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..

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.

Realistically the scenario mentioned doesn't have the NPC's evaluating if 2 pilots within their area of aggression are allied or not, just the amount of threat generated. So what benefits the allied new pilot in a rifter that isn't generating enough damage to trigger a switch also helps the enemy SB pilot since he isn't shooting the rats

Indeed, but the comment presented about the Rifter flying with a Tengu seems aimed at that very scenario. The Rifter is a frig so the NPC frigs should prioritize killing it but threat level evaluation prevents that (or perhaps just reduces the likelihood?) and keeps them focused on the source of the DPS threatening them. If this general idea is implemented to some degree I can't see how they would fix one without fixing the other.

I tested what would happen if I were a Thrasher pilot with evil designs on a mission runner. The frigates liked shooting the Thrasher regardless of its behavior. I could sit there at zero velocity with no modules active and they would switch to me. The frigates especially liked shooting the Thrasher if the mission runner recalled drones for a few seconds. They really liked shooting the Thrasher whenever it pointed the mission runner (that got me tackled and webbed by the NPCs). It seems like in the absence of multiple ships with similar sig radii to force it to calculate threat, the AI will just go after whatever matches the relevant sig radius without thinking about threat. So...unless the AI gets smarter about assessing threat, small things warping into missions will get shot up by frigates, be they friend or foe.

I'm not forgetting that , but rather I'm (potentially erroneously) assuming the idea is for rats to evaluate threat to them specifically. So generating a threat to a non-NPC doesn't really get their attention. I could be completely wrong there though as I'm trying to read into the idea a bit since there are no real details.

Logi's 'healing' DPS boats gain threat vs. rats... so you're way off base if you imagine PvP'ers EWar'ing other boats wouldn't gain the same massive hate spikes.

Heck, it seems you can web your own drones and gain the threat (I haven't tested this personally BTW), so it definitely is not going to assist PvP'ers at all.

At this rate of confusion and "what if's?" I foresee this whole change ending up in the trash can.

Pretty hard to please all, however if taking into consideration balancing and fairness mechanics:

NPCs AI should make them engage and shoot any pilot without standing with them that land on grid, and not only the Tengu or the purifier as described above.

By engaging just the ratter, makes too easy to gankers/tacklers which has been the current mechanics. It would be nice have new mechanics for a change.

Everything should have a risk, to both rattler and trackler.

Perhaps you didn't read the devblog, but this is the first step into making the npc AI like pvp. They want all ships to be fit the same, no more pvp/pve fits. So eventually they'll make scrams/disruptors needed for pve content. They are a long way off, which is why some of us have said they should hold off on the change until they were further along towards that goal.

I was speaking from a gameplay POV (that of the unfairness of ganking supertanked battleships in frigates) rather than from a decision-making-NPC POV. "Realism" arguments rarely have a place in MMOs.

In a realism argument, most of the DPS would stay on the battleship, but several tackler frigs would break to tackle the newcomer so they can kill him too.

One thing I really don't understand: Why does everybody here seems to think that missions (especially lvl 4 and 5 ones) or other NPC spawns should be runable in full-AFK mode?

CCP wants to make PVE content being more similar to PVP content. This is a good idea and improved NPC-AI is a good first step. Drones have their benenfits like providing you a lot of flexibility and good damage etc. however they have the weakness of being able to get popped by enemy, which frequently happens in PVP too. A way to avoid drones being popped is constantly babysitting them and making sure you engage only enemies which are close to you.

As said, this is just a first step. The logical next step is that NPC ships should simply warp out (with a chance of let say 50%) when you get them into hull if they are not disrupted/scrambled. And they should come back after some time, slightly repaired. This would make PVE content even more PVP compliant.

Hopefully pulled until we have a better UI and AI for drones.

Either man up for find an equally easy way to make your isk, mining comes to mind, but quit trying to undermine attempts to make it more difficult to milk NPC's with no challenge or risk involved. You are seriously beginning to **** off the majority of the EVE community.

Updates, patches, and expansions are pushed in MMO's all the time that are either not fully complete at the time of release or have issues that they know will have to be addressed after the rest of the expansion is in place.

This is nothing new.

Squawking about it as if they are selling you a car that doesn't run doesn't help your case. Software developement happens like this frequently, and most people are savvy enough to recognize that fact.

Not sure what to tell you? The Dev response on that front has been somewhere between "adapt or quit, we don't care" and "If you really really enjoyed it before we nerfed it, you'll find a way to enjoy it now, even though we made it harder for no good reason".

Honestly I have a hard time envisioning CCP adapting their new spaghetti code placed hodge-podge on top of their ancient spaghetti code to fix this one. I doubt they even understand the new rat AI code, considering how ham-fisted it's been implemented (see the tests run on the new AI). Also, see Malcanis's Law.