this ■■■■ is annoying af and should not be possible.
Context would possibly help here…
Guristas can lock like 300km away. Im assuming thats OPs complaint
NPC are able to lock everything on grid, no matter how far. This is broken af.
Upon doing some research i think its where grids used to be 150km. When they expanded the grids some, mostly guristas, can shoot farther than what the grid size was
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NPCs are designed much simpler than player ships, they have much less attributes that the server has to handle. Locking Range is one of these things NPCs simply don’t have, once you come into their “activation range” they will lock you and keep you locked, no matter where on grid you are.
CCP would probably need to change how all NPCs in the game work and give all of them (talking about many hundreds, maybe thousands of NPC types) an individual locking range. I don’t see this to happen anytime soon, for the sheer amount of effort it would take.
The issue is that NPC lack a lot of variables when it comes to their behaviour because that lowers cpu requirements to run them. “Can’t lock until range is less than X” is one of those, back when we had smaller grids that was less of an (obvious) issue.
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NPC can lock you from 10k km away and then slowboat to you. It’s an ages old thing and has only become much worse with the bigger grids.
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didn’t stop them implementing complex NPC switch aggro mechanics which screwed PvP inside sites back in the day when CPU was an even more scarce ressource - so I don’t buy this kind of reasoning. Also not to forget the diamond rats which show rather complex behavior and are just fine CPU-wise.
It’s a roleplaying thing. The NPC rats are able to lock you from so far away due to such enhancements as the Guristas Spectral Veil Sensor Booster which uses psychosomatic pulse waves to penetrate the aether and allow them to lock targets they don’t even exist yet. Just enjoy knowing that they’ve got you locked.
They’re not complex at all, the normal npc that is. There are ubisoft games with better AI for their npc.
Good evening @Lea_Ramiro 
I watched one of the TNG episode with the Rutledge Phoenix attacking Cardassian ships, and when they’re “watching” an attack on long range sensors they mention the Rutledge Phoenix being 300,000km away when it starts attacking. And in the episode where Riker is doing a tour on the Klingon ship, when discussing the emergency transporter beacon, that they’ll have to be within 40,000km to use it and make it sound like that’s fairly close for a possible engagement distance.
But while they can lock you from 2000 km they cannot shoot, so the range checks are already there for different mechanic. Don’t see could this save up anything…
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Because its less checks, the gun checks need to be done regardless, but if you can eliminate more checks that you don’t need to do it adds up in the long run
We are only speculating here as we don’t know how it is coded.
The speculation is that npcs are missing a maximal locking range attribute in order to make it more efficient.
Without this attribute they are needlessly checking everything when they don’t have to. But you are right, eitherway if it is checked it is one more check conditionally. Then it depends which condition happens more often - player outside of their range or player inside of their range. If inside is more common, and I suppose it is, then at least 1 less command when the player isn’t inside range won’t offset 1 more when he is.
there is one mission, against guristas they locked on me over 300km away and hit me.
Are you doing Smash and Grab?
Angel Pirates can target paint at full effect from 10k km though.