Because we have ways too many NPC's in the game.
Seriously, the presence of NPC's are more than annoying.
It doesn't feel like a multiplayer game to me, whenever i arrive in a system/starport/planetary base.......all over dozens of NPC's.
Even at the engineers (harmless NPC's docking and leaving......thought the had no access to engineers, what do they do there?)
The game would be so much better if the space would populated with actually real players.
Same for the economy, it's kinda hilarious how much influence the NPC's have to the ecomony and how less influence the players have with transporting stuff etc.
While the NPC's are quite clever, they should be reduced because of the immersion. Here and there a few should be fine.
Under normal circumstances i would say, NPC's a griefing and ganking but i'm not quite sure if the definition is applied to players and NPC's equally.
I don't carry anything, they just interdict me, they attack me for no reason (they die anyway).
What is the purpose of such an high ammount of NPC's all over the place?
Had the suspicion it's something like a placeholder until more players play in Open or something like objects the PvE community play with.
But i could be wrong.
Is there anything planned to reduce them?
Thank you.
This is a really weird topic.
I always looked at NPCs as ambience and a way to fill in for players when there isn't enough of them to properly populate an instance.
Which is almost always the case as not enough people play (by a HUGE margin) to replace every NPC in the game in every possible instance.
You can see the replacing in action when you low wake into a station instance during a CG there.
During the CGs in Andhrimi all the actual ships docking I could see most of the time were players rather than NPCs and the only NPCs I could see were usually system security vessels.
Just think: if you were to turn down the number of NPCs everywhere, it would have a significant effect on almost everything in the game. Less police, less pirates in RES, less helpless trader NPCs in Anarchy systems that I can blow up for heat exchangers and heat vanes etc etc.
To replace almost every NPC Elite would need a playerbase of millions. Which as cool as that would be, its never going to be the case.
Not to mention that MANY CMDRs (myself included) don't actually want to attack or be attacked by players due to the fact it has a REAL impact on how people play.
I don't really want to kill a human trader for the materials their ship drops when they are killed as I could very well forcing a respawn back into a sidewinder if they had the poor judgement to fly without insurance and that would make me feel crappy.
Blowing up the odd NPC trader is (nearly) without consequence to the game as a whole, and does not affect players at all.
