Too much NPCs

[LuckyOne]

And why shouldn't they happen there? What is so intrinsically bad about having a big fight in a planet's orbit? The owners of the planet and their friendlies already have the benefit of being able to dock to escape a blue message. They already know that reinforcements will be able to undock straight away. The pulse weapons flying from stations and docking rings are already a significant advantage. Why do we need super strength NPCs there too? All that does is take the difficult and foolhardy and make them intractable, and at times, even impossible.

Because it takes out immersion if a pirate can just walk up with his loaded cruiser to the most guarded place in the House and start shooting without any consequence. It's the equivalent of me driving a tank into the White House and demanding to "duel" the President. Same thing for Navy to walk into a pirate stronghold.

The strength of NPCs reinforces our ideas about the power projection of factions, and the disparity between small, usually unlawful factions, and large, usually lawful factions has been on an upward climb since I first played Discovery. This disparity is not just a lore thing, it's a gameplay thing too. And we as a community love to call it "realistic" when being a law-abiding citizen or a kickass Navy ace is the easy mode and being a dirty, scummy criminal on the run is hard mode. But this "realism" only comes from the assumption that lawful factions are omnipresent and omnipotent, or nearly so.

This seems to me more like a perception / faction balance problem. Of course players will flock to the "easy mode" when alternative is

• slow grind with bad trade routes
  
• always being out-gunned because lawfuls have easier access to caps due to first point
  
• can't really do anything as an unlawful to change the state of the game. Shoot a lawful ? He'll just respawn in an hour and be back to hunt me. At least if I play lawful and stop a smuggler / pirate I can be happy I saved some poor soul getting robbed / denied the smuggler his credits.
  

As things are, there's no reason for lawful players to patrol, that is, seek targets for interaction, if all of their stations and planets are strongholds. The role of establishing system security that they could be playing is obviated by NPC gunboat patrols with CDs and full-power weapons. High-level VHFs that are able to swarm and overwhelm even well-equipped player vessels. Why bother to go even sweeping the trade lanes when any threats can get sweeped up or scared off by an NPC patrol? Why bother going out to engage anything when you can wait for a distress call and go out to drag the fight to the nearest base for the support of its defenses? These may be "realistic" actions, but they don't produce interesting gameplay.

(Never mind the hard counter to smuggling that is "sit at the sellpoint with /nodock and a cruise disruptor ready, but that's another thread. Nevertheless, it is an expression of the belief that lawful powers have, or should have, infallible security technology.)

But that has more to do with the planets and stations being indestructible and smugglers being actually a bit hard to locate / catch? Why would I patrol anywhere when I can just wait for the smugglers / pirates to come to me to sell or gank. If anything the players should actually be taking advantage of NPCs disrupting players as a force multiplier / diversion so they can pirate / smuggle easier... Agreed on the smuggling point, but that's a discussion for another time

Furthermore, the role of pirates and terrorists actually being able to antagonize lawful installations is taken away. In the vanilla campaign, we see a flight of Bloodhounds harassing Pueblo, and damaging it severely. Nowadays it's almost considered suicidal (and often OoRP, by some players) for a pirate (in a much better ship than a Bloodhound, mind you) to be anywhere near a lawful-aligned object that isn't just a trade lane ring.

Same as above, no point in "harassing" a lawful installation when you can't actually do anything to it. Ok, maybe a POB, but POBs currently are a little more than private garages for rich players.

There are fewer ways for unlawfuls to force an interaction because of the NPC concentration near lawful installations, and the only reason this is the case is because so many people believe that's the way it should be. But why should pirates and smugglers in lawful zones (or in your reverse case, lawful traders or navy scouts in lawless zones) need to assume not only all of the player and topological risks and consequences, but be subject to harassment by NPCs as well?

When players are present, their power projection is felt. When they are absent, they have left a hole. NPCs do not have to fill that hole.

Where you see harassment, I see immersion. Though in principle I'd agree the trade lanes should be less guarded, but the current NPC trade lane patrols are usually more annoyance than danger.


Anyway perhaps the devs should look into alternative solutions. It's a stretch but IIRC when you start a mission everything but the mission objectives turn neutral to you. If you could tie that into a console command you could "pause" the NPCs annoying you during interactions.

Another option could be to duplicate all factions into "neutral" version so they only respond to hostilities when engaged (maybe you can add cargo scanning back to them to activate the hostile mode if a player is smuggling). But as I seem to remember there is a faction number limit ?