EVE General Discussion

My question goes for CCP


As you guys have certainly read over time stuff about drones I wanted you guys to answer my curiosity, and maybe some other dudes around, about your short term goals about drones

Drones themselves
-more dps
-more e-war choices (not only ECM)
-better defenses-->is it really normal you can instantly pop every drone with single bomb but not small ships?
-better mobility: hell why train T2 ogres for the average use when travel time it self is a complete waste of dps at the point that using small or medium drones make you have overall better dps

Ships

-5m3 drone capacity isn't something really ridiculous considering the points above

-almost every ship in game can make use of drones, will there be possible at some moment to bring back the specific ability for drones boats to deploy more than 5 drones? -it's a hell of commitment to train all drones this should bring some benefit

-isn't "bandwidth" a limiting factor for better drone improvements and ships balance? -proteus/ishtar suffer from this hardly

-are there any plans to introduce a new drone ship or revamp Dominix aesthetics, this ship being so important in Eve culture I'd rather opt for some kind of choice when building the item? -just and idiotic idea as I can have many of those but in my eye it's important to keep some basics while adding/revamping stuff and Dominix is maybe THE reference for Eve history, therefore important to keep it as, but an option should be possible

Graphics

-drones graphics have significant impact on client performance that go over the roof in fleet battle
-drone models being something we want to watch from time to time? -fighters & bombers are supposed to be ship size
-weapon/E-war effect


So after throwing this pave of silly stuff you might as well not be willing to answer, I'd like to know your actual work around these points and opinions, what are your plans, in fact to be more precise I want to know more about drones than a shot showing a salvager drone.

Thx

Addendum (Thx Roime)

- revamped Drone control UI (I saw the wonderful Punk post something about giving drones module-like buttons in the HUD, this could work, basically anything that gets rid of the drop-down menu hell)

- at least make the drone window behave so that launched group gets expanded, and recalled group collapsed, not the other way around! It's terrible and utterly useless, unless the drone received damage is displayed also for drones in the bay

- Drone implants (drone damage modules seem to be in the works, might answer your first point!)

- repper drones should work on your own ship

- dedicated drone boats should receive bonuses to EWAR drones as well

- fix the ships so that Gallente has the best drone recon (currently Pilgrim), and best drone pirate ships (currently Gila and Rattler) (obviously not so serious but I demand superior drone glory for Gallente!)

These of course are not old rabble or demands but rather particular points that actually some players would like to see some senior Dev or whoever has the ability, to comment for us.
Thx

Already exist, not used very often.

You will excuse my English low lvl of writing and comprehension, I'm not English native. In fact when I say, or someone says more than ECM drones it implies that we are aware of other drones existence, but also aware that those are inefficient to the point wasting minerals to build those is a crime.

Addendum to main post from Roim post (thx) and expecting CCP to maybe comment these points.

New modules session talked about introducing a Drone damage bonus module.

The geddon and the phoon can use 5 heavies. The domi can use heavies. The geddon and phoon get reasonable dps from their guns and the domi doesn't (unless gank fit where it has really bad EHP). Sounds fair.

What if you make the domi incapable of fielding large guns and allowed it to field 10 heavies with BS V?

How god yeah, that would be awesome. In one of my old posts about this I was actually asking for more "souplesse" in how you field your drones with a dedicated drones boat that can barely do something else at the same time such as the use of other weapon system (it can but it's not it's main purpose)

If I remember this post was something more or less like this:

7 Sentry - 9 heavy - 10 meds - 12 lights

This might seem overpowered but in fact it isn't, drones tracking travel speed op/falloff distance etc.
Also a new mod named Drone Repair Projector, high slot and to use it you shouldn't need to target your drone directly but right click on your damaged drone on drones menu and use "Repair", 1module repairs 1drone at a time.

There are so many possibilities also for implants and a new variety of modules Tech 1 and Tech 2 that this should eventually be a path choice for all pilot inclined to use nothing else but drones at any given ship size.

Thank you for you supports guys, let's hope CCP will either answer some stuff here or just put a dev blog very soon to appease our thirst of information.

If you touch my rattlesnake, I will go on a furry woodland creature killing rampage.

Yeah like I said, the Gila/Rattler line was mostly a lolrpish joke.

And this post is mostly a bump.

my impression of the drone UI concept was that it would probably break down pretty hard once you sit in a carrier with a few hundred drones in your bay.

You could potentially run out of buttons, yes. The main issue I saw with it was that it didn't seem like it could handle replacement/reinforcement drones without getting really messy. I suppose that, if you could just drag stuff from your drone bay into a drone group on the HUD, and have that drone instantly realise what it's supposed to do (viz. undock and do whatever the other drones in the group are doing), that would be a way to solve it.

I can also imagine it being a bit busy if you have a lot of drones that you need to keep track of or they'll get blasted to pieces, but there is still an upper limit to how many you can field at once — even in the most excessively equipped (super)carrier — and that keeps the complexity in check.

No matter what, though, they would be hard-pressed to make it worse than the "#%& drone window.

It was a part of a roundtable, and it didn't exactly sound like they were planning to release it (they were afraid we'd frame-by-frame our way through it and think that all those work-in-progress and conceptual designs were locked-down and final). It was more a bit of capturing the air of the new UI than presenting the details… some of us just caught enough glimpses of things we liked to commit it to memory.