If the NPC can kick the player’s teeth in, ratting stop being a viable income stream. Yeah you obviously should not be able to do it AFK but that’s effectively super easy to stop if CCP actually though afk ratting was bad for the game. Content that is too hard never get run by the player because they mostly think “■■■■ working hard for just an extra X%”. If you don’t believe that, try to remember how much people ran drifter incursion once you could no longer cheese the ship killing DD with a bunch of borderline useless ships on grid. Every time CCP added “harder” content, the player base either found a solution to it (Sansha Incursion) or pretty much ignored it (Drifter Incursion).
If you want people to rat in fleet, you don’t have to make it harder, you have to make it worthwhile. Right now, even if you don’t split the gain because you are running with your own alt, you still get more by running 2 sites at the same time with 1 ratting boat in each site than 2 in chain with both ships together unless you are running the one exception to that rule and that involve smartbombing relatively easy sites because of how the spawns work.
