Calm your before the mods have to come in and crush you fools for arguing.
OP has a good point and numerous people have been put into positions where they've lost everything they've worked for due to NPCs that are rightfully broken (as was evidenced yesterday in dev posts). I myself have finally come across this broken monstrosity in the form of a Cobra Mk3 last night. I was interdicted, submitted, then proceeded to fight with the Cobra. Here is what I saw:
-The cobra outmaneuvered me at every turn.
-The cobra was using a deadly accurate turreted rail gun that fired every 3 seconds from the instant it was deployed.
-The cobra had a beam laser that stripped my shields in about 4 seconds.
-The rail gun did 5% hull damage for every shot.
-The unguided missiles did 15% hull damage for every impact.
Needless to say, I didn't stick around long in my basic fit AspE and was running to jump out within two minutes of dropping out of SC. As for other broken mechanics, this Cobra then, without entering super cruise (I watched my radar closely for the "aggressive NPC" behavior) then jumped out of SC in front of me as soon as I entered normal space at the station I was going to and proceeded to follow me into the station, guns blazing, until I was able to dock and get below the pad. Of course, the station didn't engage the Cobra either despite numerous dumbfire impacts and beam hits against the station itself.
Elite: Dangerous, as it stands right now, is broken until they patch out the NPC weapons and AI issues. Yes, the new AI is a vast improvement over the old and it gives me great joy to see people complaining about not being able to solo a HAZres anymore. However, when a combat fit vulture dies to NPCs in the amount of time it takes him to deploy his weapons, with 1k+ armor and full shields, there is something very wrong with the game.
I won't even get started on how ridiculous the grind is for those of us who can only afford to put a small handful of hours towards the game during the week. I played for 3 hours in Deciat last night, started in-system after jumping there the night before, had an MA dropped off by a friend to begin the Farseer Engineer upgrading process and then went on a materials collection run around the system and a neighboring system for 3 hours and came back with not even 1 piece of material that I needed for the basic L1 thruster upgrades.
Ridiculous.
