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Forgotten drones
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Wylex Cross
The Quantum Epoch
#1 - 2017-06-09 21:11:24 UTC
I was recently doing a mission in which the description detailed how a gallente scientist was working with drones and they happened to turn into what we know as rogue drones due to an accident involving their AI. And this reminded me about forgetting my own drones, which I don't any more and how others have mentioned that they do.

Would it be a good idea for some of these lost drones to become rogue drones after a certain period of time, if they are not scooped up by someone else or disappear?
grgjegb gergerg
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#2 - 2017-06-09 21:27:48 UTC
It would either be pointless, or used to grief hilariously.

I'd imagine people taking out a Nereus with a hold full of drones and a depot, and deploying and abandoning them all. Repeatedly. Sometime later, 10k drones turn rogue and kill everyone in the hisec system?
Wylex Cross
The Quantum Epoch
#3 - 2017-06-09 23:29:08 UTC
I never thought of that and so I agree.

That's probably why it won't be a reality then. I will consider this a thought experiment and nothing else. lol
Nevyn Auscent
Broke Sauce
#4 - 2017-06-09 23:37:02 UTC
grgjegb gergerg wrote:
It would either be pointless, or used to grief hilariously.

I'd imagine people taking out a Nereus with a hold full of drones and a depot, and deploying and abandoning them all. Repeatedly. Sometime later, 10k drones turn rogue and kill everyone in the hisec system?

Solution around this would be that it forms an anom, and that anom then slowly grows and starts attacking. It could also be random within a certain range where the drones end up forming their new hive.

Or we could have Rogue drone incursions where they tend towards larger numbers of abandoned drones for spawn locations, so are more likely to end up disrupting mission runners, but still somewhat random.
It's not a bad idea all up, but would need some careful controls and systems rather than an automatic result.
grgjegb gergerg
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#5 - 2017-06-10 08:17:01 UTC
I was musing on that, though, with half a mind to post.

'Cept I'm hardly a good source for sov stuff. What if players could deploy a rogue drone hive "seed" in nullsec systems? It would start off small and hard to scan, and progressively shrink the asteroid belts.

Until the belts are gone, and the hive is large enough to need a capital fleet to destroy. And the drones don't have loot or bounties: if it CAN be used to farm, it WILL be used to farm. This would just be a weapon, that goes aggressive to ANYONE, that you would try and sneak in behind enemy lines, so it spreads to an entire constellation.

The point is pissing people off and wasting their time. :D
Dior Ambraelle
University of Caille
Gallente Federation
#6 - 2017-06-10 09:28:39 UTC
I think in hi-sec this could work as a mix between incursions and sleeper drones. The the main differences are it's effects will spread to connected systems through the region and may form additional hives, and that unlike the sleeper drones, these things are aggressive.
No bounty though so you can't farm them, but as the hive grows, the drones also grow both in size and abilities like scram or web. So if you don't scan and destroy the hive, hi-sec can become really annoying both for mission runners and for PVP players.
The hive itself should probably drop loot though. T2 salvage, drone alloys, random drones, even drone chips maybe.

If you want an intelligent argument, please do, I'm up for it!

But if you want a trolling contest, I will win it by simply not participating.
Do Little
Bluenose Trading
#7 - 2017-06-10 09:51:26 UTC
We already have rogue drone anomalies throughout Empire space and the drone regions of Nullsec.

Drone Clusters, Collections, Assemblies and Gatherings in Highsec - in increasing order of difficulty. These anomalies (and others) might metastasize if they aren't cleared in a period of time and infect other areas of the system - asteroid belts, jump gates, perhaps even attack player owned structures. To me this would seem to be easier from a development perspective than making abandoned drones go rogue.
grgjegb gergerg
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#8 - 2017-06-10 22:32:50 UTC
Dior Ambraelle wrote:
I think in hi-sec this could work as a mix between incursions and sleeper drones. The the main differences are it's effects will spread to connected systems through the region and may form additional hives, and that unlike the sleeper drones, these things are aggressive.
No bounty though so you can't farm them, but as the hive grows, the drones also grow both in size and abilities like scram or web. So if you don't scan and destroy the hive, hi-sec can become really annoying both for mission runners and for PVP players.
The hive itself should probably drop loot though. T2 salvage, drone alloys, random drones, even drone chips maybe.

I was thinking more of a covert anti-PVE nullsec tool. Heck, anyone who deploys one of these, even in null, should get a permanent -20 sec status that never goes up, as an enemy of humanity in general. Self-replicating hostile AI is very likely not a good idea for humans.

And not in Empire space. At all. People would just do it on alts in the most populated hisec spaces, excessively. I don't imagine for a moment that -20 would actually stop people. Just require the deploying account to have at least... what, 50 or 100 million SP? Make sure people actually sacrifice a huge pile of SP extractors or an account that can't really operate in hisec again.
Bjorn Tyrson
Brutor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#9 - 2017-06-11 03:45:54 UTC
how do you know they don't already? where do you think all the rogue drones come from?
Donnachadh
United Allegiance of Undesirables
#10 - 2017-06-11 13:39:42 UTC
Dior Ambraelle wrote:
No bounty though so you can't farm them, but as the hive grows, the drones also grow both in size and abilities like scram or web. So if you don't scan and destroy the hive, hi-sec can become really annoying both for mission runners and for PVP players.
The hive itself should probably drop loot though. T2 salvage, drone alloys, random drones, even drone chips maybe.

No body in EvE does PvE if they cannot make ISK from it so this portion of your idea is already doomed to failure.
Make the payouts so low they are not practical to farm and no one will bother. So that raises the question what happens to these rogue drones if no one bothers to go kill them?

Make the payouts high enough that they are practical (from an ISK / hour) aspect to run when compared to the other high sec PvP options and they will be farmed.

Like all PvE make it hard enough that it is a challenge for vets like this character and it will be to difficult for the new players and the alpha clones. So will these things have a difficulty rating like missions do?
Old Pervert
Perkone
Caldari State
#11 - 2017-06-12 22:15:09 UTC
grgjegb gergerg wrote:
I was musing on that, though, with half a mind to post.

'Cept I'm hardly a good source for sov stuff. What if players could deploy a rogue drone hive "seed" in nullsec systems? It would start off small and hard to scan, and progressively shrink the asteroid belts.

Until the belts are gone, and the hive is large enough to need a capital fleet to destroy. And the drones don't have loot or bounties: if it CAN be used to farm, it WILL be used to farm. This would just be a weapon, that goes aggressive to ANYONE, that you would try and sneak in behind enemy lines, so it spreads to an entire constellation.

The point is pissing people off and wasting their time. :D



"hard to scan" is still easy. There's no time crunch scanning down a sig, unless you're roaming around null, you're camped into a dead-end, and they're trying to scan YOU down. We ended up losing someone who was doing that... tip of the hat to him, he bounced off safes whilst scanning down a wormhole to escape out of - every time we got a warp-in he was either warping off or already gone. Bugger got lucky that we hadn't rolled that hole yet.

You could drop one of these in every system in all of Eve, in any of the systems where they care about mining, they'd scan it down whether it was "hard" or not, pop it while it's small, and do their thing.
Agondray
Avenger Mercenaries
VOID Intergalactic Forces
#12 - 2017-06-15 10:16:51 UTC
grgjegb gergerg wrote:
Dior Ambraelle wrote:
I think in hi-sec this could work as a mix between incursions and sleeper drones. The the main differences are it's effects will spread to connected systems through the region and may form additional hives, and that unlike the sleeper drones, these things are aggressive.
No bounty though so you can't farm them, but as the hive grows, the drones also grow both in size and abilities like scram or web. So if you don't scan and destroy the hive, hi-sec can become really annoying both for mission runners and for PVP players.
The hive itself should probably drop loot though. T2 salvage, drone alloys, random drones, even drone chips maybe.

I was thinking more of a covert anti-PVE nullsec tool. Heck, anyone who deploys one of these, even in null, should get a permanent -20 sec status that never goes up, as an enemy of humanity in general. Self-replicating hostile AI is very likely not a good idea for humans.

And not in Empire space. At all. People would just do it on alts in the most populated hisec spaces, excessively. I don't imagine for a moment that -20 would actually stop people. Just require the deploying account to have at least... what, 50 or 100 million SP? Make sure people actually sacrifice a huge pile of SP extractors or an account that can't really operate in hisec again.


if -10 doesn't stop them from camping gates due to loop holes, -20 wont stop them either because of loop holes.

"Sarcasm is the Recourse of a weak mind." -Dr. Smith
Dark Lord Trump
Infinite Point
Pandemic Horde
#13 - 2017-06-15 10:40:08 UTC
grgjegb gergerg wrote:
I was musing on that, though, with half a mind to post.

'Cept I'm hardly a good source for sov stuff. What if players could deploy a rogue drone hive "seed" in nullsec systems? It would start off small and hard to scan, and progressively shrink the asteroid belts.

Until the belts are gone, and the hive is large enough to need a capital fleet to destroy. And the drones don't have loot or bounties: if it CAN be used to farm, it WILL be used to farm. This would just be a weapon, that goes aggressive to ANYONE, that you would try and sneak in behind enemy lines, so it spreads to an entire constellation.

The point is pissing people off and wasting their time. :D

This won't work because people don't mine the belts, they mine the anoms.

I'm going to build a big wall that will keep the Gallente out, and they're going to pay for it!