Player Features and Ideas Discussion

While rat aggro can be annoying, I find it questionable that the NPC aggro is the reason for your distress if you're hunting Ishtars in a solo stealth bomber.

I also don't have an issue with NPC aggro, although I'd figure the NPC's would generally prioritize heavy dps ships over warp scramblers.

And hear we have the basics of the issue, he wants the rats to be able to do a lot of the damage to the target for him while he moves around totally free of any damage other than that the target may send his way. This change to the NPC AI was one of the best things that CCP ever did to balance the game between gankers and their targets. Now both ganker and target must be able to tank the damage if they want to stay around, heck they may even need to shoot rats so they can stay in the pocket. I would say this is working as intended.

yes, NPC switching targets in pvp encounters was a very bad change and should be reverted by CCP soon.


Ratter has intel channels, his alliance/corp buddies, the local channel on his side, so he really shouldn't
have the NPCs protecting him as well, he's mass murdering for hours/days/weeks/months/years. If he's still getting
caught despite of all those aids he deserves to loose his ship.

btw. hunting ratters is everything but risk free.


Retribution NPC AI change removed stealth bombers as ratter hunting vessels.
Surely, ratters rejoiced, since you now require a heavier ship for same thing as you need to tank the ratter + NPC,
which is in turn a lot easier to bait or catch in a gate camp consequently meaning more safety for ratters in 0.0 regions.


lmao
I guess you never tried to roam 0.0, did you?
There is no time to wait, as a neutral appears in local, most will be warping to station or POS if not even much earlier.

actually i remember this being the stated reason for it. you could keep agro on something the rats couldn't hit under the right circumstances.

There have been an awful lot of "side effects" the past few years that, just by sheer accident, had a rather positive use for carebears. Don't kid yourself, when CCP said/says "we want more subscribers" what they forgot to add is "so we'll adapt the game to the biggest player pool; the carebears".



Yes, they will of course openly state to their hardcore customers that they're changing focus. Marketing speak has always been 100% honest and open about a company's motivation.

at least they ignored peoples feedback on the announced changes.
I too, among others, voiced those exact concerns about pvp aspects of the game being severely affected - but noone listened, so it must've been intentional, or CCP make those feedback threads for troll or sheer politeness.

The Sleeper AI does not distinguish between different players, it treats all players ships on grid equally. It assesses the threat for every new ship on grid and acts accordingly. If you would put a condition like:

"if player ship is aggressing NPC & another ship is shooting the aggressing ship then do not attack that ship"

that would be highly exploitable - fit a civilian gun on your logistics and never get NPC aggro. A multiple set of conditions that would basically check for "outgoing damage on ship > outgoing buffs on ship" would need constant loop checking and it would heavily load the servers.

So this is not a secret CCP plot to help carebears and changing how the NPC AI behaves would mean changing the entire code and this will not happen any time soon.

LOL

The sleeper AI sees ewar as a threat. The pvper must use a disruptor, the ratter uses no ewar (well usually, i guess npcers using tps may be at a disadvantage). This means the NPCs will always see the pvper as a threat over the ratter, despite the fact the warp disruption provides no actual threat to the npcs. I have never ever attacked a ratter and not had the npcs switch. Even when you can avoid their damage their ewar will ruin the fight most times, getting in a jam or neuting a point off so the ratter can bail.

If it wasn't a stealth CCP plot they would simply have excluded warp disruption from the threat matrix and/or toned down the new threat switch (which is dumb in any case).

I suspect some ccp dev got his navypoc killed by a hound one day and threw a hissy fit.

It's actually a very simple coding change. New ships to grid start at 0 threat (they don't appear to currently), and hostile modules activated only generate threat if they are directed at an NPC target (friendly modules, like remote repairs and cap transfers, still generate threat as normal). PvP actions instantly are threat-free.

I mean, if you're going from the standpoint of what was stated in the dev blog:

"When an encounter starts, the NPC will individually evaluate what is known of the opponent and target the appropriate opponent. As the fight evolves, the NPC will watch what players are doing and, based on several criteria, will decide if some or all of the NPCs should change their targets."

If you were fighting a hostile force, and another force jumped in and started attacking your enemy, you would not immediately swap targets and start attacking the new force. It's absolute tactical lunacy. Better to let them hash it out, and then kill whichever side wins, if necessary.

Now, I could see it being the case that once your gank target dies, the pirates proactively engage you, since capsuleers tend to slaughter them en masse, but they shouldn't, from a tactical standpoint, attack you unless you make a threatening gesture at them first. Attacking their target shouldn't generate threat.

you didnt think about the chance he hasnt seen him on local yet?
Believe me, I've missed millions of kills while slowboating toward the bear cloaked as he realized me in local and warped off. This is a common situation.



whatever AI implementation it is, its obviously trash if its protecting the ratter, doesnt compute at all; after it killed a whole aspect of stealth bomber pvp. From me, plexers might use tank ships and farm plexes, they adopted anyways and keep doing it in a slightly different manner, doesnt make much of a difference from pve point of view.