Putting cap for 50 drones is good direction, but:
- fast locking ceptor having assist of 50 sentry drones is still way OP
- fleets will go from assist to drone bunny to assist to your squad leader. ( this is still very bad )

My proposal:
- frigates/destroyers/cruisers/battle cruisers can have max 5 drones assisted.
- other ships can have 25 drones assisted with the exception for command ships that can go to 50 drone cap when fitting some new module reserved only for Command Ships.

I don't care much for drone doctrines, so personally I don't get too fuzzed about this. However, what makes me annoyed is that you seem incredibly keen on nerfing symptoms, rather than actual issues.

Letting one person control the combined drones of an entire fleet is bad. Okay, fair enough. But why oh why, is it absolutely fine for one person in the entire fleet be the prober, the fleet warper and the broadcaster of targets for the entire fleet? How is that in any way different from drone assisting, in terms of what is required of a player? Oh no, you have to shift+clik and push F1, mad skills there!

If you really wanted to make players more involved in these fights, you would put more responsibility on the individual pilot, for instance removing fleet warp and broadcasting targets, and only being able to warp/broadcast to your own wing.

I would think that changing how fleets work altogether should be the goal, to require more pilot involvement, but instead you are trying to cure underlying mechanics by putting on a bandaid on the most superficial wound. It is the exact same pattern as with the changes to supers vs. the underlying problem of sov mechanics and too easy movement of big fleets.

yes now you can press f1 every 10 min in heavy tidi... totally see how that changes the afk thing.

Response to CSM:

Before you say "adapt" try running incursions at least once in a while. We couldn't care less about how nullsec FCs command their slaves just so that big bosses get cars, apartments and enterprises IRL via RMT.

Incursion runners are so vocal in large part because we do adapt to many different aspects of the game. For example, there are PVP offshoots of many if not most longstanding communities. There are fleets to run other, less lucrative, PVE when there aren't incursions. There are players who fund their participation in nullblobs via incursions. This is, In my opinion, a case of "This change is more negative on our preferred playstyle than you think. can we suggest other things that hurt our playstyle less that also reduce the problem stated, especially since CCP said they did not want to negatively impact our playstyle?"

We'll see how many of those trials actually stay in EVE after they learn that pressing F1 in TiDi is utter bullshit.

No. No you didn't. This war is still very much on. Whats going to happen now is the CFC is going to sit and ship spin and blue ball every chance they get until eventually your pet dev's give you exactly what you've been crying for since the start of this year.

Then you'll come out and fight.

Respectfully, I have specifically addressed this in my post. It's not a valid solution.

The solution is to lower the LP cost until is correctly represents the ship's usefulness.

However, you are somewhat missing the argument here. In fact we told you point blank that the Nestor was not fit for purpose or anywhere near value for money prior to its release.

What you actually did was rush a response to a very obvious and embarrassing flop in the market.

You did not listen.

Had you listened, the Nestor may well have been a success.

But entire fleets of missiles are fine, entire fleets of Artillery are fine, entire fleets of interceptors are fine.


What you mean to say is that the 0.0 player base is so incredibly bored with the craptastic wonder that is SOV warfare that we're willing to endure what you consider 'not good gameplay' because it makes the life sucking experience of 0.0 sov fights (you know, the ones that make you all your money in the news) remotely tolerable.

My next question would be if your player base does something, in mass, who are you to decide its not good game play? Perhaps taking a look at WHY something is done that way and fixing that instead will have a greater impact than just shoving your player bases face back in the pile of donkey **** that is Sov Warfare and telling them to deal with it.


The rest of your post is just self righteous garbage. You 100% do NOT listen to your player base, most changes that hit these forums are fairly set in stone regardless of player feedback. You ignored their statements about the Nestor, and look at that thing, your ship rebalancing has largely just been shuffling slots and bonuses with zero creativity at all and despite being told what won't work (by other people that know the game) you put in changes that you are told ahead of time by massive number of people will suck. The ESS is a joke, hated from day one. Instead of meaningful change to things like POS's and SOV that your players want we get deployable crap that clutters up the grid because entire fleets now drop mobile depot's during fights. Thanks for that. I could go on for days about what you were told wasn't going to work with HAC's and how that failure played out because of what you did to t1 cruisers.

In fact, the very best ship redo you've done is the inty, and in a non shocker the main idea for that one came from, wait for it, not you or your office but a player who wasn't on the CSM.

So go on and ride your calm high horse Rise but your design changes and ideas on balance are laughably poor. You and yours knew you were breaking damps and people didn't cry about the geddon being stronger, they outright TOLD you that you were breaking the Domi. That and the CFC (you know, half the CSM) has outright stated a public goal that they will use sentry fleets with the express purpose of you nerfing them (Its on just about every player site and this one) leads one to believe that you just typed that up because you were mad a player (you know what you used to be) pointed out the **** poor job at game balance you'd been doing.

Glad we have a Dev so easily manipulated by 1/2 of the games 0.0 player base that he would interfere directly in a war on their behalf.


So this is me outright telling you Kil2 that your player base already has figured out how we'll handle drone assign going forward, the fix was simplistic in nature, and that we'll keep coming up with new ways to afk the 0.0 game until you fix it because its garbage in the worst possible way

This is the part where I go "HAHA your alliance is dying because you don't have Zagdul"

Go on. Let it sink in.

Here's our suggestion:

Stop taking balance ques that are biased because you're taking them from one side of a war who's fighting another side of a war.

Stop taking balance ques from people who are crying about one thing being broken while abusing something else thats broken.

Read your own dev blogs and know that what you've just done is exasperated the situation for drones. What does this mean?

In the recent Dev Blog about HED, it was revealed that Drones make a lot of calls to the server. They constantly think about what to shoot, whats near them, where they're going, and all that. Thats when left to their own free will.

When you assist drones you set them to "passive" so they're not trying to figure out what to shoot on their own meaning they're not thinking about all that crap and they only shoot what their told when their told.

So in that way assisted drones are less of a drag on server resources than non assisted drones. Removing drone assist will actually have a degrading effect on server performance because now fewer people will assist them and more will just manually fire drones from a single button meaning that more drones will stay active. I mean if you think that people will stop using Domis because of drone assist needing a squad commander to bear the load then Ok but you're wrong. The net effect will be hostile logistics dealing with the alpha every 4 seconds from 25 dudes instead of one.

If anything you've now forced the player base into the nightmare situation that everybody was concerned with of multiple triggers.

The over all short sightedness of the balance team is shocking but I understand your inability to even broach that subject because your side 'won' the argument in the middle of a war but if you can't see whats coming next then you're blind.


So excuse me for not pointing out what tons of people have already pointed out, and for saying that once again the balance team will do something while ignoring feed back that will have consequences down the road that they could adjust now by leaving drone assist as is and just nerfing the ships like the Domi and Ishtar which they knew they were breaking when they broke them.

Nobody has said that drone assist causes the lag, in fact if you read the dev blog its saying that its basic drone behavior that causes it as its doing all its figuring. If anything properly assisted drones reduce lag as they're not thinking as much on their own, instead they're just sitting still waiting to be told to fire.


EDIT: None of this even comes close to addressing the fact that the 'balance' team just gave every damn ship in the game a drone bay

On the topic of "killing ships," let me tell you my personal experience with every MMO that I have played.

Devs announce that scissors is being buffed and rock is being nerfed. Across the forums people are outraged. Rock is fine, nerf paper! Do not nerf Rock, that is all I have ever loved playing and I will unsubscribe if you do this! And so on.

Meanwhile in every goon guild I have joined, we adapt. Rock is old news and Scissors is the new black? Everyone get ready to run Scissors into the ground, let's exploit it for maximum fun until it, too, is inevitably nerfed.

MMOs have nerf cycles. Whine on the forums if you want; or, deal with it and fine a way to exploit the new thing. :]

1/10 your trolling needs work.

ccp have already stated they want to preserve drone assist in incursions. the bandwith option lets them do that while appeasing the nerf drone assist because sentries crowd by moving to a bandwith restriction.

now we get to see how honest ccp are.

The ACTUAL Player base (read as: not the folks parroting whatever posting criteria Martini issued) wants **** fixed. Not cans kicked down the road. CCP kicked the drone can down the road 7 years ago, and we just caught up to it. Kick it down the road again and we will just be back here complaining again..
.

No, Im expecting the developers to notice that a sub set of players set out with a specific goal of breaking a part of the game that the developers and other players considered working fine.

As would I be, if it were part of a larger drone overhaul and not the kneejerk reaction to the cries of a singular faction of EVE who stated their direct intent to abuse a mechanic until CCP's view on it changed.

Thats not good game development, it sets a bad example that shows the CFC that if they don't like a thing, they can simply go out of their way to break it until CCP cave in to their demands, and at that point, whats the point of internal development, why not just ask the CFC what they'd like to have in the game instead of calling it a sand box and allowing players any freedom?

I don't like that CCP is catering to the loudest 65K people in the game. Frankly I think it looks terrible that CCP is even contemplating a mechanic change because of this. Especially one that has no bearing on the quality of the game in any way what so ever.

There is nothing of merit to this fix, other than appeasing the 8-12 months of CFC bellyaching
(I forget when Fountain War started tbh but thats when Domis and Prophecy fleets started getting used, and the whine started.)

If Rise wanted to actually fix this, he would be looking at a way to limit drones load on the server, not who is making them attack, and I think everyone can agree that working to better server stability is a primary concern.

One side said they were setting out to break it, the other side didn't, hope that helps

There are tons of bad mechanics in EvE, really really terrible mechanics (transfer sov from one alliance to another peacefully without coming down with CTS i dare you).

There are in fact not many mechanics in EVE that would stand up to 35k dudes harping on about them, I would argue almost none would.

If the CFC magically became a 35k man mining coalition tomorrow you would instantly start to see problems in mining. This isn't about game balance, this is about one group of players going after another group of players through the developers, because if it were anything other than that the CFC would go after all the things that are bad mechanics, not just the ones their enemies use.

things like this:

http://i.imgur.com/yKWTeOg.png

Don't go very far in securing the "unbiased" dev position. TBH.

https://twitter.com/CCP_Fozzie/status/432828115857838080

Oh I read it, I just posted it for page 64 laughs and because Rise completely ignoring this thread, and having to have Fozzie come in and bail him out on twitter.

Must be awfully busy tweaking more **** in EVE that will have no impact. How many cans can one guy kick down the road at a time?

(also I doubt many people who are new to EVE following CCP on Twitter know who comes from what player corp.)

Me too =D maybe because everyone sees discussion isn't going to change anything.

Personally I think you either go all in or you don't play the game. Cherry picking one mechanic over the other seems silly. Not to mention an Anti-AFK Patch has a nice ring to it.

Maybe skip the spring patch and just hit up the summer expansion with

Anti-Afk and Drone Weapon Systems update.

although CCP would probably need to listen to the input of the player base to make it work...a dream is a dream.

Pinky Hops you be crazy. While I don't agree with GSF and a lot of stuff they, you would be hard pressed to find one other group out there that generates more content in this game.