EVE New Citizens Q&A

I want to describe a strange situation, actually two similar situation.
Few days ago i was exploring some sites in low sec space with my astero. When i arrived to site i saw that heron is hacking there, so i thought that is the opportunity to score my first kill in eve. I cane closer to him, target and deploy my drones (Hammerhead I), but when i tried to send engage command nothing happened, drones were still orbiting me and the end, so ashamed, I cloaked and warped away.
After that strange situation I read somewhere that i had "to big" drones for frigate, so i put 4 Hobgoblins I in to my drone bay. Yesterday another opportunity for first kill appeared, but same situation. Mu Hobgoblins were orbiting me and engage target command did not work.
I am sure that i am doing something wrong, but i don't know what. Maby someone more experienced can enlighten me how to engage other player with drones.

First i hear. I did not even hear about those settings.

There's a little green dot at the upper left of your HUD. click it. There are three settings. Green stops you from doing anything bad. Yellow will allow you to go suspect. Red will allow you to commit criminal acts.

It's a silly mechanic that was introduced a couple years ago to prevent carebears from accidentally initiating unwanted PvP encounters. In this it has failed, since those sorts of players generally don't understand the system anyway. All that the safety really accomplishes is to get PvPers killed from time to time when they forget to turn it off before attacking.

Nevertheless, it's a mechanic we are stuck with for the foreseeable future. Best practice is to keep it set to yellow in highsec, unless you plan on suicide ganking, and keep it red everywhere else. Or just switch it to red an never look back, accepting that you may get CONCORDed if you do something silly.

Thank you all for your answers. Now I know what I was doing wrong
My regards to you all.

I too am actually experiencing this. Have a hotkey for drones 'engage target' that until recently worked flawlessly, once a target was locked, hit that and away the drones went...

Now, I am mashing said hotkey multiple times with NO result. Sometimes takes up to 10 mashes and even in one instance a single drone of the five engaged while the others stayed idle.

+1 that this is a technical bug recently introduced.

F

Too bad this isn't teh way to report bugs

Agreed, only proper way IMO is setting it to red, and knowing the mechanics.