Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I take it this means you tried to post and make CCP think you were one of the players who 'know what they're talking about"

Getting pretty close if you ask me. What 4-5 Regions and the circle will be complete? Not bad for 2 years. Or can we count BOTLORD as the final piece since you can't go in and PL+Pets can't come out.

So whats that 2 years For complete domination of Nullsec since Titan Nerf. We all know N3PL can't win. When the horn gets blown thats it.

GG CSM

You have been so broken, you can only post petty jabs against Grath, then actually come up with something to fault him.

Nobody ever said it was the sole reason. Sentry drone setups just weren't viable for large scale PVP before these changes, strengths afforded by drone assist or not. Once the changes were made drone assist is what pushed them past viability into brokenness. The choice comes down to either taking away that which made them viable and leaving a terrible game mechanic, or taking away the terrible game mechanic and leaving that which made the sentries viable.
If they had taken away the Ishtar and Dominix sentry tracking and range bonuses you can bet there would be much greater outcry against CCP. The fact is these setups were too powerful in combination with drone assist and removing it was the logical course of action. Regardless of whether the usage metrics were artificially inflated or not.

no it didn't, look at the graphs i linked from tmc.

it's quite clear sentry drones on their own, used on the appropriate ships, outclass other weapon systems. the assist mechanic has bugger all to do with the power of sentry drones. assisting drones hasn't been an issue for a decade, and it still isn't. none of the arguments put forward can be attributed to the drone assist other than the rampant whining.

drones have increased in popularity due to buffed hulls, the introduction of DDA modules, etc. to the point that, once again see graphs, sentries outdo other weapon systems.

the solution is to bring sentries in to line rather than ruin a perfectly fine and functioning game mechanic, but that's not what you were all whining about so that's not what has happened.

as for the argument of "drone assist is boring" that's laughable on many levels.

of course drones should ignore ship limitations, it's a totally different entity. it's a ship in it's own right (a very small one, but still a ship in itself). and it doesn't ignore human limitations at all. if some ****** can't hit f1 at the right time on the right target in a maelstrom, odds are they can't assign the right drones to the right people either.

yeah, it hasn't been abused. as for the potential, you're right that wasn't there because, as illustrated by the tmc article, sentry drones never outclassed other weapon systems until they buffed drone hulls and added DDAs etc. trying to attribute a sentry drone's power to a decade old mechanic than the myriad of recent additions and buffs is nonsensical.

as i've said previously this change won't reduce the desirability of sentry drones as; A) carriers are going to drop drones regardless as they're it's primary weapon system, and B) people will still use them if they are the superior weapon system.
all this change has done is negatively affected various sets of players, most notably incursion runners who they wanted to impact least (which, i believe would be solved by a bandwith cap than a drone cap if CCP insist on going down this route), and hasn't solved the issue of the field being littered with drones in big fights.

i'm not going to sit here and say "it's fine that everyone and their dog is using drones" because obviously that's absurd. however this change to assist mechanics does nothing to remedy almost any issue that drones have.

fleet warping also saves the unaligned i hear

let me guess, you typed out a long reply and the forum ate it?
i've had that before, most unpleasant.

Yeah, I was replying to you, hit "post", and the posting window came up again and I hit post again thinking it had my reply when it actually only consisted of your quote. I don't care enough to write out my reply again so I guess you win.

Didn't work.