Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This is a suggestion with considerable balance implications, but I think it will improve the game.

Presently pirate NPCs act according to NBSI and aggressively prioritize targets using nondamaging hostile modules (warp scramblers, ECM, etc).

I propose that they remain NBSI, but that they prioritize targets that are actively using hostile modules on them first, targets that have locked or are locking them second, and targets that have not attempted to lock them last.

Most importantly this would mean that, if a ratter/incursion runner is shooting rats and is attacked by a player, the rats would not (almost always) immediately switch aggro when a warp scrambler was activated.

Ask yourself which targets your alliance prefers to shoot,

The easy, unprepared and soft targets that cant tank you for long?

Or the hard tanking, resisting your specific damage type hunters that have specifically come for you and are more than prepared?

Rats are more like NPSI aren't they? - belt rats don't care if True Creations/True Power* has you blue.

*Of course Serpentis belt rats wouldn't - but they also don't care if the Serpentis corporation has you blue...

Because it's EVE where people would rather get an easy kill than no kill at all. For all we know, your "target" this newcomer is keeping on grid might of been holding against your best effort for a few minutes without even flinching so in good EVE player mentality, they go for the squishy one because they want a kill mail out of losing their damn fleet.

-1 to a really bad idea.

Let's use mission runners as an example here. In the past the rats would agro a mission runner and then the gankers warp in knowing that the rats would not touch them. CCP wisely choose to modify this behavior and make the rats neutral, shooting everything and anything that is in their targeting and firing range, and now you want to take it back to that terribly unbalanced thing of the past. To borrow a line from a movie my kids liked when they were little "bad idea I said, bad idea".

You want to try and gank someone that is fighting the rats, tank up and go for it they have to tank the rats and you, or they have to tank the rats while fighting you it is only fair in these situations that the rats are equal opportunity haters and shoot everything forcing you to tank up to handle the punishment as well.

As a mission runner here is a little tip, if you don't want the rats to primary you be the hardest tanking ship in the pocket because as others have said they usually go after the squishiest targets first.