A listed change was that various authority ships would stop attacking innocent ships for no good reason, actually it was the first change listed in the Issue tracker section.
That's not what I was talking about though. I mentioned hoards of Federal Agents ganging up on any and all pirates in the instance. Those pirates certainly weren't innocent lol.
Same experience here. Years ago I just entered the hazardous resource extraction site and immdiately was faced with at least 10 large ships and a few more smaller ones attacking me. I had to be tough and to kill them fast enough to survive but I loved the challenge. Today the site is mostly empty. Even taken some cargo there is only from limited success at times. I am not pledged to any power. Playing since December 2014.
Don't remember it being quite that extreme for us, though things certainly were less forgiving back in the old days. It's been consistently much better since U18 though, plenty of combat to be had,
very few Feds. Something certainly seems to be fixed.
There's always been a roll of the dice as to whether you got a "good" RES instance or a "bad" RES instance. Reloading a RES until you got a "good" instance for a BH CG used to be regular "gameplay". So I'd take initial experiences with a pinch of salt.
Yeah, there's always been a degree of RNG. Well, not so much RNG, but a
direct difference depending on what ships you arrive in, the first person to arrives rank etc. However, I've been to this res a half-dozen or some times now, over several sessions and it's been far far better. Not always loads of high-level Pirates, sure, but I've not once had the hoards of Feds I had previously.
HazRes is plenty dangerous if mining there, as intended. It's just CMDRs think it should be a bounty hunting zone nothing more and come rolling in with max engineered corvettes not mining at all. I for one, like to mine in haz res for the modifier, if they make it any harder, no longer could I mine there.
Not really to do with what commanders might
think it should be, rather what it was once, became and is again. It was once what it said it was a
Hazardous Resource site, take you chances as there's danger there - especially for Miners. However, due to the typically large amounts of Pirates there, it was literally the PERECT casual bounty-hunting location. When it was changed to become mostly large groups of Feds, as I reported, that turned them into both easy, and somewhat pointless places for that role.
Thankfully, the issue - much to my surprise - does genuinely appear to have been sorted by U18. Over numerous visits to the same HazRes in LHS 317, there have been
very few Federal Agents and I've not seen them chasing and hunting pirates... oh, there have been plenty of Pirates too. It just feels so much more like it used to.
Of course, taking heavily engineered ships into such a location is rarely going to be a challenge. However, as I mentioned, we'd regularly take
smaller ships in there for some fun, such as Sidewinders, Eagles, Viper III's, Cobras etc. Now there are actually pirates left to hunt that haven't been wiped out by hoards of Feds, it's fun again. Additionally, when I attack ONE ship from a group, ALL of them go hostile again.
So, several things have been fixed by U18:
- Instance is not full of dozens of Feds, at the expense of other ships
- Pirates are not instantly swarmed and killed by said Feds, before the player gets a look in.
- Agro'ing ONE ship of a group, causes the entire group to go hostile once again.
I'd say those are some pretty solid fixes.