EVE General Discussion

Not to sound impatient, but I always found drones look a bit unimpressive compared to other weapons. Their weapon effect is barely visible. What would make drones look more impressive?

IMHO they should have a weapon effect like their turret equivalent. Light drones like small turrets....heavy and sentry drones like large turrets. Imagine the light show of 5 hammerheads orbiting a target while firing like medium blasters! Or 5 sentries firing like large rails alongside a Dominix firing with rails as well

@CCP: any plans to revamp drone weapon effects?

They make up for it with the fact that they use Dreadnought-sized guns.

At least, that's where they get their sound effects.

If so, it's client side only. Where effects could be turned off.

Drones isn't to much of a problem atm as no one really zooms in on them, good idea though m8. It would be awesome but i think people don't pay enough attention to them plus there will be a lot more lag!

I'd probably settle for restoring the bandwidth on the Myrmidon.

I like drones, but don't think anything in this regard should change.

I pay attention to my ship too much, I'd rather have some unique options to change my ship. I.E. Color, Emblems, Corp Signs, and most of all, the grand ideal for my ship......

A spray painted middle finger on my hull.

I'm pro-drone, but looking at the current state of things, they would pretty much need to dedicate an entire expansion (or at least a mini-expansion like Escalation) to just drones.

-Drones themselves need balancing (racial drones, Min/Gal vs Amarr/Cald).
-Sentries need to be looked at (T2s still don't require/benefit from racial specialization).
-Drone UI is horrible.
-Drone AI is iffy (stick 3 Nav Comps onto your ship with Drone Nav maxed and see what happens, they still split damage from time to time with focus fire enabled).
-No drone implants still! Seriously? Turrets/missiles got theirs in 2008 (IIRC).
-More rigs - currently only one damage rig, only affects one type of drone.
-Drone boats themselves need to be rebalanced - when was the last time you saw any drone boat in a top 20 list of most used ships?

Drone models and effects? Honestly, I don't much care for that. I never have reason to zoom in on them. I'd say the development time would be better spent fixing actual game problems, not just adding eye candy.

Though I am prepared to accept that perhaps drones and drone users will always be treated like red-headed step-children. But at least TELL US this, upfront, honestly. Just do a quick post saying so, and perhaps offer SP refund for drone skills and everyone will be happy. Or at least not as sad.

It would be cost effective to have drones strafe thier targets that way you only have to change the thruster area on the model to account for hte fact they are omni directional fliers

I agree with most of this with exceptions:

-Drone UI is horrible.
It is being updated, and should be out if not in inferno than the next release. They showed a preview of it at fanfest.

-Drone models and effects? Honestly, I don't much care for that. I never have reason to zoom in on them. I'd say the development time would be better spent fixing actual game problems, not just adding eye candy.


They are entirely different departments. The art team does the art, the dev team does the game issues. Dev time is not split between the two, they work exclusively on their own.

We saw similar bitching when the new rookie ships came out, people don't realise that there are artists and there are devs, not just one group of people doing one thing at a time.

You can balance between speed/ehp/dps fairly easily without worrying about damage type.