Newcomer / Intro I'm honestly curious, why hardcode newb griefing into solo mode?

[Derpster Frey]

4 eagles can be devastating mind you.

Just one of the buggers is enough to annoy me sometimes, they just fly around me like little wasps.
Can't imagine handling 4 of them at once, hammering my Asp.

Sure, if I get a shot lined up, my dual beams melt them, but still.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

Interdictions seem to have increased after the recent patch.
I was exploring, several hundred LY away from civilization. Afterwards got a congratulations message for discovering uncharted systems. Yet some of those systems had NPCs lingering near the sun, ready to interdict any ship that came across the corona for refueling. No settlements or inhabited worlds though.

Seems a bit odd to me.

My normal day...

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Hmm this must be new in 1.1 (haven't played more than 30 minutes since the update), because most of the interdictions when I just started were by system security vessels who scanned me and waved me goodbye.

Besides the "play and win the minigame" and throttle to zero, boost and FSD tricks, another trick seems to be helping: don't FSD straight to a station from the systems entry point. It seems that NPC pirates patrol the direct route between the systems entrypoint/nav beacon and the stations in that system. So if you approach the stations in a wide arch, you might get less interdictions.

Yes, above and below the plane of the ecliptic can help.

 

[cmdr lowest]

And then there's the one that interdicted me right after arriving in the system... the escape vector forced me to fly INTO the star, and then dropped me into combat where my shields were cooking off from proximity to the star. I actually managed to escape from that one, got back into frame shift... only to be interdicted AGAIN half way to the nearest port. My shields blasted off before recovering from the 'spin out' ... boosted once... and was chased until my ship was blown out of space. 10k in cargo, several k in upgraded components and insurance costs to pay...
.

Spin out?

Are you being interdicted and failing the interdiction? Just submit. I always submit because I can't be bothered trying to escape now and generally I find I come out of it with no spin out, no damage and the FSD cooldown is quicker.

i.e. you get penalised a lot less for submitting (throttling to zero).

Then when you come out just put four pips to engines, two to shields and boost until you are far enough away then charge FSD.

As others have said, I've been playing since launch and have a fairly beefy Cobra now so it is difficult to gauge how difficult these encounters are today because not many of them scare me. However, no NPC who has had the cheek to interdict me has killed me yet. I've either successfully ran away or took them out. One has jumped before I finished him off. If that's not cheek I don't know what is. He pulled ME out of SC and then when he decides I'm too good so he runs? I really wish I had the tools to follow him and finish him off at the time...

 

[jeff47]

I'm actually having the opposite experience. (Played the original in 84, the whole X-Wing series and Wing Commander series, etc)

I've had the game about 4 days now. I'm playing in solo, so only facing NPCs. And I'm destroying damn near every NPC that I fight in a "starter" sidewinder with a burst laser, a gun, and a power distributor upgraded one notch. I have had to run away from a few fights - apparently I'm not ready for a dropship, and I could only kill an eagle when his 2 bigger friends caught up enough to hit me.

I've gotten in the (probably bad) habit of not even bothering to look at the "difficulty level" of the NPCs - deadly seems just about as problematic as mostly harmless.

Now, I did spend some time reading the manual, other online guides and doing the "training" scenarios on the first day. So that may be a difference. But my "newbie" experience has been that fighting is really not at all that difficult.