EVE General Discussion

I really don't understand why drones weren't given as much priority as ship/weapon rebalancing. Drones span every race and near every ship class - fixing the usability of drones shoulda been way more important than, say, giving the tristan two extra powergrid or completely revamping what the cyclone does.

All the other rebalancing gives me hope that a drone fix is on the way, and lets face it they don't need a rebalance they need a total rebuild. But I now have hope, with any luck winter will bring droneageddon.

Awesome! I hope you get you get allocated the project!

My wishlist for the UI is simple... simplish at least:

- ability to set Primary and Secondary group, and to bind shortcuts to launch these groups
- each drone gets assigned a number from 1-5, and you can select one or several of these by user-defined shortcuts
- when drone(s) are selected, the normal commands apply only to selected drone(s)
- launched groups needs to expand, and the returned group collapsed in the window, opposite behaviour to current!
- ability to see damage on drones in bay
- indicator when drones are targeted

These would relieve drone pilots from the dropdown menu ballet, and provide the necessary information required to control drones successfully. A lesser wish is to be able to create mixed drone groups of combat and other drones.

Keeping the window size slim is important.

Drones in general need quite a bit more than a usable UI, but I guess rebalancing and game mechanics would be handles by other teams.

Thumbs up!

Please let us script drone responses in the client.

While some settings on their behavior would be good, like "passive", "attack if attacked" or "attack nearest hostile", etc, being able to go beyond into certain conditions would be a great help and I don't imagine that this could not be server level so much that the "Oh noez the server will have to work harder and I might have a .00001 percent increased chance of not getting a KM" crowd loses the right to forum rage.


Simple drone scripting instruction on the client side like:

Engage enemies in tactical order by size/threat level(Extreme/Danger/Risky) OR Distance

Engage enemies in order of attack form: Warp scrambling me/webbing me/energy draining me/target painting me/damping me/ ... etc

Engage by ship type order frigates/battle cruisers/assault frigates/destroyers/etc


Return when: sheilds are at 20 percent (THIS would be excellent for keeping drones alive)
or
Return when: Armor reaches 10 percent ..........etc..............

We already have drones returning to the bay automatically when the ship starts initiating warp.


Yeah I know. I can hear them now: "But.... but... .this will further dumb down the game!"


No, it will reduce drone tedium and if someone's killmails depend on someone else's bad UI tedium they are lame. I would bet those who would fear such measures have a lot of rookie ships and pods on their boards.

Fact is that drone scripting is still up to the player so nothing is being done for anybody to give anybody an advantage over anybody.

It would also be great to be able to export drone action/response configurations or scripts and import them to that they can be shared for cases where a fleet doctrine requires drones to behave in a certain way. We could even fancy perhaps some of the drone behavior customization to have specific fleet directives like "protect logistics ship" or even other directives for logistical drones. Having collections of these scripts would also be handy for various situations. We could see a whole new world break out for drones and make using drones more unique and interesting.

There is hope!

Ok, I usually don't go into design methodologies on the forums but I'm in a Friday kind of mood so let's just try this together for fun.

Imagine just for a second that there are no Drones in EVE and there never was a Drone Management System.
Now imagine you are coming up with ideas for such a system..

1. User Needs - What is the single most important need this feature should fulfill?
2. Usefullness - Name one important thing you want this feature to do for your current game experience.
3. Functionality - How do you want to control this feature?
4. Inspiration - Give one example of something from a Sci-fi movie you think should be used as a reference
5. Potential - Name one good game mechanic currently existing in EVE which this feature could benefit from using

Have fun! o7

from what i understand drone ui is legacy code and being rewritten from scratch much like crimewatch was just not as complicated. more then likely the code is being first updated now and only after that can we expect improvements to 1. drone UI 2. drone usability.

As far as "how it should work," I'd only ask for two things:

(1) Remove "aggressive" mode and drone auto-attack. Drones shoot at nothing until I tell them to. When I tell them to shoot something, they shoot at it until it's dead, and they do not stop shooting it unless I tell them to shoot something else. When the thing dies, they go back to idle or orbit.

(2) NPCs do not shoot drones. Full stop. Players can still shoot them of course, but NPCs do not.

Those two changes would solve every problem you thought you were trying to solve by making NPCs shoot at drones, and they would do a better job of solving those problems than the "new AI" ever will. No auto-attack = no afk, it's as simple as that.

This would put drone users on the same footing as users of all the other primary weapon systems, and it would have the side effect of allowing you to remove a whole lot of wonky and probably hard to maintain "drone AI" code.

i like it but i prefer the bars if you need to rep a drone with armour repper for instance you need to know its armour amount etc.
Although drones need to have more distinct tanking styles more like ships which would help if T2 drones had T2 resists too match. Along with much lower sig radius so they survive long enough to be worth having bars.

Single most need: less clicks during combat.

How to control: Activate module button to attack current target, deactivate to make drones return and orbit.

While a full UI redo would be appreciated, simply adding drones as a module asap (on top of current UI) would make things 10,000% better.