It would be interesting to see the game picking up on a higher frequency of interdictions in one area in open play and dynamically increase the amount of interdictions taking place there in solo.
I too feel like NPCs should be more challenging - but the higher ranked ones can already be pretty tough cookies for less skilled players. I'm not sure how much of Elite AI being easy for me to kill is me being a good pilot. The real difficulty with AI is making them believably error-prone. If SJA wanted to she could pull out all the stops and make NPCs literally impossible to defeat without them "cheating" at all, but that'd be no fun either. I'm 100% sure that she has one of the hardest jobs on the dev team.
Oh it's a thankless task trying to balance the AI and system response.
You can't please everyone and all that.
I just feel that FD need to steer their own ship more and not let the extremists have their way via forum pressure so much.
Solo absolutely shouldn't be a free ride - that said I'm currently doing rares runs out of the old worlds in open whilst staring at my phone to type this - open is hardly chock full of excitement and danger either..
A more robust and hostile npc ideology would benefit everyone.
90% of the issue with the game is that NPC are easy mode. It shouldn't be like that I agree 100%
Another problem is that many players just want to go on their boring trading runs and rack up a heap of credits. They get their thrills getting on here bragging about their profitable trade routes and how much cargo their Anna can take while jumping 50 lys at a time..
All these guys need is a nice little safe solo mode to "play the game their way" but it shouldn't affect my game...
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I would like to comment on your post but I didn't understand it because you used too many big words...
See above comment regarding extremists.
I would count the eurotrucker brigade who just want to hop between stations completely unmolested in this camp.
If eurotruck was in the vein of ED then you would have to deal with hijackers, stowaways with guns and lunatic hitch hikers who get your attention by throwing dynamite at your lorry!
The game should be dangerous for one and all regardless of mode.
At that point it doesn't matter where you make your money as no one is getting it easy..