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I understand what is being said. I'm trying to explain that from a design perspective the current behavior of Fighters isn't a bug, it's just the way Fighters behave. Thus from CCP's perspective this change is independent of any changes to Fighter behavior. This change is a result of conditions in the game right now, as they are and an adjustment CCP wants to see to those conditions.

You're also operating under the assumption that what CCP says when they talk about changes to Fighter behavior is what you want those changes to be. It's possible that CCP might not even change fighter behavior so they auto-orbit or keep moving after a command expires, they might just make it possible to queue commands better or something of the sort if they want to limit how little attention someone can safely pay to their Fighters.



This is a bit of a catch-22 for the devs. Every dev I've talked to, at least at a company that does player feedback on upcoming changes, does actually care about the feedback they get. The problem is that it takes a fair amount of time to respond to stuff, and it's a bit of a tossup whether or not a response helps a thread or just makes it spiral off into more arguments and nitpicking. In this way community service *is* difficult and very time consuming. Remember the balance people aren't just working on the ideas posted here while these ideas are up, they're doing a lot of other stuff behind the scenes, not just watching the forums refresh.

Different devs at CCP have different approaches from what I've seen, but I doubt any of them have the time to address each point brought up in a thread, and a blanket statement saying "we've considered the points in this thread and are going ahead anyway" would A. **** people off more and B. stifle any hope of further productive discussion.

That's why I said it'd be nice if there was a CM guy, or even two, dedicated to acting as a go-between for these forums and the relevant devs. Hopefully the time expense on the devs would be comparable to what it is at present, and the CM who could dedicate his entire time to managing and interacting with these threads would be able to alleviate some of these concerns.

Again, I want to stress that personally I don't think you're wrong here, what you want is just running into the realities of development and community management and right now those are winning, because the alternative costs a fair amount of money.

That assumes that ships and drones are treated the same on the back end. I honestly don't know whether they are or not, or whether the client actually handles keeping your ship going after you stop orbiting. I'd kind of like to think you're right, but with how old the drone code is and how janky code tends to get the older it is I'm not willing to make any assumptions. Just got done being bitten in the ass by something like this at work

I think it's also possible CCP may want to change something other than having Fighters/Drones keep moving when they lose a target. Right now we're assuming they'll just have them keep orbiting/moving, but CCP may want to keep the stopping behavior to discourage AFK playstyles and just make it easier to actively keep Fighters moving between targets, though this is also just speculation on my part.

Definitely agreed though that whatever they do I hope it's a high priority for them. I am generally not a fan of "Player VS UI" and this definitely qualifies.

There's definitely some different code there, yeah. I dunno, the similar general behavior makes me wonder if they're not running on the same base framework though.

Like I said, this is just me speculating, I try not to assume that something will be easy, I just hope it will be.

Where did you guys got that drones stop moving after killing target? Because as far as my drones behave, they just slowly return to my ship in orfer to orbit it. And this should be default behaviour for fighters also. They should act excactly like drones in every way except mechanics that are fighters specific and have separate commands. So if you would like to have fighters stand in place after kill there should be separate command for this. It would be less confusing.

Exactly as he said, they either wait for a new command, or they auto-aggress the next target. Fighters don't have an auto-aggress feature, so they sit perfectly still while taking fire. Still doesn't make sense to me considering they are piloted by people. Everyone knows a target that sits still, is a dead target.

CCP said the Chimera used to be a Water Freighter. Maybe they are screwing us back into using it for that purpose again. Sure can't fight with it now.

To add up on that, the reason why drones and fighters don't continue after killing a target might have to do with the fact they never fly just in a direction. They always have a goal. You will never see a drone flying toward nothing. They always fly to reach a player defined point in space. The action "fly in a straight line" probably don't even exist in the drone and fighters code abse as opposed to player ships. What the impact of "just continue in current direction" would have is unknown to us. That's why I'm favoring a "orbit the wreck you just created" approach since it use a command drones already "know".

so you know the result is every carrier ratter needs to do 3x more work for the same reward, while still losing expensive fighters if they happen to look away even for half a second. You understand the result is going to just be more rorqual miners because carrier ratting is just too ******?

And you acknowledge the problem of fighter behavior not being "ideal" in combination with the other changes. You know currently fighters come to a complete stop and, with the new signature, the rats will alpha them out of the sky very quickly.

But you're going to rush the change ahead anyway, because apparently the fighter sig "problem", that apparently nobody else was aware of, is far more problematic than what is going to result in the changes? Can we just admit we really hate carrier ratters and want to make their job so painful they stop doing it?

I'd like to propose another idea to fighters standing still after target kill...

When you have several targets locked in any other ship, when one dies your guns will point to the next locked target or locked/selected target, I know this plays absolutely no impact on the weapons hitting or anything, but what if your next locked target or selected target the fighters slowboat towards them, if no target start coming back to your ship... even if they moved at half normal cruise speed would be more ideal than standing there picking their noses while NPC or Players ram guns up there and help them pick their brains too
They would still have to activate weapons to lock the next target so you're really not breaking anything and at half speed unless acted on prop mod would at least keep them moving.
Normal drones as it stands as soon as a target drops you can command them to immediatly engage a new target or they can auto aggro the next one attacking you until redirected... I see no reason fighters can't at least act like other weapon systems and 'point' to the next target

Love it... just love it how CCP will shaft a good portion of their player base without having played the game... without people having complained about a problem... without asking us what we think about it beforehand.

I think I posted the forums 3-4 times in my several years of playing this game, cause that is how many times CCP has ****** my playstyle over completely. Maybe I am one of the lucky ones cause I mostly agree with their changes... but just when I start believing in their logic again and think that they have a head on their shoulders, they smack those beliefs right out of me with another move like this.

CCP... perhaps the overwhelming amount of negative feedback that you received when posting these changes should raise a small alarm in your plans of deploying this patch.

I am not speaking just for the carriers which are getting nerfed to uselessness despite them being the weakest balanced caps by comparison to their peers (dreads/supercarrier/titans - all of these performing either brilliantly in their role or at the very least, still 'good').

I am also referring to other chances in the patch such as the chimera re-design. Do not get me wrong on this... when I first looked at the concept art for how this beautiful ship will look in the future I was blown away. Let me remind you, CCP, of what you said you would change it to: [url]http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/67023/1/Chimera_redesign.jpg[/url]. From all of those details that give it debth, scale, majesty and a true feeling that you are commanding a 3km long ship, what was delivered? NOTHING. Just a simple, static hull. No small heat vents when the ship is taking damage to shields/entering warp... no small maintenance drones buzzing around it to give it scale... no point defense weapons to bring it closer to a realistic design. Yes.. I am not talking out of my ass. All of these were in the concept and more and all we got was a damn 3km long shoe box. Shame on you CCP.

Perhaps you do intend to give it those details, later on, but until then it is **** and you should keep it shelved, just like with the changes for fighters, until they get major problems fixed, such as not stopping after they destroy something.