Player Features and Ideas Discussion

When drones and Fighters, are orbiting the ship or structure, whether it be mining ship or other, then they would attack any enemy that was in range of specified engagement setting.

Clicking on options tab in the Drone window(the tab which gives options like, "Aggressive" and "Focus fire"), will have the Engagement range box, for the user to input. The range will be shown in Meters.

Note: If a person sets the engagement range higher than the range of the Drones' control range, then only the maximum number will be automatically placed in the "engagement range" box. i.e. So if the maximum control range a person can control the drone is 15000 Meters, and he/she places over that amount like 20000 Meters, then the game would only place "15000" Meters in the box after the input by the player.

It is called ease of play. A game must be fun, not frustrating. Like all my suggestion here, or in the past, I still have to manually put in what I want done, so I am not asking for total automation. This allows a person to choose the level of interaction, when playing. If some want to keep the interaction higher to suit their play style then they would not input anything in the suggested box.

Aggressive drones aren't supposed to be easily controlled.

There's ease of play, but there's also game balance and requiring people to actually play the game, and making this change impacts both.

Aggressive drones with a fixed range could be used to force them to target a close orbiting Frigate in a ship that would otherwise take a long time to lock it. This is a buff these ships don't need and a nerf that smaller brawling ships don't need.

It would also have potential uses for AFK playstyles, something that is not needed.

You are meant to be at the controls actively directing your drones if you want them to attack specific targets. This is not needed.

You don't need to preface with "to the developers". That's literally the point of this section of the forums

Man, I need to make friends with the devs so we can laugh at him behind his back when he sends his ideas straight to them.

When it comes to automation, which drones are part of, they should be deliberately stupid and inefficient. If you want to use your drones efficiently then control then yourself.

Drones being set to aggressive should be as good as you get.

Then directly assign them by targeting someone.

The whole point of "Aggressive" drones is that they follow a very simplistic behavior pattern that isn't easily controlled because their action doesn't require a target lock. If CCP wanted you to be able to assign drone actions without targeting someone it would be relatively simple to do so. They don't want that, so they don't allow it.

There is a difference between a Quality of Life fix, and a new feature or buff. This is not QoL this is a pretty substantial buff to drones.