Player Features and Ideas Discussion

One of the first things that I was taught in EVE was to NEVER EVER use the autopilot. Someone decided to make the autopilot so bad that it will kill you every time. Having features like this in the game tells people that although Eve has a lot of features, a lot of them are broken and meaningless. Now I know that this is not the case, but that is what having broken features tells people. So CCP should either fix the feature, making it usable, or should remove the feature altogether in order to avoid gaining a bad reputation. To fix it would mean that it would have to jump like a human player hitting the keys, and not warp to within 15 km and then slowly taking its time approaching the gate/dock.

The same goes for all other broken features, though I can't think of any others at the moment.

Lets not fix what isn't broken.
Auto Pilot works as intended

Auto pilot is extremely useful as is.
Case use 1) managing and marking a route.
Case use 2) instant station docking.
Say you're flying a blockade runner into a trade hub in prime time (basically marking yourself for death)
What you do is use the Auto pilot to plot the route there, avoiding unessiccarily risky choke points,

Manually fly the route showing in the Auto pilot.

Then, once you're in the hub, with the Auto pilot set to the target station ,
you warp to a bookmark within that stations docking ring,
Whilst in warp activate the autopilot.

What this does is cue the docking request for the same server tic you egress warp.

It's actually quite useful for a whole lot of things that aren't derping about with a massive "antimatter goes here" sticker on your arse

Autopilot isn't broken, it's a risk/reward tradeoff.

New players are told never to use it because that's easier than the paragraphs of explanation that would be required to detail the tradeoffs autopilot entails, the specific cases where using it might be reasonable, and how to make those decisions. It's assumed that a player will eventually become good enough at the game and risk management to figure these things out for themselves.

If you haven't hit that point then let me tell you now, Autopilot is not always bad, it's just risky, because it lets your ship do something when you're not controlling it.

I use autopilot a lot and I do not think it's broken at all. It gets my freighter to places when I cannot play actively but need that ship to go somewhere. And fleet warps with a ceptor fleet and autopilot on is amazing for moving me and my alts from staging to my ratting grounds. I rather think you just use it improperly.

I autopilot often and have so far never once lost a ship while on autopilot. In my ~3 years of actually playing this game (and ~3 years of lurking), it has not happened once.

I like to think autopilot is one of those parts of EVE that reminds a player that the advice they receive from other players is not only valuable but fallible. Take, for example, the part where most of us are told at least once to never use autopilot. It doesn't take a genius to figure out how to autopilot safely, but it does take a veteran.

Autopilot isn't nearly as dangerous as it is made out to be. Some professional haulers will launch several freighters on AP and then go to bed. Next morning they will have arrived safely at destination 99.9% of the time. The other .1% insurance covers most of the loss. They earn a lot of ISK for a modest amount of risk and most of these contracts involve travelling between trade hubs passing through ganker havens like Uedama and Niarja. If you fit a freighter with bulkheads and keep your cargo value below a billion it isn't a very attractive target.

Allowing the autopilot to warp to 0 would speed the game up which most of us would consider a good thing. You are still vulnerable on the landing gate so gankers don't lose much.

If it was useless and broken, why does every bugger use it?

It's a choice with pros and cons.

lol autopilot is broken? I autopilot all the time and don't get killed using it. the AP problem is not a problem with AP but with the population of players that prefer to play the game as a game and not a world where we can actually make a difference with the things we do.

There was once a time before 2008 you could autopilot in a capsule and not be ganked, now you cant even land on a bookmark on a station at 0 with ap on to trigger the dock as soon as it hits in a shuttle.

As if you need that question answered.


Make a game thats realistic? With space ships that fly through space soup, wormholes, plasma guns, unlimited fuel, ftl travel and space zombies...

Get a clue.