Behavior patterns suggest Thargoids territorial not immediately hostile.

[Noctover]

Hmm i dont believe in all the "We dont understand their culture and cant understand them so lets let them get away with everything under the premise that they might be fluffy on the inside". Its the sheer definition of "Ignorance is bliss".

"Your honour, punching people who get to close is fine in my culture, forgive me!".

If we trust our eyes and not our "what ifs" common sense kicks in and says their nasty little sods .

 

[Urazz]

Hmm i dont believe in all the "We dont understand their culture and cant understand them so lets let them get away with everything under the premise that they might be fluffy on the inside". Its the sheer definition of "Ignorance is bliss".

"Your honour, punching people who get to close is fine in my culture, forgive me!".

If we trust our eyes and not our "what ifs" common sense kicks in and says their nasty little sods .

It's fine in a military context actually. Military ships don't allow civilian vessels to get too close in normal circumstances without some sort of communication. So this is more understandable on the Thargoid's part but since they can't communicate with us, it looks more hostile than it could potentially be.

Now the abducting human life pods and not letting human ships that just arrived to save them is a hostile act.

 

[[VR] Frank_G]

Not likely. Since the capital ships were wiped out before we had any AX weaponry or scanners, a single Cyclops could've probably done the deed without taking so much as a scratch. Most likely, though, is that they were taken out by a group of Cyclopses. We've already had sightings of up to four at a time, so obviously they can work collectively.

I get that you desperately want there to be more of a mystery, but your need does not make it so. FDev hasn't exactly been high on creativity lately, so it's likely that this is really all there is to it.

I never play a game using meta assumptions or meta gaming at all. I dont care what FDev did or not, i only care about what i see, hear and experience in the game. I guess we have a total different approach on the topic of Thargoids. I will continue to find evidence or proof in game - regardless the outcome.

 

[Noctover]

It's fine in a military context actually. Military ships don't allow civilian vessels to get too close in normal circumstances without some sort of communication. So this is more understandable on the Thargoid's part but since they can't communicate with us, it looks more hostile than it could potentially be.

Now the abducting human life pods and not letting human ships that just arrived to save them is a hostile act.

The naysayers will tell you that they are "rescuing" them .

 

[Urazz]

The naysayers will tell you that they are "rescuing" them .

Lol. Yeah, I don't see how that argument can work when they don't like the human ships grabbing the escape pods. After all, one's own race should be better suited to rescue them than an alien race that doesn't know much about us at all really.

 

[Rox360]

Shooting me for rescuing a fellow human is hostile no matter how you look at it.

It's hostile from the human's perspective. But beyond that?

I wonder if the game's simplistic NPC behavior is turning out to be a strength when dealing with this undeniably alien lifeform, in that it's causing behavior that we can't really understand as being the result of a thought process resembling our own, but one that still has definitive patterns and underlying logic: Thargoid goes to a place to pick things up. It tries to pick up as many things as it can, but if something gets in the way, it shoots at it until it can get the thing it wants. If it has started to retrieve a thing it wants, for whatever reason, and is then interrupted, it considers the interruption a hostile act. Even if it's the result of a human trying to "rescue" an escape pod.

It could be that simple. That a Thargoid carrying out an objective, no matter why the objective was established (we can't pretend to understand why they are collecting humans, but only helpless humans) considers intentional hindrance to be hostile. Might be some sort of non-individualistic, insectoid type of thinking, the result of a hivemind that prioritizes the completion of objectives above everything else, including the lives of other species, and maybe even the lives of other members of the hive.

So by simplified space-ant logic, the timeline of what is happening right now might go something like this:

Spoiler

1. Thargoid items have been disappearing from a colony. Thargoid needs their stuff back for reasons that are probably important. Scouts are sent out to figure out where the stuff went.

PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: Find missing Thargoid items.

2. Thargoid encounters human ships. They have Thargoid items on board! (The shipping of "UAs" by NPCs has been going on since long before the first player-recorded interdiction, remember.)
3. Thargoid roars at human to drop the items. The less effort required, the better for Thargoid.
4. Human ships freak out and run away and/or open fire. If Thargoid does not act, the item will be lost.

NEW PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: Collect target item by any means necessary

5. Thargoid has successfully cracked open the ship that had its item in it, and has defended itself against any other ships that were causing it harm.
6. There's now dozens of small objects floating around in space. Thargoid can't easily tell which is which, so it systematically scans them one by one.
7. Thargoid collects the identified Thargoid items, scans the remainder to make sure nothing is left behind.
8. There are strong lifesigns in some of these boxes. They're no longer a threat, so they don't have to be killed. But...

NEW PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: Collect remaining lifeforms (Why, I have no clue, but again, they only collect humans that can no longer help themselves. That act on its own doesn't seem inherently hostile to me.)

9. Thargoid systematically scans the remainder of the objects, identifies its targets and immediately begins to collect them.
10. Objective interrupted! Something else is collecting the items that Thargoid's only purpose in life right now is to collect!

NEW PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: Collect target item by any means necessary

11. Thargoid annihilates the intervening entity. (Which unfortunately happens to be a human trying to rescue its fellow human. Oh well.)
12. All objectives completed. Thargoid jumps out to continue its search, or return the collected items to... wherever they're needed. Won't it be exciting to find out?

Practically everything we've seen of the Thargoids so far can be explained by this "thought" pattern. We have no evidence that the destroyed NPC convoys we're coming across were 1. Not carrying UAs, UPs etc (many of the NHSS instances have these floating around), 2. Did not open fire at the Thargoid or fly too close to it (many of the NHSS instances have prototype weapons, reactive armor and other military items suggesting hostile intent from the human side), or 3. Were attempting to collect items that the Thargoid had made its objective to retrieve first. If those are the only rules we need to abide by to completely avoid conflict, then I don't think it's fair to label the entire Thargoid species as being "hostile". If this is all it takes to not be shot out of the sky, ever, then they're comparatively less aggressive than most species of animal found on Earth!

But if I'm right, then... we should probably find all those UAs that we've flooding human space with and return them to the Pleaides before the Thargoids track them down... Because that would be a problem...

 

[Noctover]

It's hostile from the human's perspective. But beyond that?

See now this is the thing, we are all human, so we only have a human perspective. By this logic, no matter WHAT they do, someone can always say "They are aliens, we only have a human perspective..." and they can literally be excused for everything.

 

[EdzUp]

I'd be more than happy to chat with the Thargoids if they'd stop stealing our people and stop trying to kill me when I rescue members of my own species. I don't care what their reasons are, that's just plain rude.

we don't know if there is a shadow government group somewhere using them a's a scapegoat and getting them to pick up pods for use in shadow experiments for a future war.

 

[Archduke]

It tries to pick up as many things as it can,

There is a selection porocess. Not everything is identified as a target for 'collection'.Documentation and Records are NOT selected - this suggests that indeed the interceptors are not tasked with complexity, OR the aliens are not interested (unable to decrypt?) research or Black Box record data - something that would be of potential value to a military endeavour - OR they already have better and more reliable methods of acquiring the necessary information.I MAY BE MISTAKEN but I alsop believe I witnessed a cursory "check" of such 'unwanted' cargo - the Interceptor paused, projected its "ray" to identify the target, but then moved on to the next- At least that is what it looked like._____________________________________________________________There remains the possibility that the Thargoids are so advanced and so alien that they simply do not recognise distinctions of our technologies and are still in a learning phase - having only opportunitities for combat in the last war.

 

[Cmdr Lucca1985]

The "drivel" is out of frustration that these sorts of threads have been cropping up again and again and again because people are clinging to their own fan-fics rather than following along with the story FDev is depicting for us. It's obvious that a peaceful resolution is off the table, and will probably remain so for the duration of 2.4.

The same crap happened back when the Cyclopses first appeared. People kept saying "oh, they're not Thargoids, blah blah blah. Guess what, they are. This is the same story all over again.

http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Thargoids

Theres more going on. Its not fan fic. Its Lore.

 

[S0fa C0mmand0]

Methinks you're roleplaying a little too much...

So do you.

 

[Cmdr Lucca1985]

yes, I'm with you - I've only encountered them 3 times, but they have only deployed hardpoints after I scanned them (normal wake scanner, not got the other one yet). My experince is exactly the same as yours.

I've even scooped some of the cargo from near their ship with no detrimental effect.

There must be a way to communicate.

Makes me laugh the referebnncesa to Tharogids "protecting their territory"There's nothing to suggest whatsoever (but plenty to contradict) that these aliens are in any way native to the Pleiades. They may not even originate in the Milky Way.At best, they are interlopers as much as humanity - at worst, they are an invading menace from beyond the Virgo supercluster.I, like ALL other FP brave souls, was born in this Milky Way galaxy from an ancestral line that has always been at home here. If anyone need be territorial it is the true aboriginals of this galaxy.Stop this sympathetic nonsense and eradicate the threat now.

Have they invaded anything that was in any way rightfully ours...

Dont mistake the tone, I'm actually asking. Sticky threads a bit long

 

[S0fa C0mmand0]

The naysayers will tell you that they are "rescuing" them .

Maybe they have just been watching us? Picking up probes and artefacts. They could even be taking a human apart for a thargoid engineer. Sound familiar to what we ha e beem doing well before the interceptors came along. Maybe all those probes and artefacts death cries called them here.

 

[Archduke]

The naysayers will tell you that they are "rescuing" them .

And I say to them, how many such "recscued humans" have been returned to their families by Thargoid benefactors?_Missing persons has escalated so dramatically in recent days along with the Thargoid menace (surely no coincidence) that stations have appointed specific S&R officials to address and coordinate.

 

[Connolly91]

If you scoop a human escape pod, it will attack you.

Seems totally friendly. /s

 

[Cmdr Lucca1985]

yes, I'm with you - I've only encountered them 3 times, but they have only deployed hardpoints after I scanned them (normal wake scanner, not got the other one yet). My experince is exactly the same as yours.

I've even scooped some of the cargo from near their ship with no detrimental effect.

There must be a way to communicate.

If you scoop a human escape pod, it will attack you.

Seems totally friendly. /s

The native americans wiped out the Roanoke colony, did they deserve what came after. Theres no way with the world political and social climate the way it is some smart writer at Frontier Isnt going to pull the "They wrongly Tar all the Thargoids with a wide brush" on us. But they've said its up to us how they react. People hunt them for sport, why wouldn't the moderate side be turned extreme by that

 

[Rox360]

See now this is the thing, we are all human, so we only have a human perspective. By this logic, no matter WHAT they do, someone can always say "They are aliens, we only have a human perspective..." and they can literally be excused for everything.

It's not an excuse, it's an explanation. Did you read past the first line of my post? I'm not excusing anything. I'm determining cause and effect. If the only thing that causes a Thargoid to be hostile at us is to mess with their stuff, then if we stop messing with their stuff, we'll be fine. I'm not saying "Oh but we did a bad thing so we deserve to be shot to bits, the angry aliens are totally in the right", I'm saying that if you don't want to be shot to bits, then you should identify what causes you to be shot to bits and stop doing it. If the only condition is to stop picking up things that don't belong to us, then that's real damn easy to do. Doesn't affect human day-to-day life in the least. Surely we can swallow our pride and still our curiosity for the sake of humanity's safety.

Do you want me to apply some human perspective to compensate, maybe? To show that I'm not biased or whatever? From a human point of view, our running around and grabbing as many Thargoid items as we can, experimenting on them and trading them for profit, is an incredibly unkind thing to do. We're all thieves. We've all been thieves before we even knew who we were stealing from. Maybe it was okay then, because then it was only "scavenging", but we know now, and we still do it. Worse, these objects seem to be alive! So if you ask me to stop trying to take an alien perspective because it makes it too easy to excuse them, and instead use my human perspective, then not only are we continuing to steal things that aren't ours, we're also harming and killing innocent lifeforms for our own profit and satisfaction. We've even attacked plenty a military convoy to get at those delicious Thargoid Sensors before we learned how to reliably find them in the wild. So not only do we hold no value for Thargoid life, we don't even value human life. We take what we want no matter the cost, with no regard for anyone but ourselves, our desire for knowledge and monetary profit. We're all scum and should go to intergalactic jail for our collective crimes. That's my human feelings about all this!

No, I strongly believe that Thargoids don't have much in the way of morals, or maybe even emotions, because if they did, they would have a great excuse to commit mass genocide on our entire species by now. Fortunately, they seem to be much more objective-based than that, and all signs so far point to that they only care to fix the things we keep disrupting, and hold no grudge against us. No matter what humanity as a whole has done, an individual Thargoid does not immediately attack an individual human without provocation. They don't hate us. I don't think they care that we exist. I hope to keep it that way. It's better than the alternative.

 

[Noctover]

It's not an excuse, it's an explanation. Did you read past the first line of my post? I'm not excusing anything. I'm determining cause and effect. If the only thing that causes a Thargoid to be hostile at us is to mess with their stuff, then if we stop messing with their stuff, we'll be fine. I'm not saying "Oh but we did a bad thing so we deserve to be shot to bits, the angry aliens are totally in the right", I'm saying that if you don't want to be shot to bits, then you should identify what causes you to be shot to bits and stop doing it. If the only condition is to stop picking up things that don't belong to us, then that's real damn easy to do. Doesn't affect human day-to-day life in the least. Surely we can swallow our pride and still our curiosity for the sake of humanity's safety.

Do you want me to apply some human perspective to compensate, maybe? To show that I'm not biased or whatever? From a human point of view, our running around and grabbing as many Thargoid items as we can, experimenting on them and trading them for profit, is an incredibly unkind thing to do. We're all thieves. We've all been thieves before we even knew who we were stealing from. Maybe it was okay then, because then it was only "scavenging", but we know now, and we still do it. Worse, these objects seem to be alive! So if you ask me to stop trying to take an alien perspective because it makes it too easy to excuse them, and instead use my human perspective, then not only are we continuing to steal things that aren't ours, we're also harming and killing innocent lifeforms for our own profit and satisfaction. We've even attacked plenty a military convoy to get at those delicious Thargoid Sensors before we learned how to reliably find them in the wild. So not only do we hold no value for Thargoid life, we don't even value human life. We take what we want no matter the cost, with no regard for anyone but ourselves, our desire for knowledge and monetary profit. We're all scum and should go to intergalactic jail for our collective crimes. That's my human feelings about all this!

No, I strongly believe that Thargoids don't have much in the way of morals, or maybe even emotions, because if they did, they would have a great excuse to commit mass genocide on our entire species by now. Fortunately, they seem to be much more objective-based than that, and all signs so far point to that they only care to fix the things we keep disrupting, and hold no grudge against us. No matter what humanity as a whole has done, an individual Thargoid does not immediately attack an individual human without provocation. They don't hate us. I don't think they care that we exist. I hope to keep it that way. It's better than the alternative.

Think you took my post a bit personally but yes, i did read your entire post, and my response wasnt aimed at yourself its that the line i quoted summed up the plethora of posts currently on the forum which basically read "what if, maybe, maybe, maybe, what if what if" followed by "and that's why i believe they are are misunderstood".

We could go off on a tangent about how the human race are the only ones who hunt for sport, kill out of greed etc etc and yes i'd agree, the history of humanity is certainly nothing to be proud of but, it is a game and people are clutching at straws somewhat in a bid to look down many dark windey corridors to find a solution that matches their hopes rather than just looking through the open door .

 

[Rox360]

We could go off on a tangent about how the human race are the only ones who hunt for sport, kill out of greed etc etc and yes i'd agree, the history of humanity is certainly nothing to be proud of but, it is a game and people are clutching at straws somewhat in a bid to look down many dark windey corridors to find a solution that matches their hopes rather than just looking through the open door .

Fair enough, but this applies to both sides of the debate. I see plenty of shallow reasoning for why we should immediately go to war with the Thargoids, too.

Whether it's the behavior of an alien species, or the behavior of a system in a video game, there's logic to be found, observed and connected here, and a lot of people are too quick to jump the gun because "the aliens are doing things that, if they were human, they shouldn't be doing, so let's all get together and shoot them"

And don't worry, I don't take anything personally. I love that I can give my all in an argument like this and only be roleplaying for maybe 5% of it. The rest is a genuine belief that we can understand these gameplay systems and their ramifications and maybe even be able to use that knowledge to affect where the plot goes, if FD gives us the chance. Every time I get the chance to write a too-long rant about Thargoid science or politics on these boards, and put actual conviction into it beyond just play and make-believe, it makes me feel like I'm sitting in some interstellar council debating the future of mankind and that admittedly makes me a bit too giddy! All in good fun. We're all here to enjoy the game and everything surrounding it.

 

[Noctover]

Fair enough, but this applies to both sides of the debate. I see plenty of shallow reasoning for why we should immediately go to war with the Thargoids, too.

Whether it's the behavior of an alien species, or the behavior of a system in a video game, there's logic to be found, observed and connected here, and a lot of people are too quick to jump the gun because "the aliens are doing things that, if they were human, they shouldn't be doing, so let's all get together and shoot them"

And don't worry, I don't take anything personally. I love that I can give my all in an argument like this and only be roleplaying for maybe 5% of it. The rest is a genuine belief that we can understand these gameplay systems and their ramifications and maybe even be able to use that knowledge to affect where the plot goes, if FD gives us the chance. Every time I get the chance to write a too-long rant about Thargoid science or politics on these boards, and put actual conviction into it beyond just play and make-believe, it makes me feel like I'm sitting in some interstellar council debating the future of mankind and that admittedly makes me a bit too giddy! All in good fun. We're all here to enjoy the game and everything surrounding it.

I concur. Hopefully FD create multiple avenues for interactions, i haven't shot at one yet but will when i get chance solely because its the first challenge i think the game has had for a while. While I've no doubt the Goids have a secret reason for doing what they are doing i do believe they dont like us much; will have to see how it pans out .