I unfortunately missed that period, and if I’m not mistaken the interdiction by an NPC was much harder to avoid, correct?
If so, I would certainly vote for bringing that back, so that players get more chance to get accustomed to evasion. But I would scale it more heavily than it already is according to system security (a T9 should be sweating if it ventures into an anarchy, but should get a free escort in a high sec, something like that).
I don't really recall NPC interdiction being harder to avoid (at least after the tunnel game was introduced...prior to beta 3, interdiction was automatically successful) or at least can't separate it from my own relative inexperience at the time. It may have gotten slightly easier, or I may just have gotten slightly better after experiencing it hundreds of times...I have no objective way to quantify it. All I know is that I've never really considered NPCs a threat.
With regard to the tunnel game, I have a strong feeling that latency compensation is a critical distinction between NPC and CMDR interdiction. Even if they make the tunnel game harder against NPCs, it won't be reflective of PvP interdiction because network prediction gives the aggressor an advantage that generally scales with the latency involved (and NPCs hosted on a client have effectively zero latency to that client). The game is not fully synchronous and a successful attack trumps an apparently successful evasion in most all combat actions (e.g. if I think I side-step your ram at a distance of 600m, but you see the ram connect, we take collision damage...same for exchanges of weapons fire, interdictions, or almost any other time sensitive occurrence). It's one of the reasons we get so much confusion, up to and including hackusations, around desync related phenomena.
Anyway, I was speaking mostly of CMDR on CMDR piracy earlier. Camping SC outside of stations selling rare commodities was a common occurrence, as rares were highly profitable then and CMDRs would be coming in with a haul of rares to sell while picking up more on their rare circuit. Same thing would happen in popular mining hotspots, when one could expect to get a load of platinum or palladium from a compliant miner. Various mechanical and social aspects of the game made piracy easier to pull off and with typical credits per-hour for most activities being a small fraction of what they were now (a million cr per hour was damn good in the first half of 2015), piracy was proportionally much more profitable. It's become simultaneously harder and less profitable, to the point that, as I've mentioned, it feels like most participants in it are just going through the motions with very little contextual rationale behind it.
