Some quick background - I’m a monoboxer who has been living in a C2 (HS/C3) for a few years now with my corp. During that time I’ve largely maintained my assets via solo ratting in our c3 static. I’ve run probably in the thousands of anomalies and signatures in fits of my own making, including navy battlecruisers, HACs, T3Cs, Command ships, and Maruaders. I’d like to think that this somewhat qualifies me to give feedback on the recent changes made to low-class combat anomalies.
The Good:
The rats try to be closer than they used to, and much more aggressively approach you if they’re further away. This fundamentally changes what used to be an extremely limiting fitting consideration: range. With most things being significantly closer lasers and autocannons can be much more competitive with missiles - meaning players can feel better about bringing ships that they actually like.
No more drone aggro, similar to the above point, drone boats used to be simply frustrating to fly in Jspace. In saying that I feel the need to defend this point since people are likely to raise concerns about automation. The mechanics of Jspace do more to naturally impede automation than drone aggro ever could, multiboxing the sites will very quickly drain a system and require scanning for a new one, the lack of local chat makes afk/botting ratters much easier to catch, and blue loot needs to be exported which in turn requires human input.
The EH…:
Split aggro - on paper this could enable a pair of new players to to run c3 sites with fairly low SP in like battlecruisers or whatever, have some fun in a wolf rayette and the like, and honestly? For anyone that does, that’s great for them and it’s a good change if it causes even a single person to undock when otherwise they wouldn’t. Also I fully expect that I’ll be able to drag new players out of station to be on grid with me while I rat. There is a problem here however that this change doesn’t address. The value return for a player’s time very rapidly erodes with the addition of more player ships in the site. My monoboxer self can run ~7 sites/hour, other people in my corp dual boxing the same fit can do ~9, the comparison when the ships are being flown by different people is awful - like you mean i go from getting 300m in blue loot, to 200 - purely because I wanted to be on grid with my buddy?
That one wave trigger change with the battleship. On one hand, I get it - I do, I really do - but like you already have to go to a third party source or memorise the triggers to not get surprised with more rats than you expected. It does make frontier recievers able to be run in cheaper fits and such - but like, eh?
The Bad
Not being able to interact with the scenery makes perches almost useless (as an aside this doesn’t actually slow down running Oruze constructs if you’re in a somewhat mobile fit). Setting up warp ins for marauder ratting signatures is much more tedious, as is catching a ratter who’s moved significantly from the warp in. People have to learn overview management somewhere - better while ratting than when in pvp.
The sheer size of the decor - some of these no-overview collidables span from ~ 20km from the warpin, all the way out to over 150km from the warpin. The same object! The only way to consistently maintain cloak when warping to the site is to go to the warpin ± 10km, which is of course no good if you’re trying to hunt since you might land on the MTU wreck field.