Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Drone assist is one way to counter ECM/Damps in small gangs.

'Exploit is such a strong word... I prefer 'Perfecting' myself.

Mining needs a minigame, Ratting needs anything at all to make it not boring, at this point im considering a cocaine drip feed. Just about the only mechanic I currently feel engages the player is the damn hacking and probing bits. Everything else is just a series of you staring at your screen waiting for a flashing something to cycle so you can make it cycle again.

Sorry to bring this back but I was busy until now and couldn't reply.

There is a problem here with your argument, and it stems from there being separate issues in play, 2 of which are rather tied into each other.

The first is the balance aspect of drones. This is intrinsically tied to drone assist (and is increasingly impacted by it as fleet sizes increase), but they are obviously not the same thing. It is difficult to evaluate the relative balance of drones to other weapons, especially sentries, because as it stands they allow groups of players to do things that other weapon systems cannot, namely fire roughly at the same time, and on the same target, without any impact due to poor communication, player input latency/laziness, or simply temporal delays in communications platforms transmitting information. It is difficult to balance drones with these things around, because we cannot easily compare beyond straight item numbers what happens when players use them on each other in the same context (ie, firing at each other by pressing buttons, and all those things I listed earlier which effect how that works). Therefore making statements such as "The current problem is a symptom of other balance changes", while technically true, would only lead in one direction: Drones being nerfed to a point where all of the current drone platforms fall out of favor, without really ever having an environment to truly know if they are overpowered or not.

The obvious second issue is the drone assist mechanic itself. Obviously before drones were at a point where they could even be considered a comparable weapon to other systems, the mechanic never really needed looking at, because while it existed it didn't impact play very much. Now, we have an environment where all large coalitions (and many small groups that have nothing to do with sov warfare, a critical point I think) are using this mechanic in some capacity, and due to advantages I listed above I don't blame them (being somewhat immune to ewar doctrines was also a factor here). However, what this has also done is minimize the usefulness of non-drone doctrines, and encouraged afk pvp behaviors which while reasonable in the context of sov grinding, seem rather silly when other weapon systems cannot link their fire in the same manner (I suppose the other solution here would to be to make all weapon systems be capable of being fired by others, something I personally believe is a poor solution because it entirely de-emphasizes comms discipline and player attention). Will reducing drone assist mechanics stop its use entirely in large fleets? I don't know. Obviously due to the tremendous number of posts by incursion runners taking it out entirely would be a rather large problem, so we are stuck in a weird place where it would be simpler to remove the thing entirely and allow for players to demonstrate if the change is meaningful but we can't have everything.

This is honestly why I am so surprised some members of alliances like Pandemic Legion are so opposed to this change. I would have thought the idea of there being more things on a players end which influence battles would be desirable, not the opposite, but I guess based on Graths posting there is this last issue, which you brought up as well, that being sovereignty mechanics.

Sov mechanics are obviously a contentious issue to anyone involved or interested in null sec conflict. The notion of "fixing" sovereignty systems to make conflict either more enjoyable or dispersed is one that frequently comes up, and quite obviously has come up here. I have no disagreement with the notion that it is grindy and sucks but as others have mentioned here, why should balance changes regarding combat itself be delayed or conditional to changes in sov warfare? I get that making it better is desirable, but this should not be related to or associated with combat balance (at least until changes are made and some other mechanic comes into the spotlight that is at issue due to such changes), otherwise we might be waiting years with the same stale metagame before we see any changes to it. I don't want that, and I don't think anyone else wants that either. If anything, a change such as this (which makes sov warfare more awful, at your own admittance) would increase pressure to create change to it, rather than having CCP be satisfied that because players have found a way to minimize effort regarding it they don't need to worry about it.

Drones obviously need work in other ways (reducing server load, for one), and everyone being serious in here seems to agree that while this change might reduce the number of drones used in large fights, it won't eliminate them entirely. However, nerfing them into the ground would functionally have the same effect, as the resultant player response would be identical: Drones are worse, i'll bring an alternative weapon system (ie a megathron) and use drones if it has the bays because why would I not want the extra dps. At least in this way (provided drone assist doctrine does go away due to the higher level of co-ordination needed to use it effectively now) we can see if drones are at least balanced, rather than shunting them into non-relevance.

At this point I am not really sure what your position is, Grath, other than, "Anything but this proposed change." Are you anti-drone or pro-drone? Would you or would you not vote for Sarah Palin? These are questions.

Sov mechanics is the biggest issue for drone load on the server. As long as the core mechanic in sov is defend this timer 3 days from now, then it will always be a pile on. It makes fights like HED the norm, where first to pile the grid wins the game. It makes the number of objects being tracked ridiculously high 3-4K people with 5+ Drones each is huge server load.

Ideally you want to spread the load around many systems, the way B-R was. A big battle with loads of smaller battles in support of a common goal. There are lots of interesting suggestiong being floated around various websites on how to achieve the tactical "spreading" of load. Unfortunately CCP seems to have no interest in this, because for the moment Tidi is remedying the isues for the most part.

But still Drone Asssit itself doesn't have any bearing on the current meta. The current meta is the way it is because CCP buffed the hell out of drones (comparatively from where they were of course.), and made them the fotm, and just like all previous fotm they are now reducing the power surge, or trying to. With actual balance changes to the drone weapon system.

This mechanic change to drone assist is clearly spelled out in the OP. unfortunately the fix doesn't actually fix either of the problems, and ultimately we come back to the glaring issue in EVE. Current sov mechanics need a drastic overhaul.

Ideally some iteration of one of these would be a good step forward:

1) Variable (random) Timers, or cut structure EHP and have no timers and just a long grind from shield to explosion.
2) Regional Conquest instead of systemic conquest (ie. having neighboring systems makes others vulnerable not just SBU's)
3) Actually using space, or you be losing space. This encourages Alliances to spread out in space so they can defend their regions.

But the details are hard to get people to agree on. Make it to easy to take and you will just have sov ping pong, make it to difficult you end with 2-3 big fights deciding wars like today, make it to bothersome and people will hate CCP (see POS Sov.)

Really though the drone assist thing is largely irrelevant to the game as a whole, and as a mechanic if it stays or goes is not going to have any impact on server stability, nor will it change the fact that the "wrecking ball" has clearly been established as the best defensive fleet one can field.

Ultimately sov needs to be changed because it is the cancer, this other crap like drone assist is just a symptom of the cancer.


(Also **** your wall of text....that was the hardest reply ive ever done...and these forums ate 2 of my replies because they are ******* **** please keep to only a couple paragraphs at a time in the future.)

Is that not enough? Before DDAs there was no physical way to get their damage at the same level obviously, and hell, we don't even have faction or deadspace DDAs so the full extent of it hasn't been explored.



I can agree with this, though that will require quite a bit of work in terms of carriers and supercarriers in order to make them still be a thing.

While i think the outright removal of Titans and Supers is a bad thing, I do think adding a drone bay to everything when you redo all the ships and then telling the playerbase that drones are killing the servers might not have been the greatest move

I have a few things I want to clear up

1. Do you earnestly believe that despite drone assist fundamentally simplifying fleet combat, it is irrelevant to the discussion of their balance? Not to mention, when comparing domis to megas, do you believe the ability to rapidly and with 100% confidence apply all of your fleets damage to a single target is overcome by the ability to perhaps do more damage (not even accounting for the tremendous range advantage a sentry drone domi has over a ship such as a baltec mega that could outdamage it)

2. I can agree that to supplement this change and actually dramatically impact drone use in large fleets that making changes to ships to reduce their drone use/capacity would very much assist in getting their numbers down. My concern is your assertion that this will lead to absolutely no change in the number of drones on field in fights (when objectively, ships like baltec megas cannot possibly drop as many drones as ships like domis can, nor do they always use lights). Do you honestly believe there will be 0 change in this regard (even though that really isn't the purpose of this change anyways).

Furthermore, a change such as this would impact a large swath of player activity throughout the game. For example, most turret based ships in mission running areas would struggle to deal with frigates in their deadspace zones, same goes for incursions. Making such a change to ships will require an extensive look at potential impacts, while the drone assist change is rather simple and easy to implement (at least I imagine it is).

3. Being against passive gameplay in a specific case does not mean that you therefore must be against it in all cases. As many have said, it would be ridiculous to remove things such as orbit or keep at range to reduce the one situation where players use an anchor to keep their position ideal. Not to mention, there is a substantial difference between orbiting an anchor and having to lock and fire upon primaries, and being able to literally walk away from your keyboard while in a fleet fight and still be at 100% damage output.

I mean it doesn't but just know that nobody will take you in anyway seriously if you try and argue that one form of passive game play is evil and that another is fine.


*Snip* Please refrain from personal attacks. ISD Ezwal.