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I see what you did there, and I appreciate your consideration.

Please test drone hordes with a carrier using only sentury drones and then using only fighters.

Still a drone user here...
Saw that mission once.
(Hint: it pops up fairly often as offered...)

My complaint was that you tested the easiest mission in the world for drone aggro, and were happy with the results. The AE and GE missions typically include TWO frigates in each wave.

Testing drone aggro vs. a single wave with 2 rats != testing drone aggro vs. a room full of 8+ frigates.

Sorry if my comparison was facetious, but there are vastly better places / mission to use for a more legitimate test.

//EDIT: In point of fact, I can't actually think of a less suitable place to run your test. Are there missions that include less ships per wave?

Go try the L4 version of Damsel in Distress, kill the named NPC first / then the BS wave, and focus fire everything on the pleasure dome. Assuming your Dual Domi tank can tank the resulting ships, please report back how drone aggro is managed in a target rich environment. Or the second room in either side of World's Collide... or heck, any mission currently implemented that includes more than 4 or 5 ships per wave, a la AE / GE.

I'm going to anger some people (on both sides) with what I'm about to say, and I'll apologize up front... but this is how I feel about things.

Honestly? I don't really care what tests CCP runs. We'll never see a post from any member of this particular CCP Dev team saying "Oopsie, I tested mission / plex Y twice. Once on the live servers, once on my test servers. I was shocked and saddened to learn that it was actually less fun on the test servers."

The CCP Devs, like every other working adult is working for a paycheck, and regardless of how passionate they feel about the game as a whole, they're being paid to implement a feature. And they also will know the long-term benefits of said feature. We, as customer's, are not in the same boat. Now you've made a lot of null-gamers very happy with your willingness to not make changes to features that weren't yours, and the decision not to implement your code on those towers. I think that's an excellent decision, and I applaud you for it.

On the other hand, the feature as I understand it? I do not believe it will improve my enjoyment of the game. At all. Now in the future? 18 months down the road when you guys hopefully iterate on this feature? Man, those days will be awesome. Obviously you won't share your long-term plans, but boy-howdy, we'll all be skipping down the street with those changes. Conversely I think the next 17 1/2 months will be sorta lousy while we wait with a partially implemented AI feature. I can simply point at the Incursion changes your team implemented to tell me I'm probably sorta close to the mark on this thought of mine.

Couple that with the fact that apparently we won't be able to test these shiny new features for another month (just under a month?)... Yes, let me try to contain my excitement at how low of a priority this code is to the rest of CCP.

The long and the short of most of the CCP Dev posts in this thread are, simply put, defending just how awesome those AI changes are, and just how desperately we need them... despite the fact that a decent chunk of the poster's in this thread just don't see the pay-off.

These changes won't destroy Eve, they won't be a NGE moment, they won't destroy drone boat use, they won't case 10,000,000 angry posts on the forums. Heck, my account expires in 2 days and these changes won't even cause me to cancel my account.

On the other hand? I remain unconvinced that any feature of your wonderful new AI will do anything to improve my enjoyment of the game on December 5th, nor the enjoyment of the game for any of the player's who's play-style you ARE changing. I refuse to run down the list again, I think we should all be aware of the unintended consequences of this particular change by now.

Now at the end of October / beginning of September when you finally turn the test servers on with less than 40 days of testing remaining and most of the changes are sorta literally set in stone? Well, I guess it'll be too late for our testing feedback to matter much then. But I expect we'll all do our tests and post our feedback in the hopes it gets some consideration then.



End of the month, mate

I really appreciate the amount of effort and dedication spent on this subject. It's not good to drop the efficiency of PvE activities to a level where it's becoming unprofitable, but then again it's not good to leave the system like it is and fall asleep while doing a mission.

The balance somewhere between current NPCs and Sleepers is a very good solution.

Did you try this yet ?

Really wish you guys could have held off on the devblogs about this, new ships and crimewatch if it was going to be a month before any of it could be tested. By the time it hits the test servers, half of the butt hurt players won't bother to log in to test anything, because they already feel they're being screwed, after weeks of being riled up on the forums. The people that do bother to test, will feel like their feedback is ignored, because the testing cycle will be so short at that point, that most of the features have to go in as is, and be iterated on afterwards. It's just horrendously customer unfriendly.

I was wondering how long it'd take you to figure out how to handle the Maze.. As it is today everyone I know who runs it have dedicated tanks for the station. It's the only environment in EVE as far as I know where you need a specific tank for a specific target. All other DED, anoms, missions etc you can just use your regular ship (potentially with some tweak to their tank). The Maze require a dedicated tank to be able to tank the torp, so the minute you let this thing spread it's fire.. haha, it'll be carnage. Or you want everyone to bring gimped tank-ships and slowly kill this? You'd need a fleet/blob just for that. Especially with the whatever 40 t2 frigs that can web, scramble and jam you at the same time. Other turrets should be a non-issue, same goes for stations (including final Fleet Staging esca, it's easily tanked by your regular dps ships anyway).

I'm still wondering how the hell you are thinking tho, when it comes to drones and missions. I'm not sure I'd ever set my foot in some Sansha missions without either a) bring a friend that is dedicated frig-/t2-cruiserkiller, or b) looking at setups that can fire on all sizes, i.e. Tengu, certain well-tracking ships like Mach, Vargur, Nightmare etc.

Making the AI 'smarter' is nice, but completely ******* over drone usage as a whole is not. It seems like you guys want players to be forced to use Tengus in missions, so all sizes can be killed with a single ship, but same time you are nerfing HML.. so at the end of the day killing speed will be slower, income less. Why don't you call this for what it is? An income- and drone nerf, not a boost to AI? And you also realise you flat out kill certain ships usage by these changes as well? No way I'd use a Paladin ever again in Sansha lv4 for example. The Hammerheads was the solution to t2 cruisers, now if they primary my Hammers.. no way in Hell I'd sit there pulling/redeploying them for ages when I could use another ship instead. I.e. you're pigeonholing people into using certain ships as well. For Amarr this is a real kick in the nuts, they rely on the drones vs TD'ing cruisers, in particular. And Gallente drone boats can't be too pleased either.. Ishtar/Gila will die off nearly completely in PvE, and Dominixes drop drasticly.

You must have never ever been outside of Guristas Space. The best Example is Blood Raider Naval Shipyard (CCP FoxFour, have you had time to test it yet?), but there are several others that pretty much require a dedicated tank as well.