Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hello All,

One thing that separates the drone regions is the distinct lack of loot. Im talking meta mods that drop in abundance everywhere else.

CCPLS add in some loot to the drones! not just the sentient loot.

Im not asking that the drones return to dropping their alloys en mass, but maby 1-2 occasionally? or some sort of meta mods.

Regards,

Crimson

There are some meta drone mods in the works, do they count?

Oh and the warp speed mods maybe?

I wouldn't mind seeing more salvage drop from the drones, at least to make up for the lack of loot. Some benefit to the drones existing outside of just pixels.

Granted the Integrated/Augmented drops are nice, but in drone space, it's primarily in Data Sites with very few drones dropping anything else. Salvaging the buggers is not nearly as abundant either, so there needs to be some place to give.

Exactly. Im not asking for mass mods and tons of minerals, but just something. Even if its a fairly low drop rate.

I still miss drone alloys.

No more sentiens with any loot on drone patrols and drone hordes, very good improvemtn lol

This would be best, CCP can start with very minor drop rate buff or item improvements then increase it slightly if they aren't effective as they want them to be.

I can agree with that. I'm just playing devil's advocate, saying if ccp where to make changes I think that's what they should do.

I do think they nerfed it way to harshly back years ago.

Pretty sure the nerf had less to do with the Drone Regions than it did the mass amounts of drone poo being harvested by highsec mission runners. At least that's what CCP said at the time of the nerf.

As a mission runner who was around long enough to remember drone alloys myself, I'd say you've nailed it. RD missions produced more minerals for the time it took to run the mission and loot them than it took to actually go out and mine the same minerals in a Hulk fit for yield. You also had alloys that gave a crap ton of minerals you couldn't get from mining in High Sec (even morphite if I recall), so another hit. Finally, the early arrival of the Noctis even made the rather bloated volume they tended to take up in cargo space an afterthought. Before that, volume was sometimes a bit of a pain, but most salvage 'cain builds were sufficient to get the job done afterwards and Marauders could still make some worthwhile hauls prioritizing the BS wrecks. Even if you were just gonna sell the alloys, that tended to make RD missions actually profitable enough to run them. Couple that with how easy it was to max out your gains on reprocessing.

The bounties today don't even come close to matching the worth of their alloys, and the salvage was already rather on the weak side and still is. No question that the alloys, for sake of the way they were hurting other systems, needed to go. We mission runners were probably killing mining more than gankers were, truth be told. Too bad the method CCP implemented to compensate doesn't seem to come close to actually compensating. At the very least, it doesn't make them very profitable, whether you're talking RD space in null it would seem or RD in missions and complexes. Personally, I have yet to see any RD mission give more than 5-6 mil in bounty or any RD combat site worth running even just for the hell of it, let alone for the chance the loot was descent enough. I figure maybe it's better outside of high sec, but then again I haven't heard anyone ever say good things about Drone Region either, even less about RD sites in either Drone Region or elsewhere, so that sounds like a bust too.

At this point, having them even drop some random cheap meta loot would be preferable to just bounties and weak salvage.