Jumping isn't as great or easy as you might be led to believe. (Let me first state that I jump out of dropships whenever convenient.)

The first difficulty is figuring out where you are and whether or not you want to jump. You can't really see and nothing helps for that (unless the doors on the dropship pop open- then I can see)

After that, you still aren't sure where you'll land because of a little thing called momentum. Once I was flung out at a wide angle directly in front of a red LAV. Funfun.

Jumping isn't as great or easy as you might be led to believe. (Let me first state that I jump out of dropships whenever convenient.)

The first difficulty is figuring out where you are and whether or not you want to jump. You can't really see and nothing helps for that (unless the doors on the dropship pop open- then I can see)

After that, you still aren't sure where you'll land because of a little thing called momentum. Once I was flung out at a wide angle directly in front of a red LAV. Funfun.

dont be a ***** gtfo his drop ship and fight

I'm sure if your flight patterns were a bit less erratic, you would find people plunging more frequently.

Do you hover over highly contested areas or stay in high, largely irrelevant areas of the map - for fear of losing your ship?

The dropship is now the laughing stock of the battle field, no guns to defend it with and now trying to use it for its intended purposes is a bigger joke.

I have the same problems with randoms not jumping out, ill give it to them that they have no idea where we are in the sky but the two people on my starter blared turrets should finally figure out that I'm not slowing down to hover, so that all the swarms can crash into me at once.

So I fly around the map with the viper and cru which only cost 86,000 isk and I'm completely useless, I haven't even thought about fielding a Myron cause why should I waste the isk. So I fly around attracting swarms trying to learn there new tracking system until they fix the DSs again.

Hate to bring up battlefield right now, but why not set it up so that anyone on the team can spawn inside the dropships just like battlefied? Also, eventually people are going to realize that staying inside the dropship is a death sentence, and then they'll start dropping out like they should.

If they are worried about balance, why not make the whole team CRU's require an advanced skill? That way you can still do squad only drops, or skill up and drop the whole team.

They can defend themselves just fine. I was firing at one with a prototype small railgun (barely dented the shields) and it killed me very quickly.

I have used the dropships as transports for taking letters quite a few times. I would love them to work well in that role, but right now, they don't.

Apart from the problems people have pointed above, dropships face 2 other very important problems when trying to act as attack transports:




1. The small size of the squads.

2. Related to 1, if the passengers are randoms, the other problem is the inability of the pilot to talk or signal in any way to those passengers when to jump. The intersquad coms system is still to clumsy and underdeveloped to allow any fast communications between different squads.

And this is a big problem, since the only person that really know when is the right moment to jump is the pilot.




Those problems don't exist in corp battles, but are very big obstacles in pub matches. If your squad is good enough you can get away with it. I mean, I know that if I drop Ofelia GAC and a couple of others heavies in a letter, they will probably take it. But most of the times my squad won't be enough to take a letter against 2 vs 1 odds or so.


Even worst, if you use a CRU to get randoms in your dropship, you'll probably end scattering your team all over the place. Since they can't talk to you, and probably they can't even talk between themselves, they wont coordinate and will jump one by one in different places, so they will end being isolated, disoriented and easy prey.



So right now, if you want to use your dropship as a transport in pub matches, do it only if you can communicate with your squad, and don't equip a CRU. Otherwise, I think you are damaging your team more than helping it.


Corp matches are a completely different story, of course.




Possible solutions could be either of the following:

1. Bigger squads. (My favourite )

2. A button to forcefully eject your passengers. Probably not because the potential for griefing is so great. (Hot drop in the red zone )

3. A message or/and a light that all the passengers could see/hear when they are in the dropship. Like when the pilot pressed square, that made green lights start flashing in the cabin while a loud voice can be heard saying "JUMP!, JUMP!, JUMP!"

Possible solutions could be either of the following:

1. Bigger squads. (My favourite )

2. A button to forcefully eject your passengers. Probably not because the potential for griefing is so great. (Hot drop in the red zone )

3. A message or/and a light that all the passengers could see/hear when they are in the dropship. Like when the pilot pressed square, that made green lights start flashing in the cabin while a loud voice can be heard saying "JUMP!, JUMP!, JUMP!"

The whole team can use the mCRU.

well in public matches i prefer this method now:
dropship full?
nobody jumping out?
well then im forced to jump out of the pilot seat and leave those poor souls on their own. Who ever reaches the pilot seat will survive.