EVE General Discussion

They aren't getting any free stuff, if anything people who trained CDO to V are getting stuff taken away from them as the Drone Link Augmentor II used to be unlocked by CDO V, and now that is being moved to Drone Avionics.

If you look at this purely in terms of abilities, then like you say, people who didn't train CDO but only SDO are being given all of the abilities of those players who trained CDO. Players who trained CDO are getting abilities taken away from them unless they also have SDO V which is the new pre req for the drone link augmentor II.

tl:dr, train scout drone operation to V, this close to kronos there are things you can spend your time training that would be vastly more beneficial to you than combat drone operation.

then again if you want to waste time training a skill that will only give you 5% drone damage/level on a x2 skill for the next 3 and a bit weeks... have fun, but you really would be better off training literally any other skill in the game.

They intentionally changed the skill changes from CCP Rise's proposal to CCP Fozzie's proposal. While it's certainly not meant as punishment, the consequence of this act is that people who were paying attention (and gambled as you will) trained a skill for nothing. Also, I don't think people who started training Combat drone operation to 5 didn't mean to get a "leg up on other players", but to simply prepare in the best way for this change for themselves, i.e. gaining as much SP as possible / not having to train double for something in the future. I think that this reaction to a devblog is a good one. CCP is transparent in their communication and players can decide for themselves if they decide to act on it or not.

I will accept that I trained a skill for nothing if CCP choses to continue with this iteration, but it feels a bit off. I think CCP intents their devblogs to be "true" information and not something that should be taken with a grain of salt. Also, if this Combat drone operation skill would still have a function after the changes, people wouldn't mind. It's the fact that all SP that went into Combat drone operation are useless that makes people feel misled.

Edit: The devblog still hasn't been updated with this information. Also, in previous skill changes or changes of the sort, CCP Rise would put big warning signs next to it, like "THESE CHANGES ARE NOT DEFINITE AND MIGHT CHANGE IN THE FUTURE". This also isn't the case with the information in the devblog.

It's the sum on things that makes me feel odd.

Yeah, I guess. I don't know if how many people have trained CDO V and neglected to train SCO V though. If they have done that, they're probably not the sort of person who cares about this anyway as I can think of no practical reason to do that.

The people who were paying attention didn't have time to train anything between the blog went up and the clarification came. It was all of two days, not enough to train a 6-7-day skill. If they managed to train the skill, they weren't paying attention.

Also, not only did they not pay attention to what the devs were saying, they also didn't pay attention to the timing of when this was going to happen in relation to when the blog went up, and presumably jumped on finishing a skill ASAP rather than wait a week or three until all the information was out. So no, characterising them as “paying attention” is pretty much completely inaccurate.

Oh, and they didn't change from one to the other: they changed to also include the other, since it made sense from the “you could use it before” standpoint that people who had trained SDO should retain access to their T2 drones. Speaking of which, with all this hoo-ha about CDO not getting you anything… I can only assume that people are saying that those who trained CDO V should not get LDO V or MDO V, since that would give them an “unfair advantage”?

They did: they were very helpful in the blog thread with clearing up the confusion, and started giving out even more SP than they had originally planned.

I would argue it's largely irrelevant if they updated the blog thread but did not update the blog itself. We cannot be expected to read through dozens - sometimes hundreds - of pages for any given dev blog or features thread that affects us. There are countless better ways for them to have gotten that message across, but once again they have chosen to communicate in a rather inefficient manner.

When Battlecruiser was split into racial, tons of players made sure to train it up in time when the announcement was made. How many of these people honestly read page 30+ of the forum thread that accompanied it? It wouldn't be hard to believe that the majority of them would be in the same situation too.

If we're on the topic of how they could have informed their player base better, off the top of my head:
1) Update the actual dev blog more than a month later
2) Actually state in the dev blog the changes are not final
3) Allow players to opt into an EVEmail dev blog subscription that would EVEmail them dev blogs and updates to dev blogs

This way people know what's going on and can actually make informed decisions.

source or I call bullshit

the dev blog where they say they're removing it, and replacing it with two separate skills.

I dont understand why rumour- and panic mongering threads such as this are allowed to exist at all

Especailly when they are effectively redundant repetitions of previous nonsense