Posted: 2013.05.13 05:54 to "A desperate message to CCP, from a veteran dropship pilot"
Hi guys, let me provide you guys with provide some feedback on this topic.

1. We are looking at doing re-balancing of our AV weapons. One of the topics, which also seems to be showing through on this thread is to keep a decently long enough range on the forge gun, but also look at the damage decay variable over time on it, optimal ranges, etc. Because agreed, that it is a very potent anti-vehicle weapon and it's not exactly something that is easily countered with countermeasures (see next point). We also don't want the forge gun to be nerfed to the point of feeling ineffective, so a direct reduction of damage output across the board is not going to be the simple answer there.

2. We are also want to get countermeasures in soon, as well as a lock-on warning system for players piloting vehicles that have been locked on to. The lock-on indication will be a graduated indicator so that you will have a decent idea of how imminent your time to impact is and can choose to act accordingly. Furthermore, we're also working on porting lock-on to a certain subset of turrets. This will come in helpful for dropship pilots who are engaged in dogfights, or supporting assaults against ground units.

3. As one of our immediate tasks, we want to look at how we can provide dropship pilots with more chances to earn WP. We have lots of ideas in mind, however we need to tread carefully on this one so that we're not opening up too many opportunities for exploit. Some of the ideas that are bouncing around are providing WP for players spawned into your craft, WP for use of active scanners (possibly more specialized ones), and finding a way to re-introduce WP for remote repairs without exploit.

4. We will be reducing the ISK cost of dropships so that players can get into them more easily, while also looking at the overall skill cost of this class of vehicle.

5. Lastly, we're aware of turret issues that have come up. Many of the improvements needed will require code support to fix lingering bugs as well as further flesh out existing systems. We are currently working on this as our next set of code fixes.

On 2013.05.23 06:32 in response to "New Dropship Controls, Physics and Features"
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.

On 2013.05.23 07:07 in response to "New Dropship Controls, Physics and Features"
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 ;) )

On in response to "New Dropship Controls, Physics and Features" This scheme doesn't seem to restore control to a gun camera. Opening up control customization is a bit of a task since we need to provide a whole new menu for this, and also implement the logic to ensure that mappings that cannot work with particular actions cannot be assigned - say for example putting infantry aiming on "X". Open customization is on the roadmap as part of a future release.

We do have plans for a full dropship HUD as well as HUD updates to all other vehicles. We also have plans to do Lock-On warning indicators, countermeasures, and lock-on for a certain subset of turrets.

Posted: 2013.05.09 06:51 in "[Feedback]Risk v Reward progression for support actions needs polish."


Like I mention somewhere above, we have to do some development work on the WP system itself first to allow giving higher rewards for using better repair tools/nanite injectors, but.. we're headed there.

Also, rewards for scanning are naturally on the list of WP rewards we want to add :)

On 2013.05.08 10:00 in "Assault drophsip/all air" Thanks for the feedback Hellsatano. I'll definately take your feedback into account when looking into further adjustments on the Assault dropship aiming camera. Give it a little time and I think you'll find that it gets easier with practice.

On 2013.05.08 07:48 In "CCP or CPM: New Players and Dropships"
So about dropships and love.

First, there's a price cut in plans for them. We'd like to make them more affordable especially on the lower end to make them easier to get into. The learning curve can be pretty rough if you can't afford mistakes. Dropships also provide the kind of cooperative gameplay that we would like seeing more of.

Second, we're taking a look at the SP requirements for different paths overall and making sure that skill costs are appropriate for what you're getting. Progressing into being a dropship pilot (or something else, for that matter) should ultimately be a fun and rewarding endeavor, not a grind.

Third, we're aware that flying dropships as your job doesn't allow you to make a solid living right now. It's getting looked at. We want to give some more WP-reward love to the dropship pilots. You should be able to be the trucker of the skies without having to finance your job by doing other things in between :)