insist they understand this game better than the people who pay to play it. Who knows, they might be right. Certainly doesn't look that way from the outside, but who knows.

They certainly aren't reporting logged in numbers, or anything about the economy, or anything else these days... So draw your own conclusions. And the logged in numbers will be worthless once this patch goes live, because they'll be including the Dust Bunnies in those numbers. I expect the irony of that decision won't be lost on many people.



There's no way they'll scrap nor delay it. Those days are gone.

The first testing period lasted for all of a day or three... before being yanked for more "important" projects, IE - Dust.

The second testing period was nearly a month later, and lasted for a short period of time, but was essentially using the same code because there had been no major 'published' tweaks.

The third testing period lasted for longer... but likely still used the same code. Remember we've been discussing this thing since September. It's November now.....

Unfortunately we still don't know how the code changes will pan out. If CCP releases the current AI on TQ we'll quickly adapt, because the AI is an absolute joke in most cases, and there are very simplistic work-arounds for those edge cases where the AI actually functions as intended.

If FoxFour and co. have actually spent time working on the AI, instead of all the new projects they've been derailed to (IE - containers and something else) we should expect some nasty shocks on release day.

Ultimately I expect CCP has already forgotten about this change, and it's been dumped into the abandoned features dust-bin before it's even been released.

You got crap because you lack proper communication skills, politeness, charm and refuse to take information to you.
Don't kid yourself you got what you asked for.

Well the fact of the matter is, I play games to relax and unwind. If EVE becomes more of a frustration than enjoyment I will simply move on.

Many of the games I used to play have gone FTP so If I leave EVE I can play all my old games for free. The money I am spending now on subs keeping 4 EVE accounts active can easily be spent on MT in those FTP games. Many of which I already have max level characters in. I Am just a casual gamer with a good enough job that game subscriptions are not a burden to me financially. But if EVE starts to feel more like a second job then an enjoyable pastime then those subs will be dropped like yesterdays news.

I assume most of the player community has a similar view of their game time they are paying to play. If CCP is not careful they could lose a lot of subs from a single botched expansion. If that happens the game director will be looking for someone to point a finger at. About 2 years ago they botched an expansion by focusing all their development on near useless features like new character creators, 3D models, WiS, and other graphical changes. A lot of players where upset that the expansion was such a waste and introduced a lot of bugs with no real added content. A lot of subs were lost. If I remember correctly there was even a formal apology from the game director for losing focus and ignoring community feed back. And that expansion did not really hurt anyone's play style, it just failed to add any thing to the game.

A game update that forces thousands of players to change their game style just to keep playing will not go over well with the majority of the community.

Not quite enough, drones can die even in a drone boat and higher drone durability.
Specially if webbed/scrambled, all wont make it back even if you recall while they still has some of it's shields left.
Type of rat also make a difference, the longer their optimal (the further they are from you, and thus your drones are from you, and the better they deal damage to something with an MWD sigbloom), the deadlier they are.
Sentries, as always, a totally different case. But even among droneboats, not all of them are for sentries. OFC I'm all down to the myrm getting 125 bandwidth, when two cruisers have more than it

-fly in 0.0 a Blood Raider hidden rally point in a Paladin.
-I fly active not afk
-use drone to kill tackle frigs , that means i tried to use drones against tackle frigs , after launching my hobs got insta agro from elite frigs....
-i need to return / launch them many times to kill only one frig .. thanks ccp im not happy with this !

sorry 4 my bad englisch

I am not sure I am even going to log on to this new Duality build and do more testing.
I am almost to the point that I think it is better of NO ONE gives them any feedback, and just let CCP release this disaster to an unknowing player base.

The screams will be so many, so loud, that they might be more entertaining than the game is. (BTW, I find the game less and less enjoyable every day, and am sticking around through sheer bloody-mindedness.)

We are staring right down the barrel of another UI type gun, and CCP is operating in precisely the same manner as they did with that one. It would be nice if someone gets fired if this release is as bad as I and many others have predicted, but no one at CCP ever seems to take responsibility.

One thing I really don't understand: Why does everybody here seems to think that missions (especially lvl 4 and 5 ones) or other NPC spawns should be runable in full-AFK mode?

CCP wants to make PVE content being more similar to PVP content. This is a good idea and improved NPC-AI is a good first step. Drones have their benenfits like providing you a lot of flexibility and good damage etc. however they have the weakness of being able to get popped by enemy, which frequently happens in PVP too. A way to avoid drones being popped is constantly babysitting them and making sure you engage only enemies which are close to you.

As said, this is just a first step. The logical next step is that NPC ships should simply warp out (with a chance of let say 50%) when you get them into hull if they are not disrupted/scrambled. And they should come back after some time, slightly repaired. This would make PVE content even more PVP compliant.

And why do you feel people should be unable to run missions in full-AFK mode, when it is 3-4 times slower than non-AFK? What is so inherently bad about that?

Further, consider that EVE is one of the few games where you can't just leave the keyboard willy-nilly at a moment's notice without serious repercussions. Case in point, say I'm playing, and suddenly there's someone knocking at the door. Say a neighbour came in to tell me that my tree just crushed his shed, like happened last week during the storm. I happened to be playing GW2 at the time, so I stood up and went to get the door. NPCs I was fighting tore me to shreds. What did it cost me? A couple of silver in repairs, peanuts really.

Now, what would be my choices when I'm playing EVE, and I'm in a mission, warp-scrambled and getting hammered in a multi-billion ISK ship? Even assuming I'm in high-sec, it's a very dicey proposition. If I'm away for more than 4-5 mins, event he best tank can fail. And then what? A week's worth of farming, or more, gone because I had to answer the door?

This is one of many examples why so many people avoid playing EVE. It is not designed for normal human beings.

Further still, what's so awful about giving players a choice? I can choose to go active and have the mission done in 15 mins. Or I can choose to go passive and be done in 45-60 mins. How it the second approach any worse? And this is not totally AFK gameplay - you still have to clear rooms, travel to gates, deploy drones, whatever. It is just, let's say, "reduced stress" gameplay where you don't worry too much about things like range, transversal, etc.




Trouble is, like you said it is the "first step" only. Let's face it, missions in EVE have always been...how do I say this nicely...poorly designed? That is, you come in. You have waves and waves of ships coming at you. You kill them all. This is a pretty shoddy way to do it, but fine, whatever. Thing is, this expansion they're changing the AI without changing the missions themselves. You will still be hit with waves and waves of ships, still (at least theoretically) doing the same DPS, only this time they do it a little smarter.

This is not "similar to PvP". This is "similar to getting ganked". Granted, the AI is still a far cry away from players in lethality, but their sheer numbers in many missions more than make up for it. Off the top of my head, there's missions where you get attacked, in a single pull, by 5+ battleships, 5+ cruisers and 5+ frigates all at once. When you are alone, even in a Marauder, things can go downhill quickly. Especially if AI is intelligent enough to take out your drones.

I would have accepted the AI change, if ALL missions got an overhaul at the same time. That is, number of NPCs severely toned down. As it is, there's high probability that the patch will kill missioning for a lot of people.



Only engaging the enemy close to you is what you call "flexibility"? Funny, because CCP claims drones have excellent damage projection. Which I never really saw, because many would die traveling to or from target that's up to 60km away. And if they don't travel there, they do no damage. Obvious exception to the general rule is sentries, but not all ships (even drone boats) work with sentries.

I'm sorry, but the drone issue IS an issue. A major one. And it has been an issue for a very long time now. Which is why we haven't seen drone boats in the top 20 most used hulls since...oh...2006? Relatively speaking, drone boats are severely underutilized. Too many issues. Time to target, destructible, can't be overheated, hard to replace (this is especially true in a FW roam in hostile space, where you can't just dock up and replenish the drones), etc., etc.



This is a nice idea, but again fundamentally unfair. High alpha weapons would have a huge advantage, being able to volley a ship from 5% armor to dead with no chance of it warping away. While low-alpha weapons (like rails, low alpha, high rate of fire) would see considerably more warpouts, causing the mission to take MUCH longer to complete if the mission objective is to kill all hostiles. Unless of course warpout counts as a "kill".

Bottom line, I'm optimisitcally pessimistic about the AI change. Or pessimistically optimistic? It has the potential to utterly wreck the PvE element of this game for a large portion of the player base. PvE element which, I might add, has been considered notoriously bad since the game's launch, and only tolerated for the income it can generate.