EVE Search - Concerning the drone nerf....

CCP Greyscale wrote:

Deathwing Reborn wrote:

So I have to write this all again because the forums just failed me again.

First of all Greyscale I would like to thank you for answering my hard questions on behalf of alot of people. I would however like to rebuttle some of your points here.

1. "we anticipate that a large proportion of drone ratters won't be bothering to scoop loot anyway " You do realize that ~70% (im guessing) of people in the drone regions have alt accounts for salvaging because of alloys right? I personally planned on keeping mine to salvage and loot just because that is what I am use to. If you would like for all of us to cancel our second account and leave you with who knows how many less subs, removing loot from drones is probably the fastest way to do it.

2. "so it wouldn't be a huge amount of extra stuff;" It is still "stuff" that you are not giving us the option to. You say that you are bringing Drone regions in line with the other factions in Null yet you are starting us out at a disadvantage. If creating a loot table is too time consuming or difficult then increase our bounites by say ~5%? Then at least we will have the same opprotunity for income as everyone else.

3. "This is a long-standing problem with drones that isn't really related to this issue" You just proved our point and why we are fighting so hard to make sure you do this right now. If it has taken this long and nothing has been done about these obvious flaws then we all know it won't get fixed in the future. That is why you need to take the time now that you are addressing the drone lands in order to fix these issues.

4. "which need some love, but which *are* nevertheless present" This I have two viewpoints on. One, before this patch drone faction spawns "sentiants" were 80% of the time worth 10-60k yes thats thousands not millions. They were worth LESS than a normal drone battleship unless they dropped capacitor consoles. Two, at least now they will have a static isk value set to them that will at least make them worth more than a normal battleship But what about the 100+million mods that other regions get? We still get nothing but parts for drones which we have to make that are worth mabe 1 million a peice.

5."The sec status changes aren't a re-randomization" Thank you so much for clarifing but I just want to clarify a bit more. So for sake of argument lets look at Cobalt edge that didnt change. So if I had a -1 system today after the patch it will remain -1 and in other regions if I had a -1 system it might be a -8 or some other relevant number that was scaled "upwards". This is how I read it but we have all been worrying that our -1 system might become a -0.1 system after the patch and viseversa for a -0.1 becoming a -0.9 or something.

I just want to thank you again Greyscale for finally answering the hard questions even though you still need to look at changing your plans in my and many others opinions. My post was more thought out and better written but the forums ate my post so I had to rewrite so I appologize.

In order:

- We'd very much *like* for everyone to keep their extra accounts subscribed, but we *expect* that many people will decide that it's not worth the effort of dual-boxing for ratting/anoms once their targets have bounties. That's just a consequence of the bulk of the wealth no longer being tied up in alloys.

- I agree that we're talking about 5-10% income at best, and again we're still of the opinion that this is probably balanced out nicely by the generally superior truesec values Smile

- I take the point that things sometimes take a long time to come to pass, but we're still not seeing that the loot issue is something that really needs addressing. We'd rather spend the time it'd take to add a bunch of loot tables fixing something else more pressing with the rogue drone.

- We totally agree that the drone commanders aren't worth what they should be, but again that's an old issue that's not directly impacted by these changes.

- Let me explain it this way: if you order all the sites in a given region today by sec value, they should (I think) keep that order after the change. This plus the image in the blog should let you ballpark the shifts you're likely to see. The changes are on Singularity if you want to look them up - system sec should be listed in the system tooltip so you can check the whole thing out from the map view.