Honestly,
What is the goal?
More ships lost was the goal, apparently
Scramming rats = no more rattlesnakes micro jumping to safety when new signature appears in system.
More connections = more stuff to shoot
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Isn’t it kind of dumb that the rats don’t have scrams? If the technology exists then surely the NPCs would have it, too. The capsuleers have been massacring them for decades.
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Why is a null sec player complaining about this?
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1 - Mess with bots that aren’t prepared for it
2 - Mess with people who expect easy content
3 - Mess with nullsec people who enjoy too much safety
4 - Mess with nullsec people who are having it too easy
3, 4.
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That’s a nullsec players who is selling empty wormholes, so the changes might lead to him lowering the prices.
They really need to make null sec rats, including the ones that show up at belts, scram more.
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That’s something I’ve never understood. Pirate NPC vessels should be equipped for their role, and their tackle ships should mount warp disruptors or scramblers. The latter would be especially useful to them because it shuts down MWDs and would force players to adapt to what the rats carry even further than they already do.
Hell, I even wrote up a potential Serpentis rat rework a few months back on Reddit. It’s just theory-crafting, but hey! Without hope for the game’s future, then what are we left with but despair?
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That would be extremely hard and would stop almost any activity regarding rats, if their amount would not be adjusted (look to burner missions, for example).
No it’s not.
Remember that in the lore, capsuleers are a very few. Rats are not fit to deal with capsuleers - that’s why you massacre them.
Why would you fit tackle when you can alpha the target ?
It would be one thing if they don’t equip their ship for capsuleers. But they always charge in straight to battle. After 16 years of these confrontations, you would think that word might be getting around that Gilas are too powerful to engage with “mercenary rookie” ships.
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You misunderstand greatly.
Just because capsuleers killed millions of rats, does not mean it’s relevant against the trillions of rats that there is.
You’re more likely to die from an illness than meet a capsuleer.
Or even to commit suicide in 2017
20T bounties, assuming 1M/rat that makes 20M rats , so over the year it’s 140M rats.
Assuming 1T pirats , 100 years life expectancy, that’s 10B death per year, so 1.4% of deaths are by capsuleer hand.
suicide ratio in 2017 was 1.67%
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Perhaps.
The avg rat is under 100k isk each, try those numbers again.
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lmao what thefuck?
This is flat-earther levels of “math”.
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prove it ?
literally no argument.
That’s going too far, I think. Setting aside the difficulty in programming rat behavior to mimic the responses of an experienced player, doing that would immediately turn way too many people off of fighting rats because it would be so brutal.
It’s also not lore-compliant; capsuleer ships are supposed to be OP compared to standard vessels.
Most rats players will face tend to be pirates, who would fit warp disruptors and scrams because they’re in the business of attacking others to steal their valuables.
This. It’s one thing for a group of pirate ships to attack a player flying a frigate or destroyer, but it’s another thing entirely for a trio of frigates to warp into an asteroid field, look at the dozen-strong fleet of barges and Orcas mining there, and think the proper course of action is to attack them head-on.
I’d much prefer it if the rat logic allowed for pirates to realize they’re completely outmatched and GTFO. NPC ships in Elite: Dangerous will do that (and drop canisters of “organic waste” when they do! 
), so why can’t they do the same in EvE?
I think the rat numbers are one instance where we have to engage in the separation of story and game mechanics. IIRC, going by the New Eden Crew Guidelines, the number of rat ships Capsuleers have killed over EvE’s lifetime would have resulted in more deaths than the entire population of New Eden.
Considering how many Blood Raiders the Goons alone have slaughtered since they moved back to Delve, the entire Covenant should have collapsed due to personnel shortages by now. But they haven’t, so clearly there’s some degree of dissociation between the lore and pure gameplay.
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in the context, rats is the short for pirat NPCs.
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Lore can and should be adjusted to meet gameplay needs.