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Thread Statistics | Show CCP posts - 20 post(s) |
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CCP Rise
C C P
C C P Alliance
3574
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Posted - 2014.02.06 14:18:00 -
[1] - Quote
Hello, some news:
Coming soon, in a Rubicon point release, we are planning to add a hard cap to the number of drones that can be assisted to a single player. Currently, we are planning to set that cap at 50.
As most of you surely know by now, drone assist has been a very hot topic over the last 6 or so months. Archons began showing the power of sentry doctrines before that, and the addition of tracking and optimal bonuses for drones on the Ishtar and Dominix catapulted this philosophy into the forefront of fleet warfare. The resulting meta is causing two major problems that we hope to address through this change.
We feel that drone assist, at a large scale, leads to passive gameplay that most players do not enjoy. Assist places too much control in the hands of a single person and leaves the majority of the fleet with little to do. note: we spent a lot of time considering the value in delegation of ship systems and navigation overall (why not have assisted turrets? why have fleet warp? etc) and while this discussion will likely continue, we feel it depends heavily on the amount of delegation taking place. Amount might refer to the time something is delegated or the importance of the system being delegated (is it a primary system or a secondary one). Moral of the story: while some cases of drone assist can be fun, large fleets based on assist are not.
Drones, for the time being, are the most taxing weapon system for our hardware, which means overall play experience has suffered some because of the popularity of sentry doctrines.
We are making this change primarily to address the first point, but also hope to have a positive effect on performance by allowing more room for other weapon systems in the fleet meta.
Why a flat cap?
We believe a flat cap will:
Limit large scale assist substantially
Leave room for smaller scale assisting (there are several use-cases for assist that we wanted to preserve, such as incursion drone managers)
Be very easy to communicate to players
Affect carriers more heavily than sub-caps (because they can field 10 drones per ship rather than 5)
This solution meets each of these points in a more effective way than any others we considered.
Why 50?
To arrive at 50 we began by starting at complete removal of assist, and worked our way back up until we had caught all the use-cases for assist that we didn't want to impact negatively. That included frigates on gates trying to catch cloakers, small fleets trying to use assist to avoid e-war, logistics pilots who are too busy to manage their drones, and most importantly, incursioners. We believe 50 will leave all these uses unharmed while also heavily discouraging large fleet use. If it turns out that fleets are still able to rely on assist easily at 50 (which we feel is unlikely) we can and will make further adjustments.
Before I go, I want to say that we've been looking at this for some time now. We've watched the discussion in the community evolve and also kept a close eye on TQ behavior. We began discussing this change with the CSM via internal forums just prior to the summit, and then spent significant time discussing it in person with them during the summit. Their feedback was valuable, as always, and gives us confidence that this is a good direction.
As always, leave your feedback and we will do our best to answer any questions. |
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CCP Rise
C C P
C C P Alliance
3577
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Posted - 2014.02.06 14:26:00 -
[2] - Quote
Omnathious Deninard wrote:Why 50? That still seems too much.
This is certainly the most common concern we ran into. As I said above, we think it's low enough. We didn't want to go lower because of the potential impact on other uses for assist, but if this doesn't work we will consider going lower at that point.
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CCP Rise
C C P
C C P Alliance
3577
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Posted - 2014.02.06 14:31:00 -
[3] - Quote
Harvey James wrote:it still makes no sense .. how a ship can control more drones than its bandwidth allows which surely makes drone assist a ridiculous mechanic does it not???
I think from a 'realism' standpoint it isn't out of the question to expect your drones to use your ships bandwidth to echo the behavior of another ship's drones.
That said, a big part of our approach to this issue was to isolate the two problems at the top. There may be more discussions related to delegation as a whole, 'realims', usability for drones in general, etc, but for now we wanted to find the best solution to this very specific problem.
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CCP Rise
C C P
C C P Alliance
3616
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Posted - 2014.02.06 14:56:00 -
[4] - Quote
Quote:Please clarify yourself here. What do you mean "if this doesn't work" ?
I can't put a number on it, but currently Dominixes are responsible for somewhere in the ballpark of 5 times the PVP damage dealt of the next most popular fleet battleship, if that's still the case in a few months this will have 'not worked'. |
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CCP Rise
C C P
C C P Alliance
3738
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Posted - 2014.02.07 11:17:00 -
[5] - Quote
Hi
I just got back to work and I haven't had time to catch up completely on this thread but I wanted to post quickly to clarify our position (which I made less clear with the bad post about Dominix damage yesterday).
The primary goal of this change is to improve play experience in large fleets. The secondary goal of improving server performance plays a part but it is not our main intention (in this change) to attack the power of the Dominix or any other ship specifically. We will measure the effect from this change with many metrics, including a lot of feedback from players, not just one ship's PVP damage.
Be back later after more reading. |
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CCP Rise
C C P
C C P Alliance
3739
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Posted - 2014.02.07 11:32:00 -
[6] - Quote
Dunhill Slims wrote:CCP Rise wrote:Hi
The primary goal of this change is to improve play experience in large fleets. Then how about redoing the Drone UI? :D
We would really like to. |
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CCP Rise
C C P
C C P Alliance
3752
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Posted - 2014.02.08 16:51:00 -
[7] - Quote
Really?
Quote:Thats what CCP does with the Features and Ideas Discussion section. Its not about discussion, its about CCP dropping some assclown change in our lap and going " ok this is it deal with it" no matter what the player base says about the change.
This is also fairly silly. We constantly make adjustments based on public feedback. Some recent examples might include most of the deployables and all of the Sisters of EVE ships.
Quote:Sentry drones haven't ever received any mechanical changes in any iteration they've done, the only thing thats changed is the Domi and the Ishtar, and yet suddenly they act like something changed in Sentry Drone mechanics to create some kind of imbalance thats being abused, which needs a change to drones, and not the catalyst that actually caused the rampant use: the Domi and Ishtar.
We aren't acting at all like something changed in Sentry mechanics. We also aren't talking about imbalance at all here. We are talking about how, partly because of changes to Domi and Ishtar, Sentries have become popular, and as a result assist has become popular. We think entire fleets of assisted drones is not good gameplay and so we are making a change to address that. I've already said multiple times that the actual power of sentries or of ships that tend to use them is separate and will be addressed, if needed, in a different way (and already has been somewhat by lowering the Dominix tracking/optimal bonus and by adding scripts to omnis).
Quote:CCP made changes, and when I say that I mean Kil2 and Fozzie made changes that they KNEW would break the game when they buffed the Domi and Damps as hard as they did. I've even been told that when warned about it all they did was smile, and now instead of owning their own retardation they're just brushing it all aside and moving on like they're not at all responsible, while at the same time completely destroying player made systems that have been around forever to cover their own ineptitude at balancing things.
The public feedback that you claim was so obviously telling us something we already knew - that the Dominix would 'break the game' - was actually mostly complaining the Dominix would be useless compared to the Armageddon. We knew the tracking/optimal bonus would be powerful but we also liked the idea of giving Gallente a fleet capable ship that used drones. We did not anticipate the server load issues but even if we had I doubt we would have scrapped the idea of letting drone users have a fleet ship.
Quote:
And instead of opening a dialouge with the players about it they ask the "CSM" which is made up largely of people fighting a group that uses sentry drones. I'm sure the feed back given was totally accurate and non biased and I'm sure that progod was very articulate in his ramblings.
We always open dialogue with players following CSM discussion which follows internal discussion. If you don't feel the CSM is valuable because of their affiliations or personal preferences then I'm sorry, but we will continue to use them as a resource. They are productive, articulate, calm, and they know a lot about EVE Online.
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CCP Rise
C C P
C C P Alliance
3752
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Posted - 2014.02.08 17:03:00 -
[8] - Quote
Quote:This seems arbitrary.
I know what you mean. Given the choice we would of course prefer to avoid 'arbitrary' caps.
In this case, there is so much benefit to a cap that we decided it was worth it. A cap is much easier to implement, in this case it's much easier to balance, and it's very simple to communicate to players. The benefit from all those things outweighed the cost of introducing something arbitrary in this case.
If we have the opportunity to to rework the user experience for drones I would expect us to look at this again and maybe find a way to avoid the arbitrary feel at that point. |
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CCP Rise
C C P
C C P Alliance
3752
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Posted - 2014.02.08 17:08:00 -
[9] - Quote
Quote:rise, are you going to increase the limit to 200 or are you going to just let it negatively impact incursion runners, contrary to your original post?
Unfortunately, we can't raise it. We wanted to have as little impact on incursions as possible, but if the cap was any higher we would probably not be able to achieve the main goal of limiting assist use in large fleets. There is a lot of pressure to lower it to 25 but we hope that 50 will get the job done, as I'm sure 25 would feel quite a bit worse for you guys. |
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CCP Rise
C C P
C C P Alliance
3753
|
Posted - 2014.02.08 17:26:00 -
[10] - Quote
Quote:We told you very squarely that the Nestor needed to change or be much cheaper, but you have refused to act.
Actually this is another example of us listening. In the same release as the assist change we are adding Nestor BPC drops to Sentient Rogue Drones to lower the price. |
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CCP Rise
C C P
C C P Alliance
3892
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Posted - 2014.03.04 16:50:00 -
[11] - Quote
Just updated the thread title - this will be shipping in 1.3 |
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