NPC's are getting....

[ed_philips38]

I'll no doubt get flamed for saying this, but what the hell, I may not be coming back anyway.

The way I see it from the Vanilla version was that piracy / nomads etc were rampant, the whole point of the preset missions was a/ a storyline, b/ to trigger certain elements of the game, one of which was to reduce the spawning of NPCs. ( to quote Quintaine "This will cut them down to a more manageable size" )

4 is more than sufficient and the time between spawns of NPCs should, in my opinion, only occur AFTER the initial 4 ships have been destroyed, assuming one does so, or extend the time between spawns appearing, say 60 - 90 seconds, and also take away that grossly annoying CD.

EDIT: Forgot to add, NPCs are more for SP purposes, they allow a single player to be a pirate, ie: pirating NPCs is the only way to be one.