Discussion topic for post: http://www.starsonata.com/blog/calypso-update-11-3-13/

Can you make a similar device to the fighter recall for gunners that destroy missiles?

great changes, love them. but please prioritize the engineer repairable drones idea. im switched back to speed demon because i cant afford to play engineer anymore.

lost my drones during halloween, 20b down the drain and only way to earn new drones is to go back to speed demon class.
so a little expedience in that area would be freaking AWSOME!

good work though

Since Missiles and Fighters are the same thing in the code, this type of item will work on missiles as well. Missiles are non-recoverable, so it would just destroy them. I think that's exactly what you're asking for?



All of these changes are going to be released at once. Don't worry, repairable drones will make it in. The only reason you don't see it finished yet is because it's just a little bit harder to do and I've been knocking out the easier stuff first.

Calypso

sweet love those new updates

Yes that is exactly what im asking for, sometimes missiles lose lock on target and go random directions or speed off to nowhere. For mirvs its not so bad due to there low lifetime but other missiles it can be painful waiting for missiles to expire(like large ap).

Excited to see how all this plays out

Especially happy to see the zerker changes, now I can fit 4 sets of weaps on my Watt instead of 2

Ol'reliable Monday blogs, love you caly!!

I'm going to miss mfing 5 but its for the better Very exited for all these changes any eta on the zerk changes?

Have you decided how the repair system will work?

The current plan is to have drones have 'durability' like items. When a drone is destroyed (ie, dies from damage), instead of blowing up it gets a 'destroyed' graphic , has 0 durability and can no longer be deployed. It would then take credits to repair it so it can be used again. It would be expensive to repair a drone so you wouldn't want to just let them die, but it would save you the trouble of building new ones if you got in a sticky situation.

Calypso

So when you say expensive, I'm assuming the repairs would still cost less than actually buying a new drone- so essentially we are moving away from drones being semi-disposable and going for credit repairs?

Unless drones themselves are required in order to make repairs, I'd imagine the market will start to stagnate*. Have you considered combining credit repairs with a 'drone parts' style system? Players would choose to either cannibalise a drone, which produces enough 'parts' to repair X drones OR they could repair the drones for a hefty sum of credits, an example being 500m for one Armada Charge Drone. Enough to dissuade people from using credit repairs, but still a viable option (and credit sink) when there aren't any spare drones to be had.


If you're set on soley having credit repairs, it may be worth giving all repaired drones a neurobound tag.

*I say this because most drones have lower build cost than might be expected of their gear counterparts (essentially geared towards being lost) and so the effect would be more pronounced than with other content. Of course as someone who tends to sell drones more than use, I've probably got a rather biased view of the situation.

Would be tricky to make repaired drones NB since they would then have to be in a different inventory (hence hotkey) stack. Anyway, I highly doubt that would make much of a difference. Engineers don't currently sell the drones that they use; why would they sell them after repairing them? The actual thing that will affect the market (for better or for worse) is that Engineers who used to be consumers will stop consuming once they have enough drones.

It would prevent the drones from being transfered between multiple accounts (characters if they're not allowed in the TSL), and prevent their resale once something new (and better) is released.

Thus if someone wishes to use an armada charge drone on their FC or SHM, or maybe just have an entire squad spam drones, they have to buy each character a set of drones, rather than simply sharing one set between an engineer and everything else.

Resale should be fairly self explanatory- Armada charge drones are currently the premier healing drone, and when something better becomes available there will be a flood of unwanted charge drones. I know this happens with all gear, but I suspect drones would suffer from it more.