Suggestion+poll: NPC wars

[Timmy]

Croft, you say why NPC annoy people, not why this idea is bad. NPCs annoy people because they appear anywhere, any time (especially when they're there) and bother everyone. That's how they are implemented into the game right now.

What I suggested is make sort of mini events where NPCs from both fighting factions spawn at some specific time in the same, known area. This way people who want to have fights in space, but are forced to hope that they will have allies or enemies are not forced to bother with this any more. They have both allies and enemies in the form of NPCs. From this point the only thing that is required is some work on the NPCs themselfs, to ballance them between being challenging force, but not too deadly for player who joined such thing.

Of all downsides to this idea I can see only one - server maintenence. I dunno how server can handle spawn of two huge NPC groups, but it can be implemented as a sort of medium NPC spawn with some time for their respawns.

Edit: There is another thing I've thought about, and that is the possibility that you can not make such thing without changing NPCs that spawn randomly across all systems. If someone might have an answer to that, please tell.

So what exactly is bad in that idea, that I might have missed?

[Croft]

NPC's annoy people, your idea is using NPC's to try and get folks to fight each other. It's not a hard leap to understand that using something annoying in an effort to generate activity is somewhat counter productive.

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Jimmy The Rat | Croft's Feedback | The Rat Pack

[Timmy]

NPCs are annoying, yes. But what's the problem about changing that? If you play only for RP, I can see why you won't even like this idea. But, seriously, it have been proven that RP people are not majority of this community. Were not at very least.

My idea is to make NPCs not annoying. My idea is to make NPCs actually attractive things for combat part of the game. And I also don't think that you've noticed that part, no one forces you to participate in such thing. So what harm will it do specificaly to you?

[Croft]

So RP'ers aren't a majority on an RP server? You don't think that might be the core issue with the server's slow decline?

Your idea is just to throw a glorified NPC patrol fight which as I mentioned previously happens already and has no effect on folks starting fights. Why would people want to fight NPC's? Where's the pull to get people to log on to the server?

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Jimmy The Rat | Croft's Feedback | The Rat Pack

[Timmy]

You are actually not reading anywhere further then NPC part. Currently hate towards NPCs comes not because it's NPCs. It comes because they are everywhere, and either too annoying for lone players or not satisfying for several players. I suggested to fix all of previously mentioned issues. But you still insist that it's the bad idea, basing it on "because it's NPCs".

Also, no, I don't think that RP community are a vital thing to this server. How did I come to this conclusion? PvP have been getting beating in recent patches constantly, in attempt to make RP look better. And the player count still dropped. You know why? Because RP haven't improved because of this. It either remained the same, or degraded to something unbelievable at some places. Thus, people that were interested in good faction fights left. Guys who were interested in quality RP left too. Remained people who think that RP is chatting with people, or people who are good enough to not feel the beating PvP got too much. Ah ye, forgot to mention. People who have just joined and had no taste what so ever of what it was previously. But these people usually play in Liberty as you should know who. Infamous Liberty indies.

RP, as you said, is something that comes from the players. But if there is no players, you can not do it. And you can not keep people interested with just RP either. They need more then that to play the game. And that more is not only player interactions either.

Edit: Got another example for you, why RP is not the biggest thing that makes people want to play. Official factions are all about RP. Are they popular? I definitely did not notice that.

[Croft]

You don't think RP is vital to an entire community and server based around RPing? Did you not noticed the huge section designated Roleplay? Or perhaps the "RP" in the server name? The fact that we have special ROLEPLAY requests?

At this point you're just pulling facts out of the air to make your idea seem more reasonable which means you're just doing this for attention or possibly out of pure refusal to accept that your idea simply wouldn't work.

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Jimmy The Rat | Croft's Feedback | The Rat Pack

[Timmy]

So my facts are bad, how about yours? Oh, there aren't any... Well, let's look at more obvious facts. How many players play every evening. Err.. about 50. How many of them are actually RPing? You can just look at their movements and already say that barely even half of them doing it. So... Comunity that exists only around RP is about 1/8 of community that used to play in this game, while it had something else to do except of RP. Seriously, I can not think of any more easier explanation, especially considering that you don't bring any facts, just thoughts into it.

Also, what exactly do you unerstand by RP?

[Yber]

If you remove the missiles and razors from those NPCs, sure. Adding some sort of base capture point thing to force official factions to participate would also be okay.

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inb4 Sirius gets renamed to XTF.

[Timmy]

Missiles, totally. That's just horrifying thought to have them on NPCs. Base capture point... I think devs attempted that but then ceased at some point, dunno why. I mean that thing they did with Westphalia back in days of Liberty/Rheinland wars.

[Epo]

So RP'ers aren't a majority on an RP server? You don't think that might be the core issue with the server's slow decline?

Your idea is just to throw a glorified NPC patrol fight which as I mentioned previously happens already and has no effect on folks starting fights. Why would people want to fight NPC's? Where's the pull to get people to log on to the server?

You won't gain activity just by RP, as you can see already. People won't stay in FL just to write a few sentences and those NPC encounters per some days would be pretty much what we're looking for