EVE General Discussion

Two words: Moon Goo.

Pretty sure you Goons are quite familiar with the concept.

Drones aren't broken. :P

My Rattlesnake (I do not own a Dominix) and it's Sentries have had serious issues with level four missions until I fitted mah ship with RR modules and got rid of those mostly useless cruise missile launchers...

That said.... I really can't decide wether drones are broken or not. In pvp they get scrapped pretty fast which would leave me without dps, and in PVE they're close to being the non plus ultra weapon system, once you figure out how to pull aggro on anything that would attack your drones... :/

To me it almost feels like drones were intended as an auxiliary weapon system (capital ships excluded) which somehow mutilated into a primary weapon system...

It also irks me that the whole "Fixed AI Rules" on targeting is complete hogwash. I've seen plenty of rat battleships attacking medium and light drones. However, in seeing it enough times I think I found what may be a bug (at least I hope that's all it is) that causes the AI to still alpha everything you throw out there.

The "bug" is in their assistance programming. If I've got nothing on my scope but battleships, then yes, what CCP said about their new AI usually holds up and they don't target the lights. But if there are any frigates left - which are supposed to target lights - then the battleships will target them as well. So what you end up with in not all the rats using separate AI - they seem to all be using the same AI script for every ship in the room.

To clarify, I think that if you see ten rats in a mission that they're not all running copies of the same script. Instead they seem to all be running off just one copy of that script and that one copy is controlling all of them. So as long as there is even one ship out there that will target light drones (read: a frigate) then every rat on the screen will shoot them - up to and most certainly including battleships.

Regardless if my theory is true or not, the result is the same as before the "fix" - you launch drones and the AI insta-locks them (also total BS, by the way) and alpha strikes them off the screen in a hail of fire coming from ten different ships at once, regardless of the size class of the drones or the rats themselves.

after being away when this change came in I took a rattlesnake into a mission and wasn't impressed when my ogres where eaten by the mission.
now I move my BS into close range, pull the aggro then let my hammerheads go to work on the cruisers and below whilst I concentrate on the BS's as sending drones in from long range means they become the target not you = drone screaming death even with speed and damage mods.
I'm finding that the heavies are now useless under the current AI set up until you clean up the frigs and cruisers. I would keep some on hand in case I get an elite BS whose tank I can't break with my missiles and HH2's

For someone who doesn't read my posts you sure do a lot of posting in my thread!

Bye Vimsy!

They still are, why should non-sentry users get the shaft?

What does a half million isk "fine" every time they miss whacking that mole by a second, or (heaven forfend!) they send out drones to their control range add to their experience?


There is a distinct difference between "hard" and "stupid". This is much closer to the latter than the former.

/Missile Boat pilot

Wrong, I have 14 mil in drone skills on my alt, durability to 5 etc....

I tried running L3's in a Gila, and didn't start having issues until about 6 or 8 missions went by.
Then suddenly, some of the NPC's would not aggro me at all, a group of them would wait for me to drop drones, and attack them immediately. No matter how many times I pulled in the garde 2's, it didn't matter. I tried to kill the 3 cruisers that were doing it, and lost a garde 2 with a medium remote centus rep on it to 3 cruisers sitting at 40k.

If someone with max drone skills can't manage them without losing some, in a L3 no less, there is a problem.

But, the npcs are scared you were going to salvage them, beofre they died. I too fear zombie salvaging.

But yea, lots of dumb behavior by what was supposed to be "better" AI. This is why I kept saying "design a new thing from the ground up like you did with incursions and wormholes, instead of slapping a patchwork thing on top of old content".

Every time i said that some genius would pop up and say "you just want boring , Easy rats" or some such. Why some people who speak English refuse to try to understand English.

I don't know, if I wandered onto the restricted areas of my local army base with no escort, no identification, no uniform (worse, displaying an enemy registration), and no communication with their operations waving a bunch of guns and stealing their property, getting shot at might possibly be the best possible outcome.

To the OP, in regard to your question work with an assertion and ask your self a few questions, and the answer about why this disaster was implemented becomes self evident.

1. If we consider PvE income as variable revenue source, and coupled with static revenue sources, they form the entire basis of all revenue sources in the game.
2. What happens to the value of a static revenue source as a tool / weapon / instrument of power when variable revenue drops and static revenue becomes a larger piece of the whole income pie?
3. Who controls the largest sources of static revenue in the game?
4. What areas of the game were most of the game designers recruited from?