Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Drones. I love them but apparently there are some issues with them in mass. I will probably regret this if implemented but why not.

So why not combine FOF missiles with defender missiles specifically to destroy drones? Fire and Forget Drone killing missiles would be a good Caldari answer to Gallente drone swarms.

NPC missions with these towers equipped with these missiles would quickly melt any afk mission runner.

Questions, comments, Concerns welcome?

Destroying drones isn't the issue, in large fights there are *tons* of ways to remove drones from the field and large fights are the only time drones are a major performance concern. The reason drones cause lag is simply because they're a large number of different objects in space, that's all there is to it. You would create the same amount of additional lag by less than doubling the number of ships on grid (probably less than 50%, honestly, since a lot of what creates TiDi is input processing delay on the server)

This isn't nearly the problem it used to be and it doesn't need to be solved by making it incredibly easy to remove drones from grid, that would just make them useless.

Eve Forum Translator ......


DO NOT mess with my ratting carriers.

Missile flight time is irrelevant since my drone are closer to the enemy than they are from myself when attacking.

Sentry are only instant recall if you never move in which case, instead of killing drones, use arty to alpha the non moving target from grid instead of stupidly wasting time on drones.

TiDi would still happen because all drone boat have replacement and at any number where drones really create a problem, there is just too many on grid to wipe them out anyway.

Nah, something like this wouldn't have a big impact on a Carrier since Fighters move fast enough to not take much damage from missiles and in PvP they already get wrecked by Smartbombs. Plus they're less resource intensive than a drone boat like a Domi because a Domi fields 5 drones to the Carrier's 3 squadrons of Fighters.

Also, for the record, I don't have a ratting Carrier right now and I'm in favor of the things getting toned down... I just don't like this specific suggestion regardless of what it does to Carriers.



Missile flight time is basically a non-issue here, generally the first indication a drone users has that his drones are being attacked is when they lose health, and any missile is still going to out-run an MWDing drone. I'm all for making it harder to AFK-drone rat, but that can be done quite simply by just tweaking drone aggro mechanics rather than adding a specific counter to drones to missions.

If you want to kill drones with missiles then the solution is to target them and shoot them with missiles, which is what pretty much anyone in a smaller engagement that needs to clear drones does. Small and medium guns clear drones quite easily, especially with webs, and for larger ships Smartbombs do wonders.

The trade-off with Sentries is they can only be instantly recalled if you're standing on top of them, meaning you're a stationary target.

Missiles are not sized to drones, a Medium missile doesn't do close to full damage to a Heavy drone as things stand, and the best solution to killing drones with missiles is a Light missile launcher of some description. Also the health on drones doesn't scale in such a way that you could have a small launcher be effective vs Light Drones and not be quite effective against a Heavy one as well.

Drones are not as significant a contributor to TiDi as you seem to think they are. The main contributor to TiDi at this point is the input processing queue from player ships. Drones don't contribute to this except when commanded by a player and they contribute no more or less than activating a module or controlling your ship does. They contribute more to the physics simulation, but based on the information provided by CCP it seems like the physics sim has become less and less of a contributor to TiDi and general performance drag compared to ten years ago when Drones were a much bigger performance hit on the servers.

Oh and on top of that using missiles as an anti-drone system is actually horrible for performance since missiles are also physics objects so you're spawning more physics objects to try and get rid of a few physics objects. If your goal is actually performance then turrets would be a far better option.

All of this is kind of a moot point from a performance standpoint though, since in large fights (the only time TiDi tends to kick in) there's no reason to waste fitting space or ammo on a single-target anti-drone system, since Stealth Bombers and Smartbombs are *much* more effective at clearing drone-balls. The only time anyone would use a system like this is in smaller fights where performance of the servers isn't an issue in the least.

More like weapon designers come up with the darnest things. Also, read the November update of Defender Missiles and thought of this. Still won't make the list of the worlds weirdest weapons.

Cade, that was a thought out post. Thank you. have fun.