So far in our testing this change has not hurt either of those two groups.

Drone users:
I flew a Dominix into Angel Extravaganza, I began with taking aggro, then I launched light drones to kill off the frigates. While my light drones were out the frigates switched their fire to them, but I dispatched them quickly enough that it was of no concern. Then I switched to heavies and moved on. The whole mission maybe took me a few minutes longer, but based on how long the overall mission took it was not that much of a change. I didn't lose a drone through out it either. So if our "nerf" to drone users is that they have to pay more attention to the game and interact with it, well we can live with that.

Fleets:
I ran a mission dual boxing a logi ship and a DPS ship. My DPS ship carried some logi drones, and my logi ship carried DPS drones. I had to pay some more attention to what was going on, but my logi ship had enough buffer to survive every encounter when paired with a few logi drones. The nice thing is that because the logi ship did not need to run its reps the whole mission, as my DPS ship was not always the target, I could change the fit to be less cap stable and add more buffer/resistance.

Both of these groups will have to change and adapt to the new gameplay, but so long as they put a bit of effort into they can more than easily come up with a new plan that works just as well.

There have been numerous questions about what, if anything, we are going to do about how this change will effect certain gameplay styles outside of running missions or ratting. Things like hunting ratters, ninja salvaging, and playing content with your new friends.

For the most part our stance is that we believe you will adapt and find a way to do it. In some cases this may mean increasing the barrier to entry, but we have already seen players coming up with new ways to do the same stuff.

We do have a concern about the ability for experienced players to bring new players along with them on content. We are also looking into this. What effect any changes we make here have on those other forms of gameplay is not entirely certain yet.

One of the things we are looking at is increasing how much threat you need to generate before the NPC switch. The specific case we want to look at solving is as I said an experienced player in a Tengu bringing a new player in a Rifter along. If that new player is doing very little damage we don't want all 15 frigates to suddenly decide he needs to die.

If what ever change we make to help mitigate that effects the other gameplay styles as well, then so be it. Our stance however is that those that want to will find a way to continue doing those other activities.