EVE General Discussion

I'll tried to keep this short but I couldn't. I'm a former drone captain and like many former drone captains soon to be a former subscriber. Ever since Retribution launched I, like my comrades, have been constantly hearing constant complaints of "AFK drone boats" running missions from people who, quite frankly, have no frikkin' clue what they're talking about. A bunch of brainless parrots copying what others have said. So let me set this straight.

I'm a former drone captain. I did L4 missions in drone boats. I was never AFK during these missions because it was impossible to do so. Drone boats had to be just as aware & alert as any other kind of ship, and more: We had to watch the health of our drones as well as our own ship.

I had invested the better part of a year's worth of SP in drone skills and more ISK than I'd like to admit in the special Navy issue drones. Wait, doesn't everyone just use T2 for the higher DPS? Let me be the first to tell you: No, no they do not. I bought Navy issue drones for one reason only: They had twice the hitpoints of any other class of drone.

But wait, the parrots say, who cares about drone hitpoints since the NPCs never targets drones before? And this is where the mind-blowing ignorance of the parrot crowd comes into the light: NPCs always targets drones, even before Retribution. Taking your eyes off the drone monitor window meant losing your drones. It had always been that way. Using Navy drones, then, was extra insurance. When they AI started to target my drones I knew it was going to be an agonizing amount of time between my recalling them and them actually making it back. Watching the armor and structure bar shrink away I knew that all too often that "double hitpoints for Navy" was the only reason I was getting back a drone with half it's structure left versus losing a drone outright. It was a good investment in my book.

In other words, I paid attention and was still at risk of losing drones. So much risk that I found myself more often than not launching these heavy hitpoint navy units rather than the pew-pew T2s that the parrots think we use exclusively. And despite even this I had lost more than one of these super-tough Navy drones as well - and keep in mind that just one of these kinds of drones will run you over 5,000,000ISK each. You could by a fully fitted destroyer (or two) for less than the cost of one good drone.

And now we're expected to treat them like ammo. That's cute. And the parrot crowd is busy chanting their "HTFU" - which is pretty sad coming from a bunch of cookie-cutter Tengu jockies. And when asked why this was done they always say the same stupid, insipid thing: "It was to prevent AFK drone boats."

CLUE: The were never any AFK drone boats. And AFK drone boat is a DEAD drone boat. Always has been, even before the patch. This is a myth. A lie. A pile of steaming bull-crap that somebody who knew nothing about drone captaining made up and was simply repeated ad nauseam by all the other clueless non-drone users since then.

So where did this all spring from? Simple... one incident of someone getting busted farming a complex. And by "busted" I mean "confessing." But here is where it really gets sad: Was any of this ever proven? Because, y'know, nobody has ever bragged & made up crap about their l33t skills making them billions of ISK on EvE to make their e-peen look bigger before. Oh perish the thought! If someone said they did something there is no way they could be lying, right? And based on this one questionable claim an entire weapons system - drones - was broken. Yeah, that'll show them!

So let's, for the sake of argument, assume that the BS claim was true and that some jerk really was making billions of ISK from farming a single deadspace complex. Not that there aren't fifty other ways that players make billions of ISK per month exploiting_bad_game_mechanics built right into the game, but hey... that's all nullsec *snip*, so that means it's kosher, right? Hisec players making ISK? Oh no, now that's a serious crime. Time to drop the hammer.

So who was the hammer dropped on? That is where this tragic comedy hits it's punchline: The wrong people. CCP was so determined to put an and to this mythical "AFK drone boat farming" that they killed the off the viability of all drone boat mission running. Do they honestly think that AFK mission farming will end? Or will it simply change forms?

TL;DR: People who aren't drone captains make up crap about drone captains, CCP believes them and nerfs all drones based on phony claims. Real drone captains ignored, told to HTFU or unsub. Drone captains unsub in disgust. Working as intended.

Edith:
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ISD Dosnix

I tend to agree about the AFK'ness of drone ships. While there are a couple missions it is doable but they aren't the norm unless one likes losing drones a lot or taking forever to finish a mission. In all but one L4 I can think of, to be totally AFK drone-ing you would previously need to draw all or most of the aggro and even as someone who mainly used a heavily tanked Navy Domi I found this approach to be very dangerous at times.

Sometimes I wonder if it would be just a lot easier to train a Tengu, orbit at x distance and fire way mindlessly.

Yeah, I'm not sure where they got the idea from.

I never AFK'd in my drone boat. In fact, I clicked more than I would ever have to with missles. It's a stupid change and it hits new players really hard.


But yeah, goons who have never even seen a drone boat will inevitably come and try to collect tears (:

When was the last time you saw a Domi doing missions.

At one time a properly Fitted Domi has a monster tank and you could fall asleep in it without a second thought.

And farther back before the NOS nerf, a Domi in null was not something you took for granted.

Now well, I think I still have my original Domi from 2006 and haven't looked at it in years.
Poor thing I think it is the ugliest ship in game as well
RIP the Domi.

War potato is awesome u ppl are weird.

Tell me more !

They are great if it gets webbed by a stray frigate while you're making a sammich.

<3 my Gila. And I still rat with it.

So show me exactly where CCP said this was to nerf AFK drone boat users? And I mean CCP, not players. Because I'd like the references you are using to push your claims about this, otherwise you are doing exactly what you are complaining about and pushing a lie.

On the other hand, there were a number of players who posted how to AFK drone boat in a number of specific circumstances, including how to drop two groups of sentries so one group could always shoot any frigates and take advantage of the 1m/s movement towards you that a sentry does.

So the AFK drone boat was never a Myth. It may not have been as pervasive as some players claimed, but it certainly did exist in some forms and was useable in some complexes at the very least.

LOL at all these people pretending they've never heard of an AFK mission drone boat or saying it's impossible. When the AI changes were first put on the table and people mentioned AFK drone boats, it took me all of 10 seconds (conservatively) to figure out how I'd make such a ship, then another couple of minutes fitting one in EFT. I later tested it just fine on the test server.

AFK drone and complex boats exist, and what do you know? They fare just fine. This change had nothing to do with AFK drone boats and CCP never once said that it did.