Drone Avionics Bug Explained

As many are already aware, with the updates on 7/24, a bug was introduced with the Drone Avionics skill.  Overnight, many people suddenly lost one or more levels of Drone Avionics.  The single biggest consequence was that many players could no longer equip Drone Link Augmenters that they had the skills for the day before.

After much research, I think I fully understand what happened reasonably well, and thought I would make a quick post about it. 

Here is what was apparently supposed to happen:

In the Kronos release the required skill for Drone Link Augmenters was changed from Combat Drone Operation to Drone Avionics. This was done without ensuring that players who fulfilled the skill requirements of those modules would still do so after the change. In this patch we are bumping up the level of Drone Avionics for all players to the same level that they had Combat Drone Operation when we deployed Kronos. Players who have trained Drone Avionics in the meantime will be given unallocated skillpoints instead up to the amount that their skill would have been adjusted.

Unfortunately, this wasn't well conceived or tested, and what actually happened to many players is that they had a higher level of Drone Avionics, previously had a lower level of Combat Drone Operation, and got a skill gift of Drone Avionics at the lower prior Combat Drone Operation skill level.  This actually indicates two separate major errors on the part of CCP:

1. The existing level of Drone Avionics was apparently not checked to ensure it was less than the prior level of Combat Drone Operation prior to applying a skill gift.
2. The skill gift mistakenly added a second copy of Drone Avionics to affected players instead of updating or deleting the prior existing copy.  Their system design really shouldn't allow this, but apparently it does. 

This confuses the game in many places, where the game logic expects to find the skill once, but it actually exists twice.  In many cases, it seems to just pick one or the other and run with it.  In other cases, the affects are duplicated.

The affect of just picking one or the other results in the skill behaving or appearing as the one that is picked.  Examples include seeing different Drone Avionics skill level in the skills list, in the skill info retrieved via the API in tools like EveMon, and in whether or not Drone Link Augmenters can be onlined.

The affects being duplicated is a little more subtle.  One example of this is drone control range.  For those affected, they will find that their current drone control range has actually increased!  The system adds the range modification of both duplicate skills.  In my case, I had a 40km control range.  After the change, my control range was suddenly 45km.  The extra 5km comes from the GM Skill Gift Level 1 I received in Drone Avionics, which is being added to my previous Drone Avionics bonus.

I haven't seen much information out of CCP about getting this fixed, but I did come across one post in my searches which suggested the likely date for a fix will be 7/31.  A long wait for any drone ship captains.