My dad builds financial forecasting systems for billion dollar corporations for a living. What he does is really hard, and he likes it that way. That makes him valuable. He's in high demand because supply is low.

This is how I feel about dropships. If they stay how they are, people like the OP aren't going to fly them. If they were easier, you'd go into a match and see 7 dropships up in the air. Assault players are a dime a dozen, heavies are pretty easy to come by, and about half of everybody is a logi, but I'm the only assault dropship pilot for my entire alliance (my corp on its own has ~140 members). As such, when the time comes for battle, I don't have any competition. Sounds like you better HTFU or there just isn't a role for you here. Take your optional respec and go play logi like everybody else.

Thats the worst reason I-¦ve ever heard! You want the controls like they are that you are alone and have no concurrence?
If they are easier to fly more players will spec into them but there will never be more than 3-4 good pilots in a battle though. Reason 1: They are too expensive. A well fitted Dropship costs more than a well fitted tank of the same level.
Reason 2: Most will just use some Militia fittings that are easy to destroy. Many will notice this and skill into AV.
Reason 3: You would still need to train flying if you want to be effective.

@CCP Blam! could you say something about this?

I decided to try out the dropships this build since I-¦ve heard a lot of bad feedback. Well, I wasn-¦t very good in other builds too but I could at least fly then without crashing. Now I destroyed 7 of 10 dropships myself.

It-¦s very hard to keep control over the dropship if you want to fly a bit faster to avoid swarms and if you fly lower you will likely do a barrel roll and crush since it reacts too strong even with min sensitivity. You also don-¦t have much control over the engines.

You should directly control the engines in the four directions with the left stick. Thus there are maneuvers like flying diagonal possible. The engines should be turn-able up to 60-¦ to the sides and up to 40-¦ without rolling. The max angle you can roll should be about 60-¦. To the front and back they should be turn-able full 90-¦ but if turned over 45-¦ the ship should loose height. The right stick should be used to yaw and change the pitch of the nose. The camera should always point at what the nose points at so you have a better feeling what the ship does.

With this controls and physics you should be able fly faster and control the ship better then without losing too much of speed, slow movement near the ground is easier and you can fly better while selecting a module. The only downside is that you cannot move the camera alone anymore which isn-¦t such a problem as you are able to turn the ship in any direction necessary for targeting without even moving.

I also had an idea for a new feature: the ground cam.
If you are directly above the target it could be hard to select it for the repairer etc. The ground cam is a camera on the bottom of the ship that can be accessed by pressing X. Then you switch screens and the normal field of view is in a small window. In the ground cam screen you move a cross hair with the right stick to look around and select target but thus you cannot fly as well. The area directly under you should be highlighted so you can see where your passengers drop and if bombs are added where the hit. This makes you more precise for transports and bombings. Passengers should also be able to access it.

That are more newbie-friendly controls and physics but there should be the old standard controls and physics as an option too as I think some more advanced pilots wont like this setup.

Did you even read it? Even with min sensitivity it-¦s impossible to fly as a beginner. I don-¦t want that they hop in their first time and fly like a pro but they should at least be able to keep the ship in air stable. If you train this controls allow you more complex actions near the ground etc.
Also dropship pilots will see the advantage of this controls and physics if CCP adds them because you can fly more percise like a helicopter but also faster.

Let me expand on the ground cam, and general aiming camera status.

I do in fact plan on putting in a ground camera when we are able to release our Bomber variant of the dropship, and we have been playing around with ideas on whether or not we allow passengers to use modules shared by a vehicle. There's positives and negatives for both and a bit of design logistics to take care of there.

The aiming camera on the dropship is also being worked on in general. I want to enable the camera to be more responsive to players' direct input while still allowing the camera to gently and seamlessly ease back to its neutral position when no input is provided (in case you were wondering, the reason for the ease is so that players don't have to fumble by manually moving it back to the neutral position). These improvements require code fixes that I am working directly with a programmer on (alas Blam! is a Game Designer ;) )

I did read it and I believe that you need to practice more. Once you get comfortable with it, it is reasonable.

Think of it like the Jets in Battlefield 3. Sure, a new player could hop straight into one, but without understanding of how to control it, your effectiveness was sub-zero.

Keep working on it, you will get there!

ps. I like your ground cam idea. It would be neat to use that if bombs ever get added.

Well, I am currently flying them as often as I can afford one but if you skilled directly into dropships and have no other fitting at least on advanced its hard to get the money for it. I-¦ve spend 3-4 millions solely on dropships for training. This means without good modules or turrets.

Thats why I suggested new controls: If you dont have a corp behind you cant afford even to learn flying them.

The aiming camera on the dropship is also being worked on in general. I want to enable the camera to be more responsive to players' direct input while still allowing the camera to gently and seamlessly ease back to its neutral position when no input is provided (in case you were wondering, the reason for the ease is so that players don't have to fumble by manually moving it back to the neutral position).

Bumping this thread as well. Really looking forward to the additions to aerial vehicles, whether they be variations of what we have or something completely new.

Also, to those crying about losing a few or even 10 million isk to training drop ships (because its soooo hard), go try learning to fly a battleship in Eve. The learning curve in any CCP game is huge, and I wouldn't have it any other way. They are road mapping this game for years down the road, so if it takes an entire two weeks worth of isk to figure out dropships, get over it. In the long haul, that's chump change. Keep the dropships hard to fly, it makes me feel like more of a BAMF when I land in the middle of a hot LZ to extract mercs.

I'm digging the feedback here guys.

I do actually want to put in the option for RC helicopter style flight controls. There are some challenges for this though. First off, we would need to figure out how to control the gun or the look-around camera when throttle and yaw are on one stick, and roll and pitch are on another. The current idea I have is to use the old thrust up and thrust down buttons (L1 and L2) as gun/look-around camera pitch up and pitch down. This may work because the camera on its own will gradually drift back to its neutral position when no input is provided. L2 and R2 is also possible for this, but I don't find that ideal because you are mapping an up/down movement to left/right sides of a controller, and I would also have to divorce the module switch modal from its standard R2 position. So assuming we do go the L1 + L2 route, we are still faced with the next challenge.

The next challenge is that all of our control mapping settings on the development side are based on a foundational set of "commands". For example:

StickAxes rightStickUpDown AxisPower=1 Speedx=1.0 Speedy=1.0 DeadZone=0.2

rightStickUpDown allows me to provide input to pitch up and down on the right analogue stick, using the ranges -1 to +1. This then gets routed through the gun/look-around camera. This sort of command relays values as if it were taken through an analogue device, so we get values like 0, 0, 0, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, and so on when you move the analogue upwards - keep in mind the first values are zero because we've set the DeadZone to cover a margin of 0.2 degrees of control input.

The good news is that all buttons on a PS3 controller can be set to accept analogue style input, so if it it's set up, if you press a button softly, you get a smaller value than if you press it very hard. The bad news however, is that at the moment we don't have analogue input style commands that can relay information to the gun/look-around camera as only up or only down. That means I wouldn't be able to set L1 to pitch camera up, and L2 to pitch camera down. This is something I have put on the backlog and should have in place for a future deployment at which point I'll include an RC helicopter style flight control mapping.

I'm digging the feedback here guys.

I do actually want to put in the option for RC helicopter style flight controls. There are some challenges for this though. First off, we would need to figure out how to control the gun or the look-around camera when throttle and yaw are on one stick, and roll and pitch are on another. The current idea I have is to use the old thrust up and thrust down buttons (L1 and L2) as gun/look-around camera pitch up and pitch down. This may work because the camera on its own will gradually drift back to its neutral position when no input is provided. L2 and R2 is also possible for this, but I don't find that ideal because you are mapping an up/down movement to left/right sides of a controller, and I would also have to divorce the module switch modal from its standard R2 position. So assuming we do go the L1 + L2 route, we are still faced with the next challenge.

The next challenge is that all of our control mapping settings on the development side are based on a foundational set of "commands". For example:

StickAxes rightStickUpDown AxisPower=1 Speedx=1.0 Speedy=1.0 DeadZone=0.2

rightStickUpDown allows me to provide input to pitch up and down on the right analogue stick, using the ranges -1 to +1. This then gets routed through the gun/look-around camera. This sort of command relays values as if it were taken through an analogue device, so we get values like 0, 0, 0, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, and so on when you move the analogue upwards - keep in mind the first values are zero because we've set the DeadZone to cover a margin of 0.2 degrees of control input.

The good news is that all buttons on a PS3 controller can be set to accept analogue style input, so if it it's set up, if you press a button softly, you get a smaller value than if you press it very hard. The bad news however, is that at the moment we don't have analogue input style commands that can relay information to the gun/look-around camera as only up or only down. That means I wouldn't be able to set L1 to pitch camera up, and L2 to pitch camera down. This is something I have put on the backlog and should have in place for a future deployment at which point I'll include an RC helicopter style flight control mapping.

This is an amazing post. More like this.

Let me expand on the ground cam, and general aiming camera status.

I do in fact plan on putting in a ground camera when we are able to release our Bomber variant of the dropship, and we have been playing around with ideas on whether or not we allow passengers to use modules shared by a vehicle. There's positives and negatives for both and a bit of design logistics to take care of there.

The aiming camera on the dropship is also being worked on in general. I want to enable the camera to be more responsive to players' direct input while still allowing the camera to gently and seamlessly ease back to its neutral position when no input is provided (in case you were wondering, the reason for the ease is so that players don't have to fumble by manually moving it back to the neutral position). These improvements require code fixes that I am working directly with a programmer on (alas Blam! is a Game Designer ;) )

Blam, go look at some Warhawk dropship gameplay

The dropship controls in that game were flawless, and it solves a lot of the problems you're encountering.

To put it simply...the up and down is on R2/L2 (R1/L1 could work too), the x axis movements are on the left stick (move forward/back/left/right), and the turning/aiming is all on the right stick.

Also, instead of trying to combine the guns and movement into one, it's a toggle. You switch between transport mode and assault mode, depending on whether you want to use the turrets or move the dropship. You can still move while firing, but the dropship stabilizes itself to make it easier to fire on opponents.