My statement that being a top gamer gives you an exploid is indeed a shortsighted one. The AI setting sugestion that trigered this needs to be clarified more.
Yes you are right that AI difficulty setting on player side could make exploids possible. This is not the case if this setting can only be changed, lets say once a month. Or wat you suggest, creating 3 servers with 3 difficulties settings.
Moving from one server to the other is only possible after a fee like 5 to 10 € and only once a month. This could exclude exploids and pay to win.
An other option is creating a new danger zone, somewhere in space with its own stations and economy, where the most skilled of us can have fun.
Now to stay on topic about the AI changes, items that pop-up most are:
- Interdiction harrasment. Even if some people killed the interdicting NPC, it seems they instand spawn and keep on interdicting till you are docked or you jump to an other system.
- Endless ammunition/missles/chaff/energy on NPC's while players dont have this. Maybe the NPC's have the mats on board to restock in flight and create extra ammo instand (usually the highest stats ammo). Players can not make the ammo instand. The time it takes to make more ammo can be killing.
- Spin of death after being interdicted. This happend to me enough to avoid populated space due to having a bounty on my head I got while on a mission that needed skimmers destroyed. Need to wait out my time to be able to pay my fine.
- Extreme flight skills of NPC's.
- Mission payout in mats needed for engineering fill up your cargo. This attrackts pirate NPC,s like hell. We have no station storage for materials. So I usually sell them instand.
- Invissible NPC's that can scan your cargo fom many Ls away and manage to interdict you.
There will be more AI behavior that can be annoying, just mentioned the ones I see most.
Most things we see as a bug could be triggered by us having problems with the extreme high descission possibilitys of the NPC's. We are only human (most of us) and we have emotions that work against us when we need to descide quick.
The new AI does seem to have only 1 emotion: when they see a human player they can only act as bulleys.
Sorry, I hadn't noticed the response you posted. In response the the switching modes/new areas, I thought that is what Haz RES sites, Conflicted Nav Beacons (sorry, can't remember the exact term), and Combat zones were for? I'll be honest, I never fight in any of them because whenever I had in the past (standard beta, gamma, and initial release) I would get owned, and owned hard. So I stopped travelling there because I wasn't interested in paying a lot of rebuys. The only major downside to having to pay to switch servers is that would prevent a person like me who started in Private Group starting the slow transition to Open so I could possibly meet other players in the black. But that is just something to consider.
Onto the AI...
Interdictions: I believe they could be toned down some in frequency. Lately I've been getting interdicted more, however that is also because I have a 15000+ bounty on my head in Ptah system. But even when I didn't have a bounty, I felt interdictions were happening a little too frequently. I don't want space to be safe, but I would prefer it to be logical. If I'm in a ship that is known to be a trading ship (Asp Explorer, T6, etc..) I would expect to be interdicted by pirates more. If I'm wanted, I would expect to be interdicted more. If I'm in a Diamondback Explorer with no real weaponry and no wanted status, I would expect to be left fairly alone unless I'm in a system that is known to house pirates, because while some pirates only look for cargo, there are those who take lives. One thing, if you're taking a route through high security space, there shouldn't be too many interdictions unless your wanted. I wonder if the High/Low/No security in the systems is working as intended... Now with people not being able to escape interdiction, I wonder how many use the thrusters (vertical and horizontal) during the escape? If I'm shooting to avoid the experience, I cut throttle to about 75% and use thrusters as well as roll/pitch/yaw. I escaped all but one interdiction last night and usually I'm terrible at it. In regards to the spin of death, I only experienced that once and I initially tried to run and then decided to submit right when I was about to be forced out anyways. I don't know if that had anything to do with it, so unfortunately without experiencing it I can't give an opinion on it.
Endless Ammo/Chaff/Piloting Skills/Invisible Cargo Scanning/Etc: I've had some instances of the chaff seeming to go off more than it seemed possible, however I didn't have enough time to scan their ship and determine how many chaff launchers they had and what not. I do agree though, NPC's should be
bound by the same rules CMDR's are whether it be ammo, heating, maneuverability, etc. I would also hope that if a combat npc is mostly harmless, that they would make mistakes just like a player would with thruster mismanagement, PIP mismanagement, and overheating weapons (if possible) and then rank up from there.
Not having storage space for missions rewards: While I know it attracts AI, that has nothing to do with AI implementation. I agree whole-heartedly that was poor design not to include storage capability. To keep the game quasi-realistic, I would prefer to see storage on stations/outposts cost a small amount of credits per month. Something like this: if you're at a station, you can pay 50cr a month for 200 ton increments where you can store whatever you want there. I would also hope for the following functions:
- Reminders at 7, 5, and 3 days till expiration so you can renew your "contract".
- If you didn't renew your contract, you wouldn't be fined, but the goods would be "sold" (similar to how storage facilities do now to non-paying customers)
- You could pay a fee (say 5% galactic average market value times the number of jumps) to transport said goods to a station of your choice as long as you have storage there.
We all have a different vision of what the AI should be like. Here is mine: there shouldn't be "trash mobs" of AI that you can farm. There simply shouldn't be that. This isn't a traditional MMO like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, or whatever your favorite MMO is. In a game like this, I would hope the AI would be actual pilots in that you have some that trade, some that fight, some that just explore. To the point that based off piloting skills (both good and bad) that if it wasn't for the fact that they didn't have CMDR in front of their name, you wouldn't know it WASN'T a person. I've seen a good deal of that (trade ships just running from point a to point b, bounty hunters just lurking at the nav beacon, blood thirsty killers in super cruise) so I think we are getting close to that immersive world. It just needs some more tweaking. Perhaps the number of blood thirsty pirates and killers needs to be lowered by about 20-30%. I don't know the magic answer.
Sorry for the wall of text.
I have ordered a Vive in order to get the maximum immersion and I feel it's going to arrive at a time when I don't like playing the game anymore.
