CCP rise posted the following piece at the EVE-O forums,
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.
With limiting drone assist to only 50 drones max to a person, this will allow things like carrier ratting with alts to still be easy (If you use more than one carrier on more than one account that you own) and incursions will still be easy for drone assists, be it logistics drones or damage drones. The biggest change to the game is the effects it will have on nullsec pvp, most notably Dominix fleets and the known slowcat fleets.
Sure, these fleets will still be extremely viable, but FCs will have to work harder to consolidate drones to work in sync like they currently do. With these changes, a Subcap trigger for a Dominix fleet, will only be able to control drones from ten Domixies. While a trigger for slowcats will only be able to control drones from five Archons. What FCs would need to learn to do, would be to have multiple triggers work in sync, follow broadcasts, and get each of them maxed on assisted drones. On paper this sounds easy, but when you’re in fleets of 250 people, getting people to assist drones to the right person can be difficult.
Will this be the end of the drone heavy Dominix fleets in favour of things like Foxcats or TFI fleets? Archon fleets will still be useful regardless of the drone assist change, due to their value as logistics ships. Regardless, only time will tell on how big nullsec entities will adjust to these changes, whether it be new doctrines, or a different method to assigning drones, only time will tell.
Feel free to discuss your thoughts on these changes below!
