I distinctly remember a time when I was new where the interdictions were just constant. Like, you'd beat one interdiction minigame and another would hit immediately, often three or four times subsequently.
I haven't had this happen recently, and I'm not sure what causes it, but it definitely doesn't FEEL right. It's needlessly frustrating.
I think part of it might have to do with player combat rank. When you're a low ranking player, I think you tend to get lower-ranking pirates - who are flying more agile ships. That means they can get behind you more quickly and effectively, leading to chain interdictions.
As you rank up, you get tougher enemies - but who are therefore slower and less agile. If I get a T10 chasing me, I know it'll be almost impossible for it to get behind me to interdict me, and I'm perfectly safe.
Elite is a strange game in that respect, because the smallest and theoretically weakest enemies are also often the most frustrating to deal with, especially as a beginner. An inexperienced pilot won't even be able to get them in their sights.
If you ARE dealing with smaller and weaker enemies, a useful weapon is seeker missiles. For an unengineered eagle or other small ship, a few volleys of seekers will destroy them quickly and easily.
The main thing that causes this is missions. The more missions you have on the docket, especially (but not exclusively) hauling missions, the more NPCs the game generates and sends after you. It's usually a minimum of 1/mission with hauling, often more. And so any time you drop into a system, the game populates the instance with all those NPCs who try to interdict you one after another. You escape one interdiction and then the next NPC is queued up to take a crack at it.
Every new player who gets frustrated with this will inevitably be told by forumites to "throttle zero, boost boost boost until your FSD cools down, and then get out of there before the NPC can shoot you down."
Well.
When you do this, the NPC in question will usually just interdict you again once you're back in supercruise. "Infinite interdictions" etc.
If you can outmaneuver the bouncing crosshair during the actual interdiction, though, the aggressor will be knocked out of supercruise and won't be able to interdict you again. But basically the entire Elite Dangerous playing vocal internet community continuously advises people to not even try.
It's unfortunate, because the interdictions themselves are usually not very hard to defeat. Once upon a time, they were
unbelievably unfair and difficult to escape from, and I think that's where the "always submit and then boost away" advice became codified. But now? If you're willing to practice at it even a little bit, almost anyone can learn to escape most interdictions. Like, even flying a T9 using a keyboard and trackpad.
Still though if you have 20 missions all in the same system you may well have to escape a lot of interdictions on your way to the station no matter what.
