Missions & Complexes

Lately I have noticed that when I have been in Incursion fleets I recieve more than my fair share of aggro from the Sansha. I can nearly guarentee that whenever my fleet blitz's an OTA by the time we are onto the third Deltole I will be red boxed by everything on grid.

This also happens in a high precentage of the Assault sites we are in, to such an extent it is becoming a running joke with our logi crew that they only need to lock and rep me.

I am attempting to work out what triggers this amount of regular Sansha love. I fly a mildly pimped Machariel (faction gyro's) and the rest of the fleet is made up of pretty much equally (or more so) fitted Machariel's, Vindicators and Nightmare's.

Has anyone any idea what drives the Sansha aggro selection ?

Active gang links seem to work like a magnet, too.

Go look up sleeper agro mechanics.
I'd be willing to be it works exactly the same.

As a Basilisk pilot, I found it was very easy to get aggro on me by simply providing remote sensor boosting to fleet mates. The only people who pulled aggro off that were the Bhaalgorn with the neuts, and the Scorpion with ECM.

Being the highest effective(meaning damage applied) damage dealer grands you a very high probability to get the agro(my NM/Pala are like bullet magnets in OTAs or Assaults). Even in Legion only fleets you see the damage focused on 2-3 ships most of the time, exactly this ships where the people are extra quick in changing scripts and ammo and carry a extra T2 locus or damage rig to squeeze the last little bit of range and dps out of her setup. If you fly a high DPS ship and fly this one well, you will end up with lots of agro, there is no way around it(except having more than enough other ships that are just as good/better at it).

Flying something shiny or weak tanks has nothing to do with it, as least based around what I have seen during the last few hundred sites and I flown logi a lot. A bad fitted mach or vindi will next to never get the agro, while a typical "2 Invus is enough" puls gank Abaddon can give you quite a headache sometimes.

As for logis, ECCM was a good module to draw lots of agro and fitted mostly for this reason, since logis are easier to RR it made the job so much easier, however CCP changed the mechanic a bit at some point where it stoped to work this way(sadly). RR / RSBs / RTCs don't help much with agro, since scimitars and the oneriros, even with 2-3 of this mods nearly never get agro(like once during 2h) if you have 1-2 basis/guardians on the field so it is probably total remote rep applied. You will recognize this to a extreme amount if you fly in a 5+1 T2 rep setup in a basilisk with a single L4 scimi as logi buddy you will have like 100% of the logi agro(I did for like 2 hours non stop). It can't be the cap chain, since I didn't notice any big changes cap chaining with other BS.

ECM was also very good at pulling agro, but I'm not sure if it still works.

The highest applied damage on the target gives you the wreck ownership, it doesn't just work this way for gangs during contests but also on the pilot per pilot level, I have seen 70%+ white wrecks after logging back from a disconnect in my NM in a NMC once(yeah it was kind of a random fleet, but still not a bad indicator for overall efficiency of a proper used gank fit).

There are npc AI attributes in the eve data dump that are named enough to give you a hint on how they target :P