Player Features and Ideas Discussion

BLUF: Current "Excavator" drones are (whether through manipulation or design) prohibitively exspensive and are offer no comparable alternatives. Addition of similarily scaled T1/T2 versions would expand options and relieve pressure on a scarce market.

If you haven't been keeping up with the prices of "Excavator" drones lately (or more accurately, the supply of the drone AI chips), they basically started off as fairly exspensive and have mostly gone up from there. Current prices are hovering around 1.5-1.6bil for each drone. While I won't debate why, it has become clear that these drones will continue to follow their existing pricing patterns and fluctuations.

The agreed justification for this seems to be that it balances out with the reward (comparable alternatives notwithstanding). However, it appears to me that a stoic adherence to a simple isk = risk formula only serves to frustrate and discourage potential users. So, why don't we offer an option that walks backward on that line of thinking?

Since "Excavators" are considered Faction drones, why not offer less efficient, but less costly options?

Thankfully there already exists a line of regular drones that follow this pattern, so a simple copying of the idea is easy. Here's what the important stats would look like: (I'm not touching ice drones)

"Excavator" Mining Drone
Mining Amount - 220m/3
Max Velocity - 200m/s

"Heavy" Mining Drone II (~10% less)
Mining Amount - 196m/3
Max Velocity - 180m/s

"Heavy" Mining Drone I (~33-28% less)
Mining Amount - 148m/3
Max Velocity - 145m/s

Note: those stats do not include skills, including the newly released "Mining Drone Specialization" skill. So expect the difference between T1 and T2/Faction to grow further. Another thing to consider; while each stat was individually reduced by the same percentage as the regular mining drone counterpart, since two stats were touched (the key one being Velocity) the overall yield should drop further for T1/T2.

So a let's put this in perspective. We'all use a raw, theoretical max yield (no travel time) based on an income, rather than a volume (cuz it's probably going into the wallet anyway). We'll assume that a current max skilled Rorqual pilot can achieve 300mil/hr (don't care if that's still accurate or not).

If the pilot were to choose T2 drones instead, he would still get 270mil/hr. The actual change will be greater than this, and I estimate closer to 230-250 for most.

If a brand new Rorqual pilot were to choose T1, his theoretical max becomes ~200mil/hr. This is further driven down by lower speed and lack of the specialization bonus. Probably closer to 150mil/hr.

As you can see, comparing the bottom and top, the reward has a vide variation.

So where do we put the price? We could probably argue a good point to settle on this all day, but as a rule of thumb (since these are essentially capital sized items) we could follow similar pricing schemes to what we see in T1/T2 module costs. Otherwise I won't touch on that for now.

Regardless, this should really open up some options for all different situations and considerations, and bring "Excavators" into a similar progression as other modules and variants.

It's more a matter of offering a progression than anything else. As it stands, it's either the excavator drone or regular drones (lol). There's not much room for meaningful choices or trade offs. This proposal goes a little beyond a simple cost-point discussion.

Yes? If 3 bil is the fit, you could buy and fit two more rorqs for the current drone prices with some left over. At their lowest price, you could buy two extra rorq hulls.

At the moment, just the 6-6.5b in drones is closer to a cheap super fitting package. I don't even know of many regular capitals that run that price unless you're intentionally buying exspensive modules.

honestly they need to increase the drop rate of the AI chips 300%.... the drones should honesty be no more then 500 mill per.

thats 5 billion for 1 flight of both ore and ice drones and that plus the cost of the rorq + fit is pretty damn expensive enough.. but the drones post increase in drop rate are still 1.5 billion and thats crazy

you know those drones that were so OP they needed a solid nerf bat to the groin? yeah lets buff the crap out of them!!!

Then I geuss that would make the outlier in that aspect. Almost all other drone categories have two or more tiers of progression. Only exceptions I can think of are salvage drones and EWAR drones. Don't believe I've seen number of drones as a progression since carriers stopped using them.


Considering that all the suggested drones have significant drops in yield, and that CCP at least attempted to push the price down (to what degree we may never know), I believe "buff the crap out of them" is quite a bit of an overstatement. Also they didn't touch ice drones so would those also fall into your categorization?


Player Driven =/= player designed

The fact that CCP does change build requirements, compositions, manufacturing, and drop rates all point to the fact that CCP also has quite a bit leeway in adjusting things to how they see fit. Yu can probably go back and look at announcements about the previous list and watch the markets change immediately after and much further down the line.

On a side note, you wouldn't happen to have any good cheese or pistachios for my wine? I'm not very picky, I my tastes tend to be very expansive.