Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I am sure this has been brought up many times before, in the legendary feat of 12 years, my congratulations CCP.

Thanks for making an AMAZING game, even though I am 12 years late to the party, but I have finally arrived.

Now onto the topic that I set out to talk about:

Drones, and Drone hotkeys.

There's a return to drone bay hotkey, an engage hotkey, an Return and Orbit hotkey, but no initial Launch Drones hotkey.

Surely there's a reasoning behind this, and surely I might be missing it. I really want to know though, why is this?

I've come up with some small ideas, on how this could be implemented, might there not be a concrete answer to this, and without further ado ofcourse, here they are:

1) Implement Drone Grouping; Drone Grouping is just what it says, groups of drones, that you make, just like the folders you make in the Drone UI. This enables the rest of the system which works of grouping, ofcourse.

2) Launch Drones Hotkey; This hotkey works of Drone Grouping, you simply assign the hotkey to a group, and you could make a module icon for it, or simply a button like the Engage, and Return ones. You could assign the 1, 2, 3 buttons, to Launch/Deploy Drone groups 1, 2, or 3.

3) Return Hotkey; Doesn't need a change really, since you can only have 1 group active at a time, and using the Return hotkey would just return them.

My idea works of drone grouping, so the larger drone boats, and ships that uses fleets and fleets of drones won't get handicapped, by needing to micromanage their drones.

I feel this could work really well, with some proper implementation, and not abusable, unless I am missing something CRUCIAL, which can happen. I am only human, like everyone else on this forum, unless some cats are, which is fine.

Thanks for reading, I'd love to read some comments on what people think of this.

In short, let me know if you dig, or you don't.

I would love a hotkey to launch drones as well.

I'm not sure... but I think the main reason is to prevent boters. Not like it matters though since they seem to manage quite well without a drone launch hotkey anyways.

The only other reason would be that they wouldn't know which group of drones to launch if you had many types. I'd suggest launch the last group that was manually launched, or as mentioned, give us a way to keybind to particular drone groups per ship basis.



Just to point out to people who might not know, you can drag and drop drones form the drone window onto open space to launch them ( or groups ) as well as drag launched drones from the drone drone window into the drone bay in the drone window to return to drone bay. It's just a faster way to manage the drone compared to the right click context menu.


Cheers,
Wilj0

This is not a new idea, and you can drag and drop drone groups from the drone window.

I'll just leave this here:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=297635

*Mumbles something about the search function halfheartedly*