Maybe CCP has decided that there’s a disproportionate level of income available to carriers and supers?
Risk is risk. To say that the NPCs don’t produce risk is to say that nobody has to worry about losing a ratting ship to rats. The killboards would refute this statement readily.
That’s like saying a police officer is not at risk because they carry a gun. They’re still at risk, they bring the gun to mitigate that risk. You can certainly argue that the mitigation of that risk is too effective, but it is never the less risk being mitigated.
Carries die regularly, if cynos were really that OP, it’d have been dealt with already. I do agree that cough delvecough super umbrellas are a bit much, but that’s not really a related topic to this thread.
Rats do not produce sustained risk. Once the player learns there is no possibility of continuing risk. For risk there must be randomness.
Using a real life analogy is not very good. Police carry guns because they face randomness and even uncertainty. Rats are not randomness. Risk comes from players because players pose randomness and even uncertainty.
As opposed to a world without balance? I agree that the theme park mentality exists, but CCP adds, alters, and removes arbitrary rules to the sandbox all the time. It’s not a pure sandbox, but consider the number of choices a capital ratter has already, and ask if you will see more or less choices. In a world where capital ratting becomes sub-optimal, you’ve effectively killed a choice (not many choose to be sub-optimal). In a world where capital ratting remains feasible, in spite of CCP’s active decision to change capital ratting, the choice of hull remains.
Is it random though? Not really. They’re actively seeking out belligerents and actively attending scenes where there can be a high likelihood of violence. I do agree that NPC “stuff” is not random. It’s incredibly monotonous. But I see risk as “a chance to lose”. And that absoutely exists. By tailoring the rats to capitals, you can increase that chance to lose your ship. Even if only through the addition of some tanky HICs.
I do see what you’re saying. When something says surprise and shoves a dildo up your ass, you need to be able to relax in time to take it before you blow a gasket. I would personally equate the ability to adapt to the randomness of an encounter as skill, not risk, even though the mere presence of that randomness increases risk.
No, sometimes the guy is just travelling through. Sometimes he is by himself and he has to be careful what targets he picks. Sometimes he is the scout for a gang. Sometimes he is a hunter for a BLOPs gang. And you don’t know which of these it could be. Further, you don’t know the probability distribution either. So in essence this is uncertainty.
It exists up to the point where the player masters the NPC content. Then the possibility of loss almost surely involves another player(s). For example, your idea of a HIC. I’m not saying “No,” but I am pointing out this is not really risk in and of itself. Once players learn about this, they’ll adapt to it. Where the risk is that suddenly that “tanky” NPC HIC will hold you down for 30 seconds or whatever…and then if a player happens along at that moment bad things could very well happen.
I can agree with this. If you look at the moment that you are alone in the space, the risk of being tackled by a player in reality is zero - yet it is subject to change at any time, which would in turn indicate that the risk never was at zero, merely a false sense of security making the pilot feel the risk was zero.
I’d agree with that as well… until an NPC capital wanders on-grid to take a hand at giving you a bad day. You can always primary tackle… but that doesn’t mean that it will be dead when TSHTF… maybe you were in the process of killing it when the cavalry showed up. That is of course a measure of randomness, but I would say the randomness is moot… that it can happen at all implies the same level of risk, as said in previous paragraph.
I’m certainly not saying that rats are high-risk. They aren’t. Properly fit, you need to either get bent over a barrel by RNJesus or screw up pretty bad. But risk is present (for subcapitals only). I seek to provide comparable levels of NPC risk to capitals.
This is exactly what I’m saying. “The stars aligned, and… ■■■■ I’m tackled, ■■■■ ■■■■ ■■■■ ■■■■ HALP”. Right now, that should never happen. Players are generally stupid and as a result get tackled, but realistically, smart pilots will almost never lose a carrier ratting (the only realistic way is if you probe them down while they’re in warp). Because as you say, they’ve mastered the content. By adding risks which take time to mitigate (said tanky HIC) it doesn’t matter if you master the content, there’s always that chance that you’ll be killing off the HIC when a neut enters local and warps to your site.
By having you in dedicated sites, tackle can easily see the carrier on D, do some rapid dscanfu, and warp to the right capital anom.
Another option is for capital anoms to have drag bubbles. Center of the anom, there’s a bubble. A carrier is most vulnerable if you can catch it in transit to the next site. By adding a bubble to the anom, carriers get sucked in and even if they align out, it takes them time to get out of the bubble… which means that window of opportunity to catch them while they’re “in transit” is significantly larger. It could be potentially disastrous for them if their safes are all going to carry them through the bubble. Now they have to fit a prop mod to mitigate that risk. Sure, the other solution is more safes. Different ways to mitigate the same risk.