Go rats goooo!
Similar ones are coming with next expansion ready to blow us up and pod us in eve hell !
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What this is, is you expecting an outcome that did not happen:
You thought they’d be easy.
You can complain, asking the authority on the matter to step in, achieving nothing…
…or you do the sensible thing:
You try harder.
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They seem OP, but introduce a bit of unpredictability to high sec. I think this is CCP’s way of reducing the risk gap between high and low/null. So +1 to CCP.
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Playing the big man and accepting every game change as automatically a great thing isn’t the ‘sensible thing’, it’s craven fanboy behavior. This is crappy game balancing, and should be called out as such. Having a mechanic in game whereby NPCs can just ROFLstomp players in the high security areas isn’t a positive, it’s yet another poorly implemented feature that just punishes players if they don’t live on the forums keeping up with every aspect of the game.
CCP could implement a feature whereby one in three ships just randomly explode, and they’d still have people like you running here to defend them.
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Yeah, sure, blame me for you being a failure who needs it easy! That is quite typical of failures.
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I just can’t wait to see the forest of pitchforks when at some point in the future finally CCP implements the drifter standings which will lead to everyone who farmed this past event being auto-aggressed by Autothysian Lancers whenever and wherever they are encountering them. 
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Not really. Highsec has always had NPC rats that the players were suppose to deal with. They were just made ineffectual and inconsequential by a decade of power creep, to the point anything but the weakest ship can just flat-out ignore them. Highsec was left to languish until CCP developed a new AI and was looking for places in the game where it could be deployed, and then did so to bring some life back to that area of space.
These NPCs, like the old ones, are still easily avoidable if you want to farm in peace. Leave them alone, and keep an eye out for the pirate FOBs spawning (which you had to do for Incursions before anyway), and highsec is as safe as it was before.
You are just upset because you suffered a loss. Get over it - loss in Eve Online isn’t bad game design, it is a feature! New Eden is an ever-changing place where your ship can explode when you least want it to so don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose. Embrace the Golden Rules and stop pouting over the loss of some imaginary assets. These NPCs provide a little life to a practically lifeless space and are here to stay, so your time would be better spent reading about and experimenting with these entities, rather than yelling at CCP for daring to change something as they try to make their game more interesting.
or simply don’t use autopilot.
I have NEVER been targeted by the FOB patrols, even in my freighters, unless I targeted them or stayed for a minute at the gate.
The FOB response is very different, and will point you/neut you/remove the bone of your leg and pierce your heart with it, then chew your lungs (trust me lungs taste is horrible).
But they don’t usually come to the gate. Maybe the belt was on grid with the gate ?
Hi Pedro, first let me congratulate you on managing to include so many Eve tropes in a single post. Impressive indeed.
As for your larger point though, as I’ve said several times now I’m not in the slightest bit upset about losing a couple of ships. I’ve lost hundreds of them in the past, and fully intend to lose hundreds more in the future. The day I WAAAAA-RAGE over the loss of a Hurricane is the day I give up on not only Eve but video games in general.
The thing that is making me annoyed is that having high powered rats appearing in areas of highsec that don’t offer the player fair warning of the impending difficulty spike, breaks the balancing curve and does so in an area where newer players will most frequently play. As an attempt to make highsec more interesting, its a brute force solution that offers very little positive impact and simply punishes both new players and players who don’t spend their time reading up on every new aspect of the game. Considering that CCP have been spending considerable time and resources on making the game more accessible, that is a wildly counterproductive change that sets back their efforts.
I’m not saying that FOBs as a feature should just be removed, I’m simply asking that they be balanced in a way that makes them fit into the overall game more smoothly. If they’re going to appear in belts then give the player clear warning that the system is under pirate occupation. Use popup messages when the player enters system, and have something prominently displayed on the system information panel to communicate this. For hisec, balance the difficulty of the rats that come to belts to reflect the low reward of both being there in the first place and trying to kill them. Pointing/webbing players is fine, or disrupting/neuting, but dropping all four on the player at once in that location (and combined with huge dps & drone targetting) is to my mind simply overpowered.
Now its perfectly reasonable that people might have a completely different opinion, and even make a case that is stronger and more convincing than mine. I’m perfectly open to having my mind changed. What I do get tired of however is this ‘You’re just butthurt!!’ crap. Seriously, my butt is just fine, so lets just stick to talking about gameplay systems.
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Come now, the pirate FOBs are easily seen on dscan, with combat probes, or even in the Agency tab. Their presence is not hidden from the player.
I still don’t get how they are “unbalanced”. You can avoid them with minimal effort, and even just warp away if they show up unexpectedly on grid. You seem to just have a problem with the way they were introduced.
From a game point of view they are practically indistinguishable from the uber Incursion NPCs which have been around for years. They are the smallest of iterations. If the system background changed colour or popped up a chat channel, would they now be balanced in your opinion?
Not sure I’d go as far as calling it balanced then, but it would at least be a compromise that gave fair warning to players in system. You say they’re easily seen on D-scan, well maybe if you happen to be within D-scan range they are. Should we really be asking new players to fly around each system they enter d-scanning each section of the system map to ensure they’ve picked up everything? Asking people to combat probe every hisec system they want to spend any time in, or go diving into tabs to check multiple things to see if any of them happen to be in a system also seems overly onerous.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask for a clear warning that this system is under pirate attack, and the pirates are extremely dangerous. Especially as they’re MORE dangerous than the pirate rats you’ll find flying around in pirate systems in null.
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Sorry, seems I forgot to reply directly in the answer above.
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They should program the rats with some smacktalking too after they kill you that’d be something
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That’s what sensible people do in lowsec and nulsec when neuts are in local its just your neuts are rats.
Maybe ccp could implement them in the system channel as characters then you would have similar warning but different threat
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I know your answer is sarcastic and rhetorical in nature, but the answer is actually, “Yes. Some of those things listed are good habits to be in.”. If CCP creates a scenario where more people are aware of their surroundings, the tools in their ships and in their UI, and how to use them - I don’t see how that can be considered a bad thing at all. As far as a game goes that is lacking (or was, in the past) decent tutorials for many aspects of the game, a rather organic way to make the player aware of these things is actually pretty brilliant.
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I wouldn’t argue against those being good habits for people who are intending to move out to low/null, but that asks a fairly big question in itself: Is CCP’s intention to make highsec more like low/null? It may be, in which case suddenly this kind of features makes a lot more sense, but conversely it seems to fly in the face of their attempts to make the game more accessible. Despite them being good habits, they are also yet more things for a new player to try and wrap their head around while they find their feet in game.
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I don’t think that necessarily follows. That many of these features help low/null/wh players (or players seeking to eventually fly in those areas) does not mean it benefits them exclusively.
To give a few specific (by no means exhaustive or complete) examples of things you listed in your post: as a highsec mission runner, I’m constantly d-scanning for combat probes anyway. Because people jumping into your mission pocket to steal loot or mess with you is entirely a thing. Had I been in the habit of doing so earlier in my EVE life, I could have avoided some unfavorable scenarios. Though there was that one time someone jumped a frigate in and immediately exploded (Recon 3). Even in highsec, even without wardec, d-scanning is a good habit to be in. It just so happens to lend itself to being aware of your surroundings in other areas of space too.
Combat probing isn’t really necessary and few vessels can mount a combat probe launcher without being completely compromised. But, while fiddling around with probes early in my EVE life, I had a fun time picking up drones people left behind, including faction drones. Such a habit could easily lead a person into a career they might find fun, of cleaning up space or exploring sigs.
As for the tabs/agent finder - with the Agency UI being what it is now, it does showcase a lot of what is going on in EVE. For many people who don’t frequent the forums, one day seeing an event pop up in the Agency window might be their first indication that an event is running - something many would otherwise miss completely. It also highlights (albeit, imperfectly) other activities in the region. With some quick filters for mining and combat, it can help expose new people to the full width and breath of what is going on in their immediate area. Such a UI exploration might have someone jump into a FOB system, ask a few questions in local, end up teaming up with a fleet, and taking on the FOB as part of a group action. And that’s before we get into showcasing local agents you have standings for, green sites to start you on combat exploration, and all such.
All MMOs are complicated and I dare say this one isn’t necessarily more complicated than others. Just expectations are different. Exposing people to more tools that can help them is a good thing. And they can take it upon themselves to familiarize themselves with each tool when they’re ready. Nobody is forcing them to learn those in day one/hour one. But if a low-chance encounter with a powerful NPC rat makes a new pilot undergo a journey of exploration of this game to see how expansive it really its, then it still feels like a good thing.
Well they got rid of scanning drones, so that’s one career path out the window. 
I actually like the idea of the Agency tab. I think its a definitely major positive to introduce players to more content. I also think learning to d-scan is an essential skill, I just think it’s a more advanced concept that should be explained to the player in detail and introduced over time. They already have to come to terms with an awful lot of information, and although ‘Your ship just got popped’ can be a valuable learning tool, its only useful if they come away actually learning something, not just confused by why this group of red NPCs just ripped them apart while the last 10 groups were easy to kill.
Re other MMO’s, I’ve played many of them over the years and I can’t think of any that come close to Eve in terms of complexity and above all the steepness of the learning curve. There’s a reason why the famous learning cliff picture was so funny, although fair play to CCP, they recognized it and tried to improve things.
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Agreed. But not every game will be a good match for every person. I think for a person to enjoy EvE, they have to have a mindset where they come away wanting to learn something, rather than only being frustrated that something unexpected happened.
The drone thing was removed quite a long time ago, it was supposed to make it harder to hunt down missioners if I remember rightly. Not quite sure how that made sense, but hey…