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.
.

rip 2000 drones shooting all at once.
rip going afk during a fleetfight.

oh no now i actually have to play eve ;_;

thanks ccp

There should be a hard cap on your posting, as in you should not be able to post..

Go back to hisec and mine veldspar.

banned for the blobbing exploit

Good change. PVP should require more individual or organizational skill, not less.

yes lets ignore conventional logic and reason to introduce a bad mechanic. 2008 era ccp would probably hire you as a game designer

So unless I'm one of the 4 triage carriers in a full subcap fleet (or I'm suicide Triage to save some Supercaps) my Archon has no reason to ever enter combat again.

I understand the reasons behind breaking drone assist, but there needs to be a replacement mechanic. Maybe some changes to Fighters to make them actually useful would keep Carriers relevant.

capships and supercaps are in line for tiercide, i think there's pretty widespread agreement the whole group needs to be looked at as a whole

[quote=1Of9]Tell PL to give you mercenary roleplayers some posting lessons please. It never took any "balls" for anyone ever to post on the internet as a fake mercenary corporation in a spaceship game that was never actually paid to do anything.

lowsec here. we still won't be able to use it, will we.

N3, PL *and* Dinsdale tears? It's like Christmas came early in 2014.

ccp caves to goons, goons can't win without ccp's interv- oh wait, we kind of did.

I fully agree on that topic, but Tidi, at a large scale, also leads to passive gameplay that most players do not enjoy.
If your main concern about drone assist is passive gameplay - then the actual priority should be fixing tidi.

I think most entities in large scale sov warfare will find drone combat dull and stupid but cycling guns every 15 minutes for a straight 12 hours ain't no adrenaline rush either....

I can't even decipher this gibberish but your illusions about how CCP works made it through and it's apparent you're still rolling strong from the BDCI school of ignorance. Maybe make some fake internet mercenary coins about it or post a few pages about how confused you are about whether you're a human being or a girl in an internet space game to get it out of your system.

:edit: I don't even care what corp you're in that 's how I roll

Anyway, we beat that doctrine by dropping all the capitals on it. Which unfortunately was the only real counter. Now you have to contend with 600+ dreads being dropped on you every time you undock. Good times.

A very convenient sov-drop due to a "glitch" says you didn't

Looks like carriers have been relegated to having no place in sov war besides repping.

With one section of eve having such overwhelming subcap superiority, you have managed to create the greatest push towards NAP and NIPing everyone in sight (including your previous enemies), what with one side being massively more powerful but content to sit upon their hoard and sleep, and the other side unable to contest the mass of warm bodies in subcaps that the other side can throw around.

All celebrate the Hegemony of the North, next Deklein sov change inc 2027.


It's all and well to make changes to mechanics based on how you feel they are negatively impacting the game, but this mechanic was one of the main mechanics preventing the state of nullsec from devolving to everyone turtling up. A will still wipe the floor with B, B will do the same to the C, and everyone will sit on their throne of renters and grow fat.

And nullsec complacency and boredom are imo, far more dangerous in the long term to eve than a passive gameplay mechanic.

God damn Goons! Ruining parts of the game I don't have anything to do with since I mine veld in Empire!

It's not a matter of cost, but possibility. CCP is already using the best servers money can buy. The "next gen" server platforms just haven't come out yet.

One squad of 10 ships = 50 drones.

[quote=BoomBoss]Three regions, at least, and that's assuming you don't fail cascade over getting your big shiny toys taken away. But lets not quibble, the important thing to remember is that N3 is terrible at EVE.

Good change. A carrier without a triage module should be as worthless as a dread without siege.

It does. Drones get used for their perfect alpha ability, with that gone there in no reason for literally everyone to be flying some flavour of drone boat and bogging down the grid so much that you could swim in a sea of drones.

I absolutely recommend training for t2 sentries. They're still excellent.

Resetting the goalposts while you're backpedaling so fast must be awkward.

T3 have yet to be teircided.

Teircide will not be finished until all ships have seen it.

We will touch every ship, and we will continue adjusting every ship over and over again.

Balancing isn't a project with an end. Tiericide was a specific subgoal within the balancing project that we finished last summer.

None of this is new information, we've said it before and we'll say it again.

Well no solution is 100.00% perfect mate, that's the nature of compromises. We did our best to cause the minimum damage to gameplay modes that weren't a problem. In this case the damage is pretty trivial. I doubt anyone on the CSM or at CCP is going to lose much sleep over the hideous torment inflicted by this change on the helpless innocent incursions community.

At least it actually lets ME pilot my ship and lets ME play the game I pay for Instead of SOMEONE ELSE. Whatever lets me do more with my ship then some Trigger handling I am for. Think about how much LESS tidi there will be and how many MORE ACTIVE players you can cram into a systems, put into these large Epic fights now before Tidi kicks in. the system to handle these fights has been greatly improved, lets keep items that break it out of it.

TL;DR: we are now happy that drone assist is gone so we can have 8k player looking at black screens over 4k.

STATION GAMES

maybe you should keep up with the times and realize that we disemboweled your wrecking ball fleet and are now taking regions uncontested

^ This.

Well, yeah, actually. The fact that Drone assist is completely unbalanced is kinda the point. Do try and keep up.

any "counter" to the blob will ultimately become the blob hope this helps

Maybe if you want to beat us you should actually diversify and use cunning, strategy, deception, diplomacy, etc. instead of being ****-lords who rely on a single broken mechanic.

Obviously its time to cap standings lists and then cap alliance membership numbers and then just artificially cap things in the sand box until we get it in the position that we want it, we of course not being the players who are creating the content but the developers who have proven over the years that they absolutely do NOT know whats best as anybody at the company who's shown an iota of creativity or forward thinking has been shuffled off by Hiltermar or let slip away.


I can surely support this point of view Andski, lets do it.

We would really like to.

Hahahaha are you for real.

CCP fix the fighters on carriers so they do dmg to other capitals and buff it

Is the 50-drone limit along established drone capacity and bandwidth limits for ship class? I suggest using a drone capacity/bandwidth-based number versus right out using a 50-drone limit:
50 x 25 m3 = 1250 m3

1250 m3 Drone Assist Bandwidth. Yes?

Why wouldn't it?

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 very thread is a perfect example of that.

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.


It is in effect you shooting somebody with a gun and me ignoring you and trying to blame it all on the gun.

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.

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.

The end result is the developers doing exactly what you're telling the player base they shouldn't:

i mean it was taxing enough to juggle the HP of my fighter bombers, the cycling of my reps on the titans next to me, continuously resetting my fighter bombers to keep them applying damage, and the fps monitor to ensure that my client was actually working

being an incursion runner must be hard

if you haven't noticed i'm calling you out on your BS about your life as an incursion runner being so hard because oh no CCP lapsed in their constant coddling of players that don't even pay their own subscriptions because as it turns out they have to occasionally act with
other interests in mind than yours

i can turn that around and ask why 0.0 players, who are routinely responsible for the content that matters and attracts new players, should be penalized because CCP doesn't wish to trivially inconvenience the farming subset of the playerbase?

also goddamn your assumption that incursion runners are the "majority" screams entitlement and i am quite sure that more players regularly partake in 0.0 warfare than in incursion running

small post from me to even out the retardedness in this thread ATLEAST a little bit:

Pretty much all 14 of the CSM were in favor of a drone assign nerf for OBVIOUS gameplay reasons, there were only a few differences in how the nerf should look like. In the end, CCP decided to go with a hard cap of 50. It might not be the prettiest option, but exceptions are never pretty. Why they went with it? You can read that in goddamn post #1 and it makes sense. If someone could link me the post explaining the particular problem with Incursions and the hardcap, I would be thankful as I am not interested into reading through of 40 pages of uselessness.

Almost nobody used sentries for PvP 2+ years ago with their current stats because of their obvious disadvantages. Drone Damage Amplifiers got released - some ships became somewhat useful, especially shield tanked drone ships like the Gila. Slowcats were possible all the time, but the concept was underdeveloped like most fleet concepts are in their first stage. Then the Dominix change came. We even had a goddamn entire tournament centered around this change and how it causes problems, I can't figure out why everyone is bringing this up again and again ESPECIALLY after 6+ months even though this problem like multiple others (DAMPS, BOMBERS etc.) are known to CCP, the CSM and pretty much all players for a long time already. Do I want those changes quickly? Sure I do, especially when 1-2 things are no-brainers for me. If you're playing for some time already, you know that CCP devs take their time for changes, it will be no different here and I have no clue why anyone thinks it would be different.

But hey, stay classy guys. Based on dev reactions I am sure ranting about drones and other stuff in the ESS and other threads is surely gonna work out well for everyone and will speed up the process, lmao.

It seems that changing the limit based on the types of drones being controlled, while certainly more complicated to implement, would preserve this use-case while addressing the problem with massed sentry drones that needs fixing. Is it really that much more complicated to implement?

yes with the fantastic tracking of XL turrets i'm sure this will work great against anything smaller than battleships

I wholeheartedly agree with this. BPC drops won't do anything to change the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the Nestor. There seems to be a fair amount of hubris present, and I don't know why it's so difficult to just acknowledge that the Nestor has been a colossal failure, redesign it for something useful and move on.

I mean 300 man archon fleets were pretty routine in 2004

Yes the 50 drone limit applies to guarding or assisting, they are counted together. For example, you cannot have 50 guarding and 50 assisting, however you could have 25 and 25.

I tend to wait for the little orange Draft Saved box to appear, then click that. I've given up hoping that the web devs have a clue in regards to web tech. This forum has to be one of the worse ones I use and that's saying something.

You mean fix fighters fix tracking so that sentries weren't the go to drone (this can be broken down into sub categories but we'll condense it) fix the drone UI so it wasn't garbage fix the drone behavior so they didn't go skynet fix the drone coding so it didn't pour gas on the server and flick matches at it fix ec 300s so that they weren't broken and dumb fix other ewar drones so they were useful to carry just to name a few off the top of my head.

If there was an overall patch for drones then this wouldn't be such a one sided thing

Grath has repeatedly assured me that this change won't affect the "FoTM" at all.

I waited 60 pages, to see if the noise would settle out, wrote a blog post while I was waiting.

Look, the difference between Incursions assist and slowcat is the incursion pilots are still really active in the fleet, not going off to make a sandwich. THAT is why I argue that some drone assist needs to stay.

Other options were considered and the hard cap was what was settled on so I ask this of you forum pundits.

What will happen next?

Will drone usage change in null?

Will Incursion fleets end because they cannot maker the ball o doom?

Will the intended outcomes be achieved or do you even agree what the intended outcomes are?

I can assure you this was NOT a kneejerk reaction to any recent battle in the past month so drop that garbage now.

m

I guess that's why they'd also begun using supers in their carrier fleets, using them as logi, leaving the carriers' only job to deploying drones, assisting them to the trigger and rubbing out a few for the next few hours.

looks like there is zero room for adjustment

might as well give up now

There are counter-mods available, and balancing anything by isk value is dumb. "hi I'm more expensive than you I shall be impervious to whatever you do".

How did they break it? Serious question, I know they said they would set out to show how broken it is blah blah blah, but what did they actually do aside from use it?