PETITION: Nerf NPCs

[mjolnir]

NPC Caps : Definitely Nerfed. They were fun to fight in 4.84, when they were barely outfitted. I could ACTUALLY kill them in my bomber alone. I have to bring a human Dessie with me to help me with the missions. I remember that dessie DYING. Then I, naturally, HAULED ARSE out of there. And lost my Outcast tag.

Don't really get how they were "fun" in 4.84 when they could never down the bombers shield basically.. and it took some 40 SNs to kill the BS on patrol. They were basically just a patience test.

NPC Fighters in houses: When I'm passing through Dresden on my RepEx, I get friggin' RAPED by Wild. When I'm on my Bounty Hunter, I get friggin' RAPED by gunboats. If I happen to get on my Freelancer, I get friggin' RAPED by Nomads who now have SHIELDS.

a) Wild NPCs in Dresden are only next to Bauntzen afaik, why don't you dock? There also comes RH cruiser patrols by that kill them.

b) which gunboats are raping your BHG? the Rogue ones? Those have 140 thruster speed so it should not be a problem to evade them

NPC Gunboats: Jesus. Frakking. Christ. I was on my Bounty Hunter, combing some debris field for pirates, then I get jumped by Grayhounds and Gunboats. I barely escaped. I saw a Gunboat camping a station on my trader, and the NPCs kept getting shot down, as they were low-level patrols.

No NPCs use greyhounds, you mean Wolfhounds I guess. Don't get the second part about station.

NPC Pirates: I almost look forward and anticipate the next time I get jumped by Hessians, just so I can shoot the bastards down. My trader is only a few weeks old and already has over 150 kills on him, all Hessian/Unioner. I get jumped three or more times between stops. They aren't dangerous, just annoying.

how far are the stops apart?

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oorp loadouts

There are no NPCs with oorp loadouts.

Otherwise I'm kinda disappointed that you have to post in green text to do exactly what? Yes you write that "if you could have it like that" but don't you think it's too much?

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After some long-time testing I'd like to see the NPC top number somehow limited (so that you don't get say 14 NPCs at once). As well as the possible "respawn" time. Afaik these are set in every system separately which means it really is ton of work and system modding is done mostly by Igiss himself due to a lot of possible crashing problems.

As to the main "question" of this poll which doesn't addres any specific problems but tried to generalize. It seems that are are 2 camps here:

a) NPCs create immersion and should be dangerous

b) NPCs are nuisance limiting player interaction

If I look at it from vanilla perspective NPCs were a). Discovery added capships and big transports, so it moved more towards b) actually.

Yes it's possible to turn NPCs off completely or to turn them into useless thinks that can't move your shield.. like ever. Personally I see that as very different from vanilla freelancer experience. Any change in policy like this is made by Igiss, I can only fix "local" problems that may happen with some npcs/locations.

Right now NPCs get "turned off" rather fast as server fills up. Even with 200 people a huge part of sirius is rather empty (or with 1-2 people in the system). So everyone has an opportunity to see how is "life without NPCs". Personally I find the space extremely dead and boring then, but that's just me.

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Igiss says: Martin, you give them a finger, they bite off your arm.