I owe you guys a bit of an apology. I made the following post without much of an explanation as to why this was the path we were taking.
Quote:There have been numerous questions about what, if anything, we are going to do about how this change will effect certain gameplay styles outside of running missions or ratting. Things like hunting ratters, ninja salvaging, and playing content with your new friends.
For the most part our stance is that we believe you will adapt and find a way to do it. In some cases this may mean increasing the barrier to entry, but we have already seen players coming up with new ways to do the same stuff.
We do have a concern about the ability for experienced players to bring new players along with them on content. We are also looking into this. What effect any changes we make here have on those other forms of gameplay is not entirely certain yet.
One of the things we are looking at is increasing how much threat you need to generate before the NPC switch. The specific case we want to look at solving is as I said an experienced player in a Tengu bringing a new player in a Rifter along. If that new player is doing very little damage we don't want all 15 frigates to suddenly decide he needs to die.
If what ever change we make to help mitigate that effects the other gameplay styles as well, then so be it. Our stance however is that those that want to will find a way to continue doing those other activities.
The biggest question is why are we making changes to help new players play with older players (Tengu and Rifer from the example quoted) when there are probably, actually I know there are, more new players ninja salvaging.
For us EVE is a sandbox and as much as possible we should not be telling players what they can and cannot do. The best things that come from EVE are the emergent stories and gameplay. Things like ninja salvaging are not things we ever sat down and said "hey, lets make this cool new feature called ninja salvaging!" Ninja salvaging is not something we design specifically for or against.
So why are we designing specifically for the Tengu Rifter scenario? Well we aren't, not specifically. One of our design principles though is that we should as much as possible not tell our players they can't play with their friends. This is an MMO and social is a big aspect of that. We want to make sure as much as possible people can play with their friends.
On another topic the test server Duality will be open again this weekend. There have not really been any changes except stability and performance. So the NPC not shooting Ogres thing is still around.
We will be having a mass test on Monday, another post to follow.
I also want to say that I have been talking with the original designers of the level one AI and apparently shooting players or using EWAR on them should not generate threat towards the NPC. Heck using assistive modules like remote repair directly on an NPC is not supposed to generate threat. So I need to look into that and see what is going on. No promises here, I am not a programmer. I will however be trying to figure out what is going on and if it is not working as designed figure out what needs to change.