Player Features and Ideas Discussion

LOL, your funny and maybe you should read the post I was responding to.

I've done enough incursions to know the reduced drone assist will have little to no effect.. Hence the sarcasm
And who says it was Vanguards the comment was in reference to. I responded to a specific post sarcastically, what in that says I don't know what I'm talking about?

Do you know what "Sarcasm" is?


A troll will troll regardless of whether it is relevant or not..

wrong thread

why not to limit drone assist to your SQUAD LEADER.
and thats it.

that will keep a balance for subcap and capital drone asist.

let say u r in a carrier fleet . well u can get asisted by 10 players = your drones + your squad drones.

if u r on a sub capital fleet, well is the same. but as u know capitals can have up to 15 drones for asist. / note since super carriers CANT use other stuff that is not figther/figtherbomber.

Are you planning to actually fix the feature, or just limit the amount ?? ie if you assist drones.. they don't always stay assisted, every now and again.. enough to be annoying, they go and do their own thing..

You keep seeing people say this, like they anchor on the FC and his ship magically keeps at the right range to the hostiles and the logistics magically keep at range of their fleet members, but somebody is driving the anchor around, its not just keeping itself in the right position.

The FC moves to keep transv at the right place, the Logi anchor moves to keep the other logi in proper range.

So a 'more complex flight system' isn't needed because somebody is already using the existing flight system to do all these things for you

As I understand it you and I see things the same way. I think the guy I was replying to was suggesting that anchoring is passive and that it should be removed. i.e. all pilots should pilot their ships individually and not be allowed to keep range etc.

While neither agreeing or disagreeing, I am simply highlighting the gameplay difficulty that this idea presents.

Want to rid eve of TiDi?

Simple. Give "warp to fleet member" a degree of error in its operation, say you land 0 - 200km from where you hoped to. Give titan bridging and cyno-jumping a larger degree of error, say landing 0 - 20AU from the cyno.

Now it will will take fleets longer to get in position, and when they do they will need to be mobile, making decisions and flying their ships.

This will make fleets harder to command

This will make them smaller.

There are other suggestions, for example introducing parallelism into the eve server code, fewer moving objects and simplified physics - but ultimately none of these solutions can scale faster than pilots' ability to log on and "warp to zero" on the FC/bait ship/tackler.

While we have "warp to..." on fleet members, we will never be rid of the blob.

I mean, at present, an FC can't even say "please warp in my direction but hold 2AU out", unless someone has already thrown a bookmark out of the window while in warp previously.

What kind of crappy navigation systems do the put in these ships? Why can't I give an order for the fleet to assemble at 20AU at 30degrees "horizontal", 80 degrees "vertical" from the sun?

Even in the 20th century, the USA was able to build Voyager - a remotely controlled drone that was able to make it out of the solar system... without a bookmark!

So instead of one FC being able to control a full fleets worth of sentry drones, now only squad leaders will be controlling the drones of their underlings?

Sorry but I don't see how this is better. A hellcamp fleet will need a few extra people to stay logged on and listen to FC call orders while the majority of the fleet can bugger off and play Warthunder or something while their domi continues to shoot things.

The cap is a good start, but sentry's should be treated like mobile deployed guns, not drones, and as such should be removed from the assist table completely.



Sentry drones provide heavy drone damage with turret like application. Heavy drones are slower, they need to get on-top of their target and this in turn gives the poor sod who is targeted by a heavy swarm time to react. Unlike sentry's where enough damage can be applied to someone almost instantly simply by changing targets.

Of course, the real universe is in constant motion and space-time is not Euclidian. However, we could make a reasonable approximation by saying that the galactic centre (needs definition) is the origin, and that the positions of 2 distant galaxies define a plane. Once you have two planes you have a frame of reference for x,y,z coordinates.

Within a system you can do the same thing, using the sun as the origin and two distant stars as plane reference points.

That's good enough for players to approximate landing positions when delivering co-ordinates to the warp drive control system.

I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that a civilisation that developed the warp and jump drives have also figured out how to compensate for moving reference points, time dilation and the bending of space-time due to gravity, so we can spare the players (and the eve servers) the work of doing the mathematics for that part.

I suspect that in order to get rid of TiDi we will need more than a multi threaded engine or better hardware. Per CCP comments we are already on the steep part of the exponential curve, this means all our best efforts to move X back are just going to slightly impact the server performance Y (or move the exponential curve a bit to the right), further the problem is aggravated by the incentive to pile maximum numbers in a single grid to get in game advantage where again the overly powerful fleet control doesn't help.

We still need a better engine if CCP wants more customers but we also need game design to help. Limiting force projection and spreading sov warfare over different conflict points are the two most commonly raised answers to this problem, my point is that besides these two if we can somehow make the task of moving and fighting with a large fleet more complex we can create diminishing returns to the extra pilot/ship thrown into the grid while at the same time allow room for better active game play.

You should gain in game advantage from being able to control tons of players with diplomacy and social tools and you should also gain in game advantage from force multipliers such as better fleet disciplines and/or better weapons that are built over the long term. The problem is that one way or the other the best decision is almost always to pile more people into system and currently it seems there is an opt out button available to those with sufficient numbers that allows them to crash the node, something clearly broken since it becomes "either I win or there is no fight". A server rewrite will not solve this problem since even if we improve performance what will happen is that the incentive to make even larger coalitions will be huge and at the same time the additional numbers required to again enable the opt out button aren't that big since we are dealing with exponential complexity.

If we somehow introduce skill / complexity to the way large fleets move (instead of a fleet fighting and moving as a single unit) then commanders could make choices such as sending fleet A to point X and fleet B to point Y, in practice they would be managing a pool of military resources (pilots in ships) and sending them to battle areas according to some cost / benefit analysis.

The idea of making fleet control more complex / interesting aims to address some of the comments made in this thread about fleets allowing for a lot of passive gameplay, I believe this is not about the flight control model that is working in solo and small gang but about the way the flight control model synergizes with the fleet interface as was pointed out. This re design should also lower the incremental benefit of sending the 1001th member into a grid as opposed to sending this resource somewhere else. Note I am not saying we should remove this incentive altogether or add some sort of cap, just that there should be additional game play elements involved to make it more complex and require active game play from all involved. We can still have 10.000 pilots on grid if the server allows it, it will just require that everyone is actively playing the game and both sides are able to deal with whatever game play complexity is introduced.

Limiting force projection and spreading conflict through different areas doesn't affect cost / benefit but forces commanders to spread resources through different points, changing the way the fleet interface synergizes with the flight control model to introduce more evolved game play is also about reducing the benefits of piling up pilots in a node, something I feel will have to happen besides the server rewrite if we are to get rid of TiDi.