Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I will go first.

We currently know that pirates can shoot, use ewar including webs and scrams, remote and locally repair, approach, orbit, and occasionally warp off.
I think that warping behaviour is exclusive to some of Sansha’s Nation incursion rats and some belt rats.
There are no drones, which I assume is due to the additional server load of all those extra ‘ships’ in space.
There are no smartbombs.
There are no bubbles.
I have never done incursion HQs so I don’t know how pirate capitals behave or if there is anything lacking there.

When engaged with a capsuleer, pirates do not spiral in.
When fighting a smaller ship, they do not attempt to lower transversal, other than from trying to pull distance and activate any available webs.
when fighting a ship with short range guns fitted, brawler type rats do not attempt to kite in far falloff. They will try to stay at their optimals, which may not be ideal in terms of damage dealt/damage taken. (clearly some of these observations are a little more significant than others)

When it comes to group behaviour, pirates have very very little.
They will aggress targets in a group, focussing fire usually. They have logistics occasionally.
however:

At no point do they decide as a group that the fight is unwinnable, and scatter.
As a side note, I have heard objections to this behaviour before.
In regular missions of course this would be a PITA, but I am not necessarily restricting these pirate activities to missions or belt ratting or the like. In fact such legacy rats should be the last to receive these behaviours as it might disrupt people’s livelihoods a little too much at first. Nobody wants to have to brawl and facetank every rat in the complex.

Pirates never actively warp around the system, they are quiescent in their home grid until a player comes along to shoot at.

Pirates never scan down players, and I feel this would help spice things up a little.
Yes this would nerf 10-account afk mining operations. but once again, this behaviour need not apply to all rats. it could begin in wormhole space, where the most vigilance of all is required anyway.

There is no cohesion in pirate fleets, they do not orbit an anchor, or stick within logi range (is there a limit on pirate logi range?)

There are no pirate fleet boosts. If there were, perhaps we would finally have to do something other than orbit the pirate ball at range and shoot them. perhaps the booster could stay on the far side of the pirate pack, forcing us to go closer in order to kill it.


Anyways i am tired so this will do for now.

If you are still reading, and any good at programming, I would like an estimate of how we could go about facilitating better pirate assessing of capsuleer ships/fleets in order to decide how to engage and when to scatter.
I have my ideas about how to make rat scans happen, but would value some ideas there too.

I approve of this message.
The NPCs really do need to be more difficult. Roaming pirate fleets sounds like an interesting idea.

Problem with this behavior is that missions would need to be rebalanced or the isk/hour would go to hell as much as it already hasn't.

I don't run missions (except for standings sometimes) but if rats started killing drones first every time and all that it would soon become more expensive than it's worth.

Two words..... Cap warfare

I think we all know they key difference is the lack of smack in local.

The purpose of the Thin Client was to allow CCP to test internally with many many pilots logged in without having to run many, many physical machines to do it.

Check this thread out. <-- This is a bump, sorry for confusement (recieved questions IG).

Thanks mate! Although I seem to be late to the party from the look of the other two NPC fleet posts. they were end of March and April this year.

And Randy, thanks for the link, it was good food for thought. Looks like this is a clone thread a little bit after all, sorry guys :/

I still feel that the programming options and also limitations of these various suggestions should be discussed in more detail in order to give CCP devs something to go on, and perhaps increase the chance of implementation. It would also help us identify the most feasible upgrades and push for them to be uploaded to the AI first.


I saw some arguments in some one of the other threads so I might go through them here.
And yes I am aware that writing them myself like this is a little strawman-ish, so feel free to defend these points from me if you like.

Point 1) Roaming NPC fleets = no more gate camps, destroying a valuable and important Eve sand castle.
Answer: Basically I can't deny that this is true. However, I never liked gate camping in lowsec. It is safe and boring, basically farming easy kills. If you're going to gank, you should hunt the mark down yourself, not wait for them to fall into your lap. I know of people that actually watch movies while camping, as if they were mining. And their steadily increasing ISK efficiency will have nothing to do with their actual fighting abilities.
One of the reasons I rarely go out into lowsec by myself is because it takes so much damn time to set up.
You need OOC eyes to light the way and watch for camps, apparently, or risk losing your ship.
I barely ever see people actually travel solo with cruisers. The only roams I go on, there is typically at least a +1.
That sort of stuff is an entry requirement that damages the casual playability of lowsec, especially roams from high through low.


Point 2) EVE is a MMO sandbox for player generated content only, blah blah blah.
Answer:For you, maybe.

I just wonder where the hell you think ISK comes from . Even if you mine, or sell PLEX, or whatever, you're selling your spoils for ISK that someone else got from PvE. Off the top of my head I'm pretty sure every ISK ever made came from bounties on pirates, mission rewards, and Incursion fountains.
There was this one choice character that romanticised himself and his fellow 'elite pvpers' by saying that they are the ones making all the content and otherwise running the show. His prose was so flowery i want to put him in a pot.
There are a lot of people heavily invested in PvE play, which basically means NPCs or asteroids.
NPCs add to the immersion of the game, and good AI helps make them believable, and more challenging, which stops it being such a chore to take them on.
One more point about PVP content being everything in eve.
I can't help but note the similarity in distribution of PvE activity and active pilots. Everyone always says highsec is where all the players are.
Perhaps the reason nullsec is largely deserted is because people feel so lonely out there :)