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There is no immediate need for this fix and many would argue it will do more harm than good. Leave it alone and focus on the harder dev challenges that no one seems to want to attempt.

The thing is, the issues you are describing come from flawed game mechanics and the problem we currently have with risk vs reward in eve (i.e. lvl 4 mission runners grinding isk without risk), not necessarily NPC AI... Maybe you should be requesting that all null/low sec belt rats are fitted with scrams, instead of pointing out the faults with this proposal.

Who knows, maybe all the people in here crying about how they won't be able to afk mission anyone will move to null sec for a better reward for their time, and you will have more ppl to kill.

High-sec missions have about the same reward than null-sec with a lot less risk, especially since the agent changes a year ago.

awake people GTFOing instantly as you appear without any chance of getting them has nothing to do with rewards they are cashing in. Maybe you would attract a lot of other unaware people which get killed as consequence but even they learn fast how to avoid risks. Dont want to start a separate discussion about that, just pointed out whats wrong with your suggestion.


already done in many other threads, however I focus here on what has been announced, everything else would be off-topic.





the downside of this proposal is that everyone who wants to kill anything solo would have to grind standing at local agents first like a mongoloid which isnt even possible without joining locals and even then 0.0 missioning is likely of being interrupted by neutrals hanging around with probes and cyno etc or simply classic campers; then imagine, your alliance moves on to different grounds where you already f*cked up your standings to minmatar for instance by guristas missions you needed to farm for guristas space hunting, you'll end up with the same bad situation as stated before. Put simply, too much hassle on top of what is already required to get a kill in said regions, I would prefer aggro-based approach on that which means rats dont shoot first.

Overall this is positive. Giving NPCs better AI is not bad by default. Having them target swap and adding more challenge is cool. However, making them shoot drones is not. I can see why it's appealing to kill off potential botting ships using drones, or people just putting out drones and going afk, but consider this:

1) Alpha damage from NPCs in mission/plex/anything but belts can easily alpha even sentries, so no matter how you babysit that's still making sentries useless, even if you could theoreticly insta-scoop them.
2) Lights sometimes travel quite far to chase down targets, and many mission/plex/anomships that has some size (battleships) uses light drones to keep ewar, web, scrambler etc off. Are you saying that it's reasonable that players loses Marauders because their drones got volley'd by NPCs? Even if you babysit the drones this is bound to happen, especially when they travel back after you recall them (they usually eat quite alot of damage then with MWD on).
3) Missions and plexes where you can face up to tens of scrambling/jamming/td'ing/webbing frigs could potentially be a major issue unless you bring a sub-bs-weaponry ship.

I have to assume that CCP think this:
"PvE is for blobs, just like PvP, so suck it up and play in gangs"
"You're not supposed to be able to save drones, even if you 100% babysit them, they will eventually die"

I'll have to respectfully disagree with you on both points. As much as I enjoyed running lv4 in corp gangs back when lv4 was nothing for every man. It was fun and somewhat of a challenge. But it was bad already when you made officers tank so much that you need to bring capitals or fleets to kill them. Every change you do is promoting blobbing, and I'm curious if you ever considered that not all players want to blob? Drone changes is one, because in small scale (solo, dualboxing) PvE, drones are literally your best defence against NPC's that ewar + scramble/web you.

A Paladin with x NPCs that TD him rely on his drones. If you run Sanshas the Blockade, you can't even kill the t2 cruisers in the 2nd wave with a common beam setup (assuming they put their TD on you, and you have a few tracking mods fitted, with beams and navy micro crystal). Sometimes you are lucky and time it well and pop them before they can apply their TD, and boom it's really easy wave. Sometimes they lock you down completely, orbiting under your guns and your only hope is your medium drones. Literally this single wave can make a fast-running missions into a slow-running one, purely based on this, and your best bet is your drones. One counter is (was?) to use a missile ship, but with the proposed changes by you guys that TD affect missiles too.. losing your drones when you sit there TD'd to hell and can't hit stuff is a horrendous change.

AFK-running Dominixes is not an issue either, I've used those myself and you need quite alot of them to make any decent money. AFK-ing plexes with sentry drones have been deemed an exploit. So why exactly would you need to do this? Let the poor drones be left alone, or massively boost their defences vs NPCs so a pilot that is active at the keyboard at least can pull them back to his drone bay before they die. I.e. give NPC's something like 20-30% damage done vs drones, it needs a significant drop or the initial spawns in missions/plexes will volley the drones.

Am all for AI changes, but leave the poor drones alone. Seriously.

sleepers are not changing (read the blog again)

Also HAHHAHHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA

some of the posts are awesome! rage quits, trolls and general stupidity!!! made my day reading these.

And you even got a few half decent pages out too

2 sec....

edit:



there you go

Please fix drones first.

I welcome missions being less mind-numbingly boring but the drone UI/AI is so godawful that I've actually stopped training the last few skills I need for "perfect" drone skills and started training up gunnery skills instead.

What do I do? I mission in high sec with my friends. I would love to mission in areas where I could pvp some too, but the current paradigm of hunt or be victimized does not appeal to me. I would at this moment be a potential Target in low-sec if it didn't involve me signing up to either sit in station all night (not fun), dedicating myself to hunting someone who is going to sit in station all night (not fun for me) or being someone's fresh salvage and epeen buff boy. Instead I mostly avoid the issue by staying in an environment where I can manage my risk to my own comfort level, and just think how it would be nice to move to greener pastures if only it wasn't certain to be a waste of time and effort because I'm either in station or dead.

The problem is that style of play makes it fun for one person to completly ruin my fun, with nothing I can do about it because of the mechanics of the game. It don't have to be a 'fair' fight, I just need to have a non-zero chance of fighting back.

I highly doubt that the AI change will accomplish this on its own. For the stated goal of bringing pve and pvp closer together both playstyles will have to shift... Meaning local repair will have to be viable on ships bonuses for it, not just buffer and remote rep all day. Pve ships will need the tools to provide a fight to their pvp attackers while engaged in pve, and pvp ships will need the tools to deal with pve settings as well as their targets. Both parties must have the need to deal with the other, not one group simply be easy targets for the other.

But for the conversation at hand, this change needs to come, but it needs to come with the tools to deal with it too, which means some way of effective fleet defense, and some major changes to the very nature of drones.

This change should increase the retention of players in eve.It has been said over and over again ratting has become repeative, predictable and boring.

If the players want to do something that is repeaditve, predictable and boring. Try Mining,

So go a head loose those accounts that lost the desire to play the game. this change will keep people interested in the game longer.

People who are active in the ame provide content, those who have lost the will to enjoy the game, should leave the game for a while, train some long skills and Cohen come back with fresh eyes