Lost Greybeard
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Posted - 2010.06.21 21:28:00 -
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I see a lot on the forums about improving 'rat AI to be something closer to what Sleepers are now, and NPC enemy AI in general, but haven't seen any suggestions for better use of 'friendly' NPCs. I also see a lot of complaints from miners about macros, and from PVPers about people (especially AFK/macro miners) being able to hide indefinitely in NPC corps, etc.
So, why use an existing tool (CONCORD) to fix some of the other issues in the game, or at least make them behave like they've more than two brain cells?
To deal with macro mining, have patrol ships arrive at random intervals (a poisson distribution is what I've been suggesting) in asteroid belts, and flash what is effectively a captcha at ships in the area? If there's no response in 5 minutes, have them flag the ship as unregistered (i.e. a criminal) and let high-sec pirates take care of the rest.
And to make gate-camping less of a foregone conclusion in low-sec, how about another 'patrol' pattern making the potential of CONCORD intervention extant (albeit scaling down the chance a patrol is passing through with security level). Make them an environmental hazard that has to be dodged.
And why don't they ever show up in missions? I feel they're kind of being underutilized from a plot standpoint as well. The only non-hostile NPC ships I ever encounter are either just sitting there (epic arc questgiver in the SoE epic, CONCORD) or a wreck (rescue missions, etc). I'd kind of like to feel that NPCs... do things sometimes. Even seeing CONCORD zapping the rats in the belts when I'm exploring would improve immersion.
(I'm aware that high-sec is not really a priority and we love our player dependence. I just feel like the fact that there are billions of people on thousands of planets doing their own thing is an extremely neglected aspect of EVE background. It's like the few thousand PCs on at a given time are the only beings in the universe and the rest only exist in context of us... which is true, but a disconcerting feeling, like someone wrote "this is a game" on a baseball bat and is repeatedly striking me over the head with it.)
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