EVE General Discussion

Cant get this to work, did a mission with fleet members of the same corp, and i have my drones in space and right click on salvage and it sayz that: no sutublae weaks found to salvage,

What am i doing worng?

Read the dev response...

I tried out salvage drones last night from my Gila. Finished a Guerilla Grounds, perched on the elite wreck, and fired up my salvager on it. This usually takes time, so I put out my shiny shiny new new salvage drones (w/ the skill trained up to 3), and told them to salvage.

They went after the elite wreck, which they probably cannot even salvage. (Anyone know for sure?) Either my on-board salvager or the drones happened to get it very fast. I put my salvager on another nearby wreck. I noticed the drones had stopped salvaging; what? So I told them to salvage again. They again went after the wreck I was salvaging. It appears that when you say "Salvage" the drones prefer to go after whatever wreck you have locked, or perhaps selected. Not helpful for me, but OK, probably few people who have salvagers on their boat are using salvage drones.

After the second wreck, I noticed that my drones had turned themselves off again. Yes, in a field of wrecks, many of which were within 5k of my ship, they stopped noticing them. It appears that when you have directed drones to salvage a specific wreck, they go to it, salvage, then come back and go into standby. Again, not helpful.

After I figured this out, I unlocked all wrecks, then hit "Salvage" again. Now the drones sort of did what I expected to begin with. That is, they chose a wreck (a nearby one -- again, not helpful to me personally but whatever), and went to salvage it. Then they came back, presumably dumped off the salvage, and off they went to salvage another wreck. Hurrah!

But... all five of them are always choosing the same wreck! Thus they are wasting most of their salvage potential. (BTW I did not have "focus fire" selected.) Also, they are really, really slow. They seem to move about as fast as a heavy drone, perhaps 1k/second. It would have taken forever for them to clear the field on their own. And this was just frigate wrecks, on average perhaps 15k from me.

As thing stand, these drones are of very marginal value. Their only serious use appears to be for AFK players. I.e. finish a room, start them salvaging, then go do something else for an hour while they clean up. Hardly a good use of time, but if you had to run to the store anyway, better than nothing.

Let me offer the following suggestions for consideration:

• Make salvage drones microwarp faster, at least when not loaded with salvage. It would be cool if they zoomed out at a rate something like a medium drone, then (laden with salvage) came back at their current speed. This would allow players to recall them fairly quickly empty if needed.
• Make salvage drones give low priority to wrecks that their owner is currently tractoring or salvaging.
• Make salvage drones respect the normal drone setting of "aggressive/passive". If they are aggressive, they should never turn themselves off until no wrecks are left within your drone control range. If they are passive, then they should act like they currently do when you have a wreck selected.
• Make salvage drones respect the normal drone setting of "focus fire". If "focus fire" is on, then they should act like they currently do: all go to one wreck at a time. If "focus fire" is off, they should (ideally) all select different wrecks, or at least they should not always all select the same wreck.

I have salvaging trained to 5 and use salvager 2s with salvage tackle rigs. I've noticed that salvage drones with maximum training only give 13% access difficulty bonus. I compare that to the 565% increase via using the salvager II (not even counting the rig bonuses) and can't help but wonder wtf I would want to use a salvage drone and potentially lose so much. Now, i could be wrong. Do the salvage drones use the salvage skill and rig bonuses as well and we just haven't gotten the salvage drone 2s yet to make up the extra 52% difference?

I'm still astonished at the number of people who think that your access difficulty bonus translates to the amount of stuff you get out of the wreck/can for salvaging/hacking/analyzing. It doesn't. The only thing it determines is how fast you can access it. Whether it takes one cycle or multiple cycles. The exception to this is T2 and some sleeper wrecks, which require a minimum access difficulty to even attempt to salvage. But if you've got the skill high enough, you'll still salvage it and eventually get the same stuff no matter how many cycles it takes.