Yes, it beggars belief, but as I said earlier, but possibly elsewhere in this forum, it was a change put in to appease crybabies who didn't like encountering NPC's tehy could ROFLstomp. This goes back to the early days of Elite; grab a cup of coffee, this is going to be a relatively long post, but one worth reading
Back in the days from elite versions 1.0 to 2.1, the NPC AI routine a bug where they would slow to 0m/s but do a stationary barrel roll, like a hog on a rotissiere, or more like a sitting duck just waiting to get shot to smitherenes. This enabled ANYONE to "farm" NPC's and "grind" combat elite. A year and a bit into the game we had all these "Elite" CMDR's, many of whom couldn't really win a fight against anything more potent than a collector limpet. When a new update, 2.1 the engineers, brought with it a new AI that didnt stationary barrel roll like a hog on a rotissierre for CMDR's to shoot at, which was also capable of decent tactical manouevring, and those NPC's with the new AI also came with upgraded mildly engineered ships. It was carnage, and a lot of fun, but a lot of the CMDR's who'd artificially inflated their combat rank were soon overwhelmed, and the forums flooded with a tsunami of tears from the, erm, cry babies.
As a bit of a red herring there was also a bug where NPC's loadouts were pick and mixing weapons attributes, like there was a video of an NPC shooting a multicannon with plasma accelerator projectiles and damage. There was also a video of a cutter getting shredded from full shields to gone in 7 seconds, with a beam laser, which upon investigation by FDev was discovered that it was firing a rail gun shot with every singe frame of the game. So 60FPS = 60 rail gun shots a second - ouch. Eventually after FDev got to the bottom of this NPC pick'n'mix bug, but still the not really elite guys were getting hosed and crying on the forums. So Frontier made a decision to "address those concerns", or cave to the teers, and put two controls in place. Firstly they altered the games engine to scale the spawning NPC's of the same rank as the player, so noharmless sidewinder would get mullered by a deadly NPC FDL. Scondly they allowed plaers to contact support to have their combat ranks demoted to allow them to cope. Thirdly, but not officially announced, there was a downwards revision to the abilities of the NPC's and also of their ships capabilities.
The sum of those controls means that nowadays with a decent combat rank, and a decent ship, all you are ever going to see is harassing you is elite ranked Condas & FDL's harassing you. And if we are totally honest about it, that is all we are ever likely to see now. Sure, it doesn't make my game unplayable as I can handle myself in game, but it does get a bit tiresome / incredulous that out of 400 billion stars, 100,000+ of whcih are colonised, of which there are trillions of occupants, and only the elite of which want to come after little old me. Personally, were I designing those changes back in 2.X, I'd have not directly linked, or
matched the scale of NPC to player, but
capped it at player's ability + ships performance + a percentage. I'd have skewed the spawn algorithm so that higher rank NPC's were rarer, and in that same algorithm, I'd also have given them access to higher grade midified modules and weapons, and kept the higher ranks AI sharp, and elite would be as sharp as Sarah Jane Avery (Mistress of Minions) could make. The result would be a humdrum galaxy where even the weepiest of crybabies could safely play space trucker, but even seasoned veterans would fear higher ranked, especially elite, NPC's. And if I were on the design team, at the same point I were tweaking the NPC spawn algorithm with thsoe adjustments I just outlined, I'd also have fixed this infernal bug where NPC's have miracle recoveries every time they spool up their FSD.
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