First, let me address the obvious knee-jerk reaction I will get for posting this: “Go to low-sec or null-sec if you want harder rats!”. Answer: You are right. I do when I want to kill stronger rats and get better bounties and loot. The point of this post is just to show the inconsistency and give new players more variety and challenge as they improve their skills. Right now, from 0.5 above, you usually get the same old 10k bounty rats, with a rare exception once in a while. I suggest the following:
Probably. Power creep has made the anemic ones there are kinda useless for everything. And CCP’s move to populate the universe with more “realistic” ones like with Pirate FOBs and mining fleets kinda petered out.
There probably should be a more challenging gradient of NPCs, ideally with motivations and consequences to fight. And there should, occasionally be ones that you just can beat that show up and ruin your day. The trigs idea is kinda along those lines, with a wormhole spawn bringing unexpected spice to a highsec system, but they are too predictable and too easy to trivially invalidate with standings.
Ideally though, they aren’t just random, but would be tied in to the universe somehow and player actions. It’s a tall order that requires a lot of work and thought to get right, but it is something that CCP has expressed interest in and I’d love to see.
I like that idea. How about a mix of Trigs and really tough rats, like -0.9 rats? Also, reduce the speed of mining guns to half so it takes twice as long to mine anything?
You can see trigs sometimes in mining belts around Jita, they are already there, killing orcas and exhumers. Also watch out on gates.
The other hard rats are the empire mining response fleets, if you shoot the NPC miners.
So plenty of hard stuff to kill, if you really want it.
I’m talking they attack even if you don’t shoot the NPC miners. Just making the belts battle zones, killing fields. That ought to provide content for them miners.
That’s what I’m talking about. There could also be toxic gas in space that damage your ship to where you have to back off the belts, recharge shields and get back in to mine.
HiSec should get more dangerous but also more lucrative as you move down from 1.0 to 0.5. And I don’t just mean CONCORD response times, but they way Crimewatch and flagging works, how strong and also how aggressive NPCs are. I’d like to see low SP players having to form groups to survive in 0.5.
I’d like to see low SP players having to stay in 0.8 and above due to the threats in lower systems. I’d like to see 0.7 systems and under be as risky as null or more. Trigs, tough NPC, mine fields, gankers… all those need to permanently be in belts and even around stations.
I’d like CONCORD to only be in higher sec space like 0.8 and above.
As for hisec being lucrative, I think the loot and mining yields should be cut by half or more.
That’s the point. I think there’s not enough threats to new players. Hisec is already too large in my opinion. I think hisec with CONCORD intervention should be constrained to 0.8 and up while 0.7 and on down should be like null.