EVE General Discussion

Question : How do they spell "Drones" at CCP?

Answer : "C-H-A-F-F"

It boggles the mind that CCP succeeds every upgrade in drowning the nice content they add in miscontentment about changes that nobody wanted. A certain shop and some rather ugly icons come to mind from the past.

The 2 major screwups in this expansion :

1/ Without doubt drones are on number 1. There was , from a players point of view, nothing wrong with them. The interface could be a lot smoother, as was already acknowledged by CCP. But they worked. But now? If you want to keep them you better recall them after 1 hit and certainly not send them out far from your ship. And they get hit way too often. Which makes that 2/5 of your dps is hiding/flying-to-from your target.

It seems CCP has forgotten that drones are a weapon-system. And those are supposed to be nasty. With the current state of affairs no empire would ever have invested in the development of drone-boats. Way too fragile.

Now perhaps some people "abused" drones. Which is apparantly doing Afk missions . Never done it. I doubt my skills are good enough for that. But is it so wrong? Drones are autonomous weapons. They should be able to do stuff on their own.
The current change is just CCP's easy, lazy solution to a problem most people don't have.

There are several much better solutions :

* let drones auto-return after a some time
* let drones run out of power so they need to be recalled manually after a certain time to recharge their weapon systems.
* change drones to throw-away cheap stuff that you can launch with dozens at the time.
* ...

There are alot of solutions possible. But screwing up their effectiveness is not a solution. And what makes me really annoyed is that they did these changes before they optimized the interface. Any smart person would have done the interface before you made it harder to use them.


2/ The second screw-up are the new target-symbols. Again CCP seems to have forgotten that the purpose of a battle-overview is to give the pilot an overview, calm him and support him in making the right decissions. But apparantly it's more important to look good and get selected to hang in an art-museum.

So what's wrong with it? Well : instead of 3 little bars that gave you all the information you need, you have now a rather big 3/4 circle (i'm not playing at high-res). And instead of seeing small red increases in your damage on a bar you now have big violent red arcs that needlessly pull the attention of the eye. And when an arc is full you must start again on the other side of the ship icon. Left-right-left-right.....that's not calming at all. Your information is actually broken up by that ship in the middle.

This interface would never make it in a RL ship. And that's the main problem. While CCP claims to be on the right track again, they still don't seem to realize that if they build something that would not survive if Eve was real, then it's not a good idea.


Oh well...I blew off the dust of my mining ship. Looking at some rocks in space seems to be the big idea CCP has for this game apparantly. And I hope CCP's get their act together before I get bored.

Didn't take long at all

Eve is not real ergo HTFU

Again: Risk vs Reward.

Missions were made to be more risky, especially to drone pilots, yet no extra rewards were given in compensation. Bounties are still the same, mission payouts haven't gone up any.

The argument of "WH dwellers have dealt with this AI for years" is invalid - WH dwellers, so I'm told, can make a hundred million ISK in a single mission. Yeah, well guess what? You guys can actually afford to replace a dozen T2 every mission and still come out ahead. Us regular mission runners? Not so much.

There were lots of ways they could have made drones more balanced and challenging at the same time, but they did not. Instead the went for the cop-out solution: Copy & paste sleeper AI, call it good, dust off hands, go back to smoking a fatty or something.

What could they have done instead? Heck, anything really. Consider:

1) Make drones use ammunition and add new ammo types for them. When the drone runs out of ammunition it automatically returns to reload. If you don't have any ammo left in your cargo hold, too bad. Note that this would make people actually consider using Amarr drones again, because as always lasers don't need ammunition. This can make missions more challenging without making the drones any less durable.

2) Stop giving drones separate stock & MW drive speeds. Just give them one flat speed, less than a MW drive but still fast - a light drone should be twice as fast as your average frigate, say around 1000m/s. No more of this "switching gears" crap. It's pointless and annoying.

3) Make the rats use drones themselves. We've all seen rats using ship hulls that we know to be drone boats, yet do they ever use drones? Which is especially weird considering how often you find drones as loot inside wreckages. If rats used drones the same way that players did then that would give the drone captains - and everyone else - some new challenges to deal with. More importantly, those new challenges would be applied to all players equally and not just aimed at screwing over one class (i.e. player drone captains).

4) They want to make rats more like PvP ships? Fine - take away their unlimited ammo. Make them vulnerable to energy neutralizers and vampires. Let them run out of capacitor for their tanks. Let the AI face all the same annoying problems that we players have to deal with in our all-too-mortal ships. How's that for bringing things closer to PvP levels, eh?

5) More the above: Make logistic rats and have them do their logi thing with each other. Yank out some of the gratuitously large blobs in missions and replace some of those attack ships with functioning logistics ships instead. Now players have to decide which is the more important target - just like PvPers do.

See? Right there off the top of my head that's five things they could have done to make mission running more challenging and fun without screwing over one particular class of mission runner at the expense of all others.

So let's see it happen. Roll back the failed drone experiment and try some of these new ones. Hop to it, CCP. There's still time to save some subscribers.

Actually, did you ever consider that the rewards for lvl 4s were way too high until now, especially for drone pilots, and that it's actually been more properly balanced?

Beat me to it

For the record, I was a drone captain from day one, and in all my time I never went AFK during a mission. Nor do I know anyone who ever has. I don't know where you people get this hyperbole from. In fact, I'd like to see CCP present one documented and proven case of someone soloing a L4 mission in drone boat while totally AFK.

Seems to me the more likely case was the decision was made first and the excuse for it dreamed up after the fact. AFK combat - lol ... beyotch, please. And then you woke up. Maybe they meant bot combat - yeah, that was an actual issue .. and one linked directly to sov rules spawning rats that were being farmed for ISK by bot users. Odd how that issue got swept under the rug... odd, but not surprising.

Lalalala I see nothing.

Have a cookie.

But.. but EVE IS real.

I was there !

Drones still work quite fine actually. Even with new AI they still do their job. Do they get fired on more often? Yes. Is it a game breaking issue. No. As for people afk missioning in drone ships. Yes it was happening. In dominixes, typhoons and any other ship that has a good drone capability. There were people in lvl 4s using remote reps in the highs that were targeted on the drones and then left running while the drones did the work.