Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hello, some news:

Coming soon, in a Rubicon point release, we are planning to add a hard cap to the number of drones that can be assisted to a single player. Currently, we are planning to set that cap at 50.

As most of you surely know by now, drone assist has been a very hot topic over the last 6 or so months. Archons began showing the power of sentry doctrines before that, and the addition of tracking and optimal bonuses for drones on the Ishtar and Dominix catapulted this philosophy into the forefront of fleet warfare. The resulting meta is causing two major problems that we hope to address through this change.

We feel that drone assist, at a large scale, leads to passive gameplay that most players do not enjoy. Assist places too much control in the hands of a single person and leaves the majority of the fleet with little to do. note: we spent a lot of time considering the value in delegation of ship systems and navigation overall (why not have assisted turrets? why have fleet warp? etc) and while this discussion will likely continue, we feel it depends heavily on the amount of delegation taking place. Amount might refer to the time something is delegated or the importance of the system being delegated (is it a primary system or a secondary one). Moral of the story: while some cases of drone assist can be fun, large fleets based on assist are not.

Drones, for the time being, are the most taxing weapon system for our hardware, which means overall play experience has suffered some because of the popularity of sentry doctrines.

We are making this change primarily to address the first point, but also hope to have a positive effect on performance by allowing more room for other weapon systems in the fleet meta.

Why a flat cap?

We believe a flat cap will:

Limit large scale assist substantially

Leave room for smaller scale assisting (there are several use-cases for assist that we wanted to preserve, such as incursion drone managers)

Be very easy to communicate to players

Affect carriers more heavily than sub-caps (because they can field 10 drones per ship rather than 5)

This solution meets each of these points in a more effective way than any others we considered.

Why 50?

To arrive at 50 we began by starting at complete removal of assist, and worked our way back up until we had caught all the use-cases for assist that we didn't want to impact negatively. That included frigates on gates trying to catch cloakers, small fleets trying to use assist to avoid e-war, logistics pilots who are too busy to manage their drones, and most importantly, incursioners. We believe 50 will leave all these uses unharmed while also heavily discouraging large fleet use. If it turns out that fleets are still able to rely on assist easily at 50 (which we feel is unlikely) we can and will make further adjustments.

Before I go, I want to say that we've been looking at this for some time now. We've watched the discussion in the community evolve and also kept a close eye on TQ behavior. We began discussing this change with the CSM via internal forums just prior to the summit, and then spent significant time discussing it in person with them during the summit. Their feedback was valuable, as always, and gives us confidence that this is a good direction.

As always, leave your feedback and we will do our best to answer any questions.