NPC Security is a missing in the game

[saiyuki]

Hi guys. Solo play, and i suspect open play as well.

Whats a pilot got to do to get protection in high security space. I can't count the amount of times i'm interdicted close to a station just prior to jumping out of supercruise -sometimes Mn's away. I see green security ships but no attempt by the security to help. You would think pirates and wanted ships would stay out of high security sectors, even medium security sectors should be enough to deter pirates/wanted pilots -unless heavily armoured and guns to match- to attempt anything.

Are the security services only when your docking and close to a station -though the station provides it's own security. Even in medium security sectors the NPC security appear very lax in patrolling their area's. Shouldn't there be a sliding scale in respect of pirate/wanted pilots interdiction attempts based on the security level of an area. They are supposed to be patrolling the shipping lanes to protect traders yet do nothing to help. As soon a i jump out of hyperspace i'm more often than not told i'm targetted by a pirate/wanted pilot. Where's the ability to send out a distress signal for assistance -at the least it would give some hope- where's the security patrolling the shipping lanes. I should expect possible trouble flying through a low security sector and no trouble when in a high security sector. If this was the case, i could map a route through high/medium security sectors to my destination safe in the knowledge my cargo would get through. As it is, the security in this game is not as it should be.

Regards

 

[Deadlock-3000]

It's simple - they don't actually exist at all.

I mean it. Every NPC is entirely virtual. They blink into existence and then blink out. They have no connection to any other game system than that.

So when you see the star system crawling with green security dots (like, maybe even 8 of them, in a system populated by billions of people) and you are then suddenly interdicted by that eternally optimistic NPC pirate who is after your cargo despite not carrying any hatch breaker limpets, every single NPC in the universe literally disappears, consigned to the eternal void they were born from short minutes ago.

Every non-supercruise instance of space is just an "encounter", straight out of a 1980s tabletop roleplaying game, except without the mind of a decent live DM giving your opponents even surface motivations.

Play the game long enough - a few weeks - and you'll learn how each kind of encounter is scripted. You'll be able to predict who pops in, and where, and roughly what "level" they'll be, to the extent you could sketch it out yourself on the back of an envelope.

It is an eternal marvel to me how I can play other games that cost half as much and had 2% of the human resources thrown at them and be utterly captivated, forgetting who I am and where I am in time and space, but when I play Elite Dangerous I feel like someone is standing by my shoulder screaming GAME in my ear.

 

[thistle]

I believe in high security systems if you get interdicted by a pirate you will often have security turn up to help, i think that's probably the only obvious difference. There may be rates of pirate spawn differences, or difficulty, I'm not sure.

I mean Deadlock is right I suppose, the npc's aren't permanent and are generated for your instance. The horror. It's almost like it's a game

 

[Jukelo]

Security level of the system affects how many and how tough pirates are, how fast the police shows up and how strong the police response is.
In high security systems, the police will show up in under 10 seconds after a crime is committed, in low security it takes them ~2 minutes.

 

[Vardaugas]

Make sure the "report crimes committed against me" box is ticked or security will never know something happened. It's somewhere in the right hand tab. They moved it around, so I don't know where it is now.

 

[saiyuki]

Make sure the "report crimes committed against me" box is ticked or security will never know something happened. It's somewhere in the right hand tab. They moved it around, so I don't know where it is now.

Thanks for the info guys

Regards

 

[777Driver]

Some info =


1. There is a bug since 3.3.01 that causes some places become lawless, as if part of a conflict zone.

2. Security response time is strongly dependent on system security level, ranging from several seconds (high security) to several minutes (low security). Since 3.0 or 3.1 the game actually displays this time whenever a crime is reported so it's easy to check.

In general, if you get attacked in a high security system you get help within a minute (it takes some time for the security forces to jump in, get closer and engage the attackers), while medium and low usually takes so long that the combat is over by the time they arrive.

Also, don't expect security ships to actually help much - they are pretty much useless against higher level NPCs, and utterly useless against player ships.

 

[saiyuki]

Some info =


1. There is a bug since 3.3.01 that causes some places become lawless, as if part of a conflict zone.

2. Security response time is strongly dependent on system security level, ranging from several seconds (high security) to several minutes (low security). Since 3.0 or 3.1 the game actually displays this time whenever a crime is reported so it's easy to check.

In general, if you get attacked in a high security system you get help within a minute (it takes some time for the security forces to jump in, get closer and engage the attackers), while medium and low usually takes so long that the combat is over by the time they arrive.

Also, don't expect security ships to actually help much - they are pretty much useless against higher level NPCs, and utterly useless against player ships.

I do have the report crimes against me enabled but was not aware of the timing factor for the security. I had a such a pretty miserable time trying to use a type 9 that I gave up and now stay with a python.

Regards

 

[rrobes]

Eventually you will not want security to respond, you can get more kills that way as well as testing you skills and ship build-out capabilities.

You will be able to engage or disengage at will as far as NPCs are concerned, just keep an eye on the situation and plan accordingly.

When you fly a large ship and going against NPCs, you're looking for trouble for fun, mediums can give you a chance to go after those pesky Anacondas that spam chaff and shield cell banks but carefully, smalls are a challenge but doable.

Good luck.

 

[Tarman]

I believe in high security systems if you get interdicted by a pirate you will often have security turn up to help, i think that's probably the only obvious difference. There may be rates of pirate spawn differences, or difficulty, I'm not sure.

I mean Deadlock is right I suppose, the npc's aren't permanent and are generated for your instance. The horror. It's almost like it's a game

I wonder how much work would be involved to create fully persistent NPCs. I mean, I have them in STALKER (dood you wanted this pistol but now you're all the way across the Zone), but it doesn't also need to create millions of them across the actual Milky Way.

 

[Deadlock-3000]

I wonder how much work would be involved to create fully persistent NPCs.

Far, far more work than will ever get put in.

But they wouldn't need to be "fully persistent", for almost any definition of that. I don't think anyone expects a detailed simulation of a trillion people in spaceships. It would just be nice to have something where the mechanics aren't completely in your face.

For example: ships not reliably appearing in your instance when they finish interdicting you; dropping into instances which are mysteriously empty after an equally suspicious pause in router activity; mission targets not magically repairing their ships on low wake, or magically jumping in and out of different ships in the middle of space; security forces actually patrolling a system and their time-to-arrival when you need help being in the same order of magnitude as their distance from you when you got interdicted etc. etc.

There's even a mission-related encounter where ships will spawn in the very millisecond you fire at a "bait" ship, like space wizards. I keep looking in Outfitting for the magic scanner that can detect weapons fire and drop me and my wingmates out of supercruise behind someone at precisely 170, 180 and 190 degrees from their heading, all in the blink of an eye, but oddly, it's never there. Pre 3.3, there was an Unauthorised Installation encounter where between 8 and 12 ships spawned all in a perfectly straight line with exactly the same distance between them, all facing the exact same direction.

It's just blatant.

 

[Tarman]

Far, far more work than will ever get put in.

But they wouldn't need to be "fully persistent", for almost any definition of that. I don't think anyone expects a detailed simulation of a trillion people in spaceships. It would just be nice to have something where the mechanics aren't completely in your face.

For example: ships reliably appearing in your instance when they finish interdicting you; mission targets not magically repairing their ships on low wake, or even jumping in and out of different ships in the middle of space; security forces actually patrolling a system and their time-to-arrival when you need help being in the same order of magnitude as their distance from you when you got interdicted etc. etc.

There's even a mission-related encounter where ships will spawn in the very millisecond you fire at a "bait" ship, like space wizards. I keep looking in Outfitting for the magic scanner that can detect weapons fire and drop me out of supercruise behind someone at precisely 170, 180 and 190 degrees from their heading in the blink of an eye, but oddly, it's never there.

It's just blatant.

I was just thinking of a solution more in macro terms; making "PermaDood 4872299911" would be a bit much certainly, but perhaps a more sensible semi-independent existence for NPCs in general so they're not wizarded up completely from scratch and vanish just as quickly. At the least it'd be nice that the entire time you're encountering any given NPC, they should be able to "live" as long as needed to maintain the illusion that it's the same dood.

How that is to be accomplished (or if) would be for more code-monkey people than me, I just do concepts.

 

[Deadlock-3000]

I was just thinking of a solution more in macro terms; making "PermaDood 4872299911" would be a bit much certainly, but perhaps a more sensible semi-independent existence for NPCs in general so they're not wizarded up completely from scratch and vanish just as quickly. At the least it'd be nice that the entire time you're encountering any given NPC, they should be able to "live" as long as needed to maintain the illusion that it's the same dood.

How that is to be accomplished (or if) would be for more code-monkey people than me, I just do concepts.

Well, the "supercruise instance" (or whatever you want to call it) dies the moment you leave it for normal space. Having it not do that would be a start, so that all the NPCs you saw in supercruise could still drop in and out. At some point, I'm guessing fairly early in the design process (because it's been this way since day 1), it was decided that this kind of thing was too much background processing, that having nearly-a-double-digit number of ships moving around a star system would substantially impact the smoothness of your one-on-one joust with a shieldless Eagle. (Fast forward to 2019 and you have hazres instances salted with tedious Powerplay security clones and strange mechanics where FDLs jump in 500m away with metronome-like regularity, resulting in bonkers numbers of ships at once all pew-pewing like mad, but whatever).

Maybe you could further abstract them away - file them away under "ships which don't matter while I'm out of SC" and "ships which are actually headed here now + countdown" - but like you say, not our job to code the game, we merely paid for it.

 

[Sapyx]

Re: security force backup: Security does turn up in High Security zones. But a "crime" has to be committed against you first, and being interdicted does not itself qualify as a "crime"; the pirate has to actually shoot at you, and hit you. Then the timer starts.

Security response is also improved with your relationship with the system's ruling faction. In my "home" systems, I'm 100% Allied with the local cops, and in the high-sec ones, a swarm of eight cop ships appears within a few seconds of the shooting.

Re: NPC permanence. One problem with permanence is the combination with "multiplayer". Example: I accept a mission to assassinate a Pirate Lord. In an ideal world, accepting this mission will then either spawn the creation of a single persistent NPC, or (even better) the game randomly selects my target from a set of persistent NPCs it has already created and are already flying about the galaxy. However, it's a multiplayer universe. What if some other player, who's just out bounty-hunting random NPC pirates, finds and destroys "my" Pirate Lord before I can even arrive in the target system? The mission "fails", and it's entirely not my fault. Or maybe the "bounty hunter" is a griefer who has learned what "pirate lords" look like and is deliberately targetting them to disrupt other people's missions. "Going Solo" won't help; Solo only stops me from being instanced with the bounty-hunter. If another player in another mode "steals" my NPC into their instance, that NPC has been lost to me.

I would, however, like to see some more NPC vs NPC behaviour in Supercruise, because ED is still very much programmed around the single-player mentality, where all NPCs are created solely to be player content; they either target you or ignore you, and they never target each other. I play Solo-only, and I have never, once, seen anyone else but me be interdicted, either by the Cops or by pirates. As far as I'm concerned, when a pirate is spawned, they should run an algorithm "OK, who's going to be my target?", and target that ship - whether it's a player ship, or an NPC trader. And the cops should do more than just strut about, looking all green and pretty - if I'm in a lightly armed trader being chased through Supercruise by a pirate and there are cops about, then the cops should make a beeline for that pirate, interdict him and take him off my tail; stopping pirates is their job, not mine.

 

[Dash]

I haven't actually tested it, but I'd hope that the "big haul" pirates that spawn when you jump in with cargo don't appear in high security.

I'd also like to see the level of the response in high security to be stronger. i.e. easily capable of overwhelming even engineered players. E.g. several Elite condas per player ship drop in.

Along with jumping into navy beacons if there, I think this would really make the security of a system something to pay attention to.

 

[Jukelo]

I would, however, like to see some more NPC vs NPC behaviour in Supercruise, because ED is still very much programmed around the single-player mentality, where all NPCs are created solely to be player content; they either target you or ignore you, and they never target each other. I play Solo-only, and I have never, once, seen anyone else but me be interdicted, either by the Cops or by pirates.

That is not correct, NPCs do interdict one another.

 

[777Driver]

That is not correct, NPCs do interdict one another.

Yep, you see it quite a lot. Perhaps Sapyx is expecting to see a blue tether.