Gate rats in nullsec are a pain. Too many of them, too often. When roaming solo looking for pvp content I constantly find myself either half shield, or webbed or in a disadvantageous position because of these IMMERSION BREAKER gate rats.
CCP rebalance that, please, it’s a killer for solo players and micro gangs desperately looking for content. Either less of them or less often, or both. If I want pve content I know where to find it, I don’t want it IMPOSED on me EVERYWHERE I go.
That’s one of the examples for CCP’s well thought through changes. After they removed most ore from asteroid belts, they removed those belts because they were empty and “confused” people. However, since rats only spawned there and since you need those to start gaining Military Index, they had to make them spawn elsewhere. That gave us up to 1, 2 or even more NPC pirate group spawns on gates. This is also supposed to make your life more interesting. Isn’t it amazing? You should feel grateful for this opportunity to have a more interesting experience!
Nah, they’re just there to force you to bring a ship that can clear those rats, but that ship probably has poor sensors, while you need a quick-locking tackle in order to grab players, but that tackle can’t clear the rats. So… that means you need to tag your alt along because you need both a cruiser or larger for the npcs, and a frigate for the players
If it was just for the index, you could grind anomalities and randomly spawning combat signatures.
It was for the index because anoms and signatures are not spawning reliably enough if you do not have upgrades. By the time some signatures or anoms have spawned or respawned, especially in a newly conquered region or constellation, the index will have degraded by a few percentage points. This problem was brought up in the feedback topic for the patch when CCP removed the empty asteroid belts and this is their solution: make everyone’s lives more annoying. I have had a few instances where targets got away because Blood Raider NPC neuted my tackle dry and I could not keep the warp disruptor running. Truly great experience.
The best “hope” now is that CCP will reintroduce all these removed belts after they so boastfully claimed that ore content in all asteroid belts would be doubled in the New Dawn quadrant, and that they remove these annoying extra mass spawns of NPCs on gates.
Yeah, I used to solo gank in a flycatcher. You can’t do that any more, the rats will push you off.
Also, before the scarcity consumed the belts, rats at the gates would be at the gates. Now it’s not rare to see them spawn 100km away. I can bring an alt to add some firepower and clear rats, but if I bring an Eagle/Tornado/Cerb that can reach out 100km… that’s just not my camping style, lol. Especially as the “Artillery Camp” should have multiple artillery pieces, and I don’t want to solo-operate a fleet.
null rats have always spawned at gates . as you stated … gate camps have always had to deal with them . it’s part of the immersion , not breaking it .
it’s a large thread ; you could link the actual post that states what you infer . other than ccp confirming empty belts were removed . where does CCP mention changing spawn rates or locations of null rats ?
It has never been this many rats before they remove the belts. There are now reliably 2-3 individual spawn groups on gates where as in the past you had rarely one, and if you cleared it it would not respawn within minutes. Whether this is immersion breaking or not is irrelevant compared to the undue problems that this causes for other activities.
Besides, what is really immersion breaking is the lack of asteroid belts in only a portion of the cluster.
It’s only 170 posts, don’t be lazy. But since you are and since you apparently can’t click links and search topics and related topics:
The rats at stargates used to be, in the worst possible case, 3 BS with poor tracking and either 3 elite frigates with webs/longpoints or 3 elite cruisers that are quickly wrecked by small weapons. Now half the spawns I see have more then 10 ships of all sizes. What’s the largest spawn nowadays? 15?
They also used to spawn within 20km of the stargate, which enabled even a short range armed camper to burn to the rats while still having a considerable share of the spawnable space within warp disruption or bubble range. With rats at 100km to the gate sniping the camp, the camper has to burn away from the gate and leave it completely uncamped while clapping the rats. Not to mention they’ll often warp out as soon as you start engaging them, so you don’t even get bounties.
thank you for the replies. i was looking for where it said ccp intentionally moved spawns to gates, as implied by you. it appears more as an unintended side-effect of spawn mechanics having fewer points to place rats. never attribute to malice…
Gate rats were supposed to be a temporary fix to the issue of the removal of belts. This has been months now, and they are still there and they are awful. We have been bringing this up and will continue to do that until it’s fixed.
I can’t stand the belt rats being on the gate. That update was one of the worst in recent times. In some systems it’s oppressive where they spawn in large numbers shortly after you kill them. Probably systems that had a lot of belts but few gates they just spawn as if there are a lot of belts but on the few gates leaving an almost endless spawn of them.
I don’t play this game to constantly be clearing gate rats.
They need to put them back in the belts or in some other site where they belong.
