EVE Information Portal

To be honest I am not familiar with this site and will have to test it.

It'll be the one to reduce the session change time, when you jump, by keeping all the pilot details separate, rather than torn down, the brought back up.

This should not really make them that much harder to kill, actually it is not changing their tank or DPS at all. So killing time should not change.

Sounds really interesting and will definitely try this out. Also, I don't think there's any massive issue when playing together with newer players.

Over the last few months I've ran missions with lots of new pilots, many who just jumped into their first cruiser.

Sure, we usually kept the aggro on the Battleships and Battlecruisers, but even then, it sometime happened they targeted the "li'l buddy". But then? He can just warp off and return (or try to tank the damage).

IMO these changes are even an advantage for such occassions: It should now be even less likely for fresh spawning Battlecruisers/Battleships to immeditely target and try to pop that poor guy that wanted to have a look at Level 4 missions with his Frigate or Cruiser.

---

Different Question:
Could you use this AI iteration to improve the behavior of NPC Industrials a bit? I'm talking about the usual Personnel Transporters in some missions. I always feel it's rather dumb to see them charging player ships, rather than trying to stay away. They can't outrun players anyway, so this would be a nice addition and it would look less suicidal. :)

This is why I keep subscribing to Eve Online - it's the constant improvements.

AI is a really important aspect of gameplay.

The more interesting the AI is the better.

Why? IMO what makes Sleepers and (Incursion) Sansha more dangerous than the usual pirates are their stats: Speed, Health and Damage. That's nothing touched by just switching the underlying AI, considering most people run missions solo or in small groups only anyway. It might screw up people flying AFK drone boats, but at the same time it's something you shouldn't do anyway (why pay to play a game, when you don't even play then?).

I'll start manufacturing all the ravens that will die to this, tho probably drones should be more valuable haha.

I personally like the idea and support this a lot, it will be a game changer for something that has become static and plain repetitive.

Some suggestion: Please please please tell your people to make a shortcut to launch drones, and that is!

I think the logistic pilots and drones will have to look out for themselves now, while solo players or spider tankers will be a new approach!

Pretty cool.

I'm presuming the NPC rat AI as it is currently has been this way since time immemorial, right? If so, I guess it would be reasonable to assume that all missions, complexes and anoms since then have been designed by Devs based around the way NPCs have always worked.

With the new NPC AI templates for these everyday NPCs, are you guys going to keep in mind the possibility that a specific mission, complex or anom's "reasonableness" might be drastically altered beyond the what's intended because of its specific layout or NPC size grouping?

I like these changes, just from a design standpoint I'm presuming that current dungeon difficulty is based on current NPC behavior... and now this is going to take that design flow and reverse... something which usually brings highly unintended side effects.

/T

Shift+R recalls drones... I do agree though that system needs some work. We will be keeping an eye on the income generated from L4 missions as we do have graphs and statistics for this. :)

This sounds both hilarious, and superb. It's been a long time coming...

I know you don't have time, at the moment, to tweak individual missions, but when you do... Please look at making spawn-triggers less predictable.