EVE General Discussion

This is a point worth repeating, and as someone that's spent a lot of time doing solo PVP in small ships in low sec myself, I'm glad somebody here understands this. Again, some of my best fights have been in frigates in the belts of lowsec against other frigates, or even sometimes larger ships like cruisers. But you can't gate camp or station camp in a frigate, you have to hunt. And this gimps it massively.

Easy fix is for NPC's to cease all activities when player with negative standings warps in so that he may gank in peace. Once he leaves, NPC's may go about their business.

You do not have to join them to get that, just have positive standings with them, people are using that in hisec, they use an alt to shoot the mining ships, in comes a support fleet and then if they get gankers attacking them they get reps, don't really think the reps will make much difference in such ganks but it is funny and adds another variable.

This person understands the problem, and as I stated in my OP, the best course of action, I think, is to keep NPC mining fleets to corps that players cannot be a part of. That way, killing those players won't be the reason for losing standings with those mining fleets, making the consequences of your choices much more closely related to them. IE, mining response fleets are coming after me because I killed players in their corp, not because I killed their miners or response ships (which I did, but only twice, which is not enough to kill standings).

Moving that DCM to a distinct corp from player join able and keeping there function.

Would that result in everyone gets reps ?

Less you choose to farm the spawns.

Seems less interesting that way.

I've been away from eve for a while, so the AI may operate as you say, however I was not using the vexor example out of nowhere. It was my first kill after returning to the game, and I did not notice a switch in AI priority until after the Vexor went down.

I'm not fully up to speed on any changes thay may of been made to AI target priority, although it does seem that they are more likely to switch on to my drones than I remember.

Either way, what I dislike the most about this is the one-sided nature of it. If pirate AI will switch targets between players then neither player has any great advantage, fine. However (and I'm only going by what the OP has stated here, as I've yet to see it for myself), the NPC mining support fleet is very one-sided, and from what I have seen they are far more dangerous as a group than most other low sec NPC's to a solo player.

This might be a very small problem at the moment. But this is eve, as soon as people figure out how to take advantage of this on a larger scale I'd expect there to be quite a few alphas/ alts cropping up in low sec as members of DCM. Maybe a nice little boon for those who like to hunt in gangs, but does ganging up really need more encouragement ?

Like I said, I'm not much for solo hunting, so probably wouldn't be a major issue for me, but that doesn't mean I'm happy about something that I honestly feel has no place in Low sec or Null.

Yes, the AI was overhauled a year or so ago. Before it never would switch targets in which case your Vexor example would have been a good tactic. The NPC's now switching to who they deem to be the most threat has been the case for at least a year or more now.

And it isn't really balanced between the hunter and the hunted, because as a PVEr you never need to use Ewar; whereas as the hunter you have no choice but to use at least a point, and so the cards are always stacked in favour of the PVEr.

So like I said, if you want to encourage more small scale PvP without NPC interference then this issue is of higher priority than belt ratting fleets that are easily avoidable if you just manage your standings.

Thanks for the heads up, didn't check that myself. I think Brutor Tribe was the only one having that kind of issue so far (Epic arc agent, trading hub). Does this affect more corps?

This is an annoyance, because it induces no meaningful gameplay, but collateral damage. In combat, regardless where and how, you usually don't check the NPC corp of people you shoot at, and you know (whatever purpose) alts, and formerly boosters are often in NPC corps for example.

If you lost enough standing, the consequence is that you are not safe in some belts, regardless of the ship or reason you are in, because you engaged in some unrelated PvP before.

This is not a big thing (if you know about it), but hardly an intended mechanic. My proposal would be to make sure in general, that NPC corps, who are part of some important PvE or infrastructure can't host player chars. NPC corp standing shall not interfere with unrelated PvP combat.

This is not about hurting miners.

Lots of lowsec pirates are in NPC Corps and asteroid belts are common places to meet for PvP. Top belt for example has been a traditional warp to point for a 1v1 and belts in general provide a lot of active ships for PvP.

The new AI is great; and particularly in highsec, but I agree with Remiel that this has a potential to significantly impact the outcome of an engagement between players because the new NPCs are not so easily avoided and have much more substantial fleets.

There's no easy way ahead of an engagement to know the standings good or bad, of a player to an NPC mining Corp. you can know yours, but not other people in system. So this is s situation that isn't really all that predictable and if it becomes an issue, serves to reduce the areas solo pvpers can roam.

In that regard, Remiel's highlighting of it in this thread is a good thing. Hopefully CCP consider the comments as they continue to develop the new AI.

This isn't an issue of laziness. The solution of 'find another target' isn't always that simple.

Additionally, the comment about 'check their corp', how does that help at all? It's about standings to the NPC mining corps, not membership.

Roaming lowsec solo or even in a small gang of 2-3 players can result in a low rate of engagements. Sometimes less than 1 fight per hour depending on timezone. Sometimes you can roam for 2-3 hours and only come across FW plexers that don't want to fight and who warp off before an engagement (which is perfectly fine).

There's nothing that should be protected about solo pvpers at all; and at the same time, these recent changes have the potential to impact a form of pvp that many people just getting into pvp fall into (solo) and/or people who continue to enjoy the challenge of solo pvp. In that respect, it's worth looking at.