Player Features and Ideas Discussion

That maybe fine for ships with anemic drone bays, but what about ships that have the capacity to hold multiple flights of drones? I think that's why CCP haven't implemented this since chances are a launch drones shortcut would probably launch the last set of drones you had in space, which may not be the ones you wish to launch. When you have a Gallente boat with a big enough drone bay you may not get the results you expected.

Both good points. CCP, any thoughts? Has this already been considered and rejected? I've talked to other players and corp members about this and they thought it could be a useful addition in certain circumstances, like if you have all the same type of drones in the bay, or you want to send out the ones you recalled again.

I've got a counter-proposal that I think would actually solve this issue (I just thought of it a second ago, I was going to post another "it's been mentioned, but there's no way to decide which drones to launch" response, but I had this idea).

How about if you could drag a group of drones down to the {|Ctrl|Alt}F1-8 buttons that you use for all your other weapons and modules? Then you can hit that hotkey to launch that group of drones (or however many you have bandwidth for from that group). It would effectively be a simple shortcut for rightclicking on the group and clicking 'launch'.

I'm pretty sure this would perfectly solve the whole issue. And you don't need to worry about having that key recall drones when you hit it again, since there's already a keybind for recalling drones, this would just be a button that launches them.

Can anyone see any holes in the idea?

It would be even more helpful when you're running a drone boat with many different types of drones, which is why I suggested letting you drag and drop any given group onto the hotbar. Then you can deploy any set you want with nothing but a keystroke. It would be a significant time saver for people who are swapping out drone sets on the fly, since you don't have to move the mouse all the way across the screen and click a specific spot to launch them.

Also, for bonus points, make the icon on the hotbar the same as the icon of the drones in the group (or the top drone in the group if there are multiple types). Then you can tell your groups apart without having to guess at/remember which is which.

Windows going blank seems to be very common with Crucible, I've had it happen lots since December. I just had my drone window go completely blank. I had it docked with the fleet window so undocked it and it sorted itself out so perhaps if you have a window go blank like that just try dropping it onto other windows, or removing it from the group they're in if you have them docked. Seems to do the trick in repairing that annoying little bug.