Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So, the drones got their long needed buff, and even few nerfs after that. However most reacently we saw a buff to carriers and supercarriers drones in form of all the dronemodules starting to work on fighters and fighterbombers. As especially on regular carriers case this was a needed and a welcome buff, we are now in a ****** situation, where a thanatos can push out 3300+ dps with fighters never being on grid. Obviousely this have been already widely abused.
Another way this is being done is to use supercarriers on a offline pos. If anything appears visually on grid, type the pos password and shields go up. In this case you haveto find your drones from space, but anyway you can deliver some serious punishment without actually risking anything at all, except few cheap t1 ships. I already seen this happend aswell. If I were to do this, I would do it with a fit like this. So one nyx can assign 5 drones to any t1 shitship on field with 2369 dps worth of assisting. It's more than any subcapital ship is able to do under any circumstances.

After dying couple of times in weird situations to assigned fighters I started to do some research. I came up with this fit. Rigslots are empty so, that one can take any fleet / ratting fitted carrier and do this. Note the speed of the fighters. Now, just park that thing outside pos shields and assign the fighters to 3 scram/web inties/AF etc and win eve.

I ran some testing on sisi with this and the fighters are really good now. They really kill fast subcapitals. Even small ones. To frigates you actually need a painter, but anything bigger than frigate gets owned by assigned fighters pretty damn fast in nothing, but web and scram.

Even that is not enough. The fighters have the unique attack & follow option. This means, that if the fighter assigning ship has checkboxed that option, the fighters will follow to warp the target and keep shooting it when the warp lands. With the modern warpspeedchanges this means, that an attack battlecruiser warps slower than the fighters, so the fighters are practically waiting on the landingspot for the attack battlecruiser to land. They instalock tha attack battlecruiser and kill it immediatelly.

So was this intentional? If it was, I think it was a VERY bad move, as this will kill solo to medium gang warfare from 0.0 alltogether.

However I think it's fair at the least for a carrier to be able to do that, IF it is on the combat field. But it would require the fragily fitted carrier to actually appear on grid and combat field. But as it stands now, it is just bad game mechanics.

I know there a a lot of peaople here who starts to claim, that the carriers / supers ARE risked while being 2 meters outside the forcefield, or on the offline pos, but cmon. All of ya know, that the fact is, that there is no risk at all, bar to disconnections etc outside of game accidents that will affect you anyway.

So to the suggestion:

- Remove assign drones option from carriers and supercarriers alltogether. It makes no sence at all to have it in the first place. Or atleast modify them to the same system the assist drone mechanism is on subcapital drones, so that you haveto be on grid to be able to assign them anywhere.

edit: durin discussion on this thread a another idea has been suggested and later edited by me to this form:

- Not being able to assign fighters within 5000m of forcefield, station, stargate or any other structure that limits smartbombs aswell. You could use your own fighters personally as normal, but cannot assign them during the previous conditions are met.

That does sound like it sucks. But its what they've always been able to do. they just do it more powerfully now.

you apparently did not read at all what I wrote, but it's okay. I explain it again.

The nyx sits on a pos with shield down, but online. He has the pos mgmt window open with pw pretyped in, but apply not pressed. Then he assigns hes fighters all over the place. If something decloacks / warps to grid, he presses aply to the PW typing screen and shield will go instantly up. 0 risk. No counter.

Even, if he is just on a regular pos with shield up and VERY close to shield edge, he still have several tens of seconds to get inside FF if something decloacks / warps to grid. Before anyone have locked him he is inside the FF. 0 risk. No counter.

Only way to harras these drone assigners I have found out during my researches is to bump them inside forcefield. If they have not had the time to call for their drones, the drones will be abandonded in space in random locations. However this often, if not always requires a deacent fleet, so that you are able to tank the pos itself.

I really hope this change was accidental and CCP just forgot that the whole assigning fighters mechanic even existed.

He's still out a couple of hundred million every time he presses the button you know.

Shoot the fighters before he gets them.

Bumping since this issue needs dev attention and statement.

I haven't seen this done with suppers or in the way you propose with sitting in an online tower however i have seen it used with thans sitting outside a POS and it isn't broken we have managed to bump them away from the tower and kill it. this is a decent strategy and gives a sort of home field advantage to the fight. this can also be countered with a few AFs in your fleet to deal with the fighters costing them 22-30mill per fighter. this isn't a bad change but it is one we will need to adapt to.


Now if the offline online force field trick does start to be widely used then that wouldn't prove uncountable but it would give the supper pilot the ability to put out DPS risk free so instead of removing the assign fighters alter how the force field works(they are already working on POS) make it so that the force field has a delay on it so when you first put a PW in it as an online timer long enough to bump the carrier out of range.

with all of this what i see more then them sitting out side of a POS is them having a Cyno ready in a safe system that they will jump to when the see someone pop on grid. This however is also counter able with a cov ops set up with a tackle

Only few ppl abuse it FOR NOW. It will increase as ppl notice how superior tactic it is.

AND it will kill solo / super small gang all together. Completely. And you dont need any help to defend sov vs solo / super small gang, or actually vs any sized roaming. And that is what it kills.

In sov warfare ppl can afford to bring the carriers on field, and it's fine. Carrier is a capital vessel, that should give capital punishment. But as I said earlier, riskfree pvp is just wrong. If they come to field and on grid, they are putting their caps into risk and its completely fine IMO.



Well, you have been lucky my friend of finding the idiots, who cant stay just barely outside the forcefield. Obviousely idiotism is always easily counterable. However, if this is done correctly (and the cases we tried out the bumping, it have been done correctly) the carrier is inside forcefield before anyone can even lock it. And bumping after you cannot lock it is sadly a exploit nowdays.

Um, most people DO use caps.


As if defending people don't already have all the advantages.


So tracking titans shouldn't have been nerfed. Good to know that you, sir, are an idiot.