I'm totally down with npcs shooting mines when they are in station sectors, or monitored space. But I'd like to suggest removing that feature for the hive. Mines are extremely limited in their uses before npcs perfectly shot them and destroyed them. But now they are in my opinion completely useless if npcs are in sector. Because they automatically clear minefields in maybe a few minutes without dying. It makes grinding harder overall, and I believe (in my opinion) that it would be the best for VO.

Seems to me the issue is less with the NPCs and more with the mines. Traditionally, mines aren't easy to detect. VO mines, last I checked (a while ago), are visible so long as you're within radar range. NPCs, being able to identify a target on radar can obviously shoot them from the maximum distance safely.

It's been asked before in the past that mines only be detectable from a very close distance. This, with a % chance that an NPC will fail to identify it, would make mines better in all situations.

Even if the mine detection range has been shrunk already, NPCs are still able to react faster than PCs, so they could potentially halt their movement and clear the mines much easier than PCs.

Part of the problem was also their usage in killing large numbers of Guardians and other higher-value NPCs.

Understand, this isn't about the grind or the farming side of things, not really anyway, it was more that players were creating situations that were becoming problematic in terms of server load.

Like we had sectors getting so far behind they were starting to automatically "instance" and deploy other behaviours that should only kick in if there were like a thousand people in the sector.

But, because players would jam large numbers of NPCs in cracks and carefully deploy mines and the like, it was.. creating collision-detection scenarios that were far worse than any normal use-case of the sector.

Having NPCs prioritize mines was one way to deal with that (we did several things, in fact, including different attack behaviours, clustering / grouping, and so on), and it was needed at the time.

I'm not against doing things like what draugath mentions, with detection distance changes, and making the NPCs have their awareness limited in the same way.

But, understand that if the goal of the thread here is to return to large-scale farming of NPCs using mines, that's probably not going to happen, because it has serious scalability issues for the server.

Fair enough. +1 to what draugath said

Part of the problem was also their usage in killing large numbers of Guardians and other higher-value NPCs.

Could we have it where lower level bots are a bit more derpy when comes to mines? Whereas bots like guardians and assaults instead have much better mine detection and destruction programing?

I'd suggest that bots simply ignore mines that their path does not take them within maybe 500 meters. Mines way off in the distance are no threat to them, so why bother flying way the hell out there to kill them.

What LNH suggests is fairly simple to implement, and shouldn't have too many negative ramifications, I think.

WAF, it doesn't really matter how high or low-level the bot is, the problem is if people basically use mines to farm them, and cause excessively high collision detection load on the server. The physics gets intense.. and we're only making that worse now (physically interactive debris, asteroids, etc).

Basically, there are two takeaways from what I'm saying:

1) I'm fine with making tweaks to make mines "less pointless" in sectors containing NPCs.. like reducing their instant desire to fly "far" over solely to destroy your new mine field.

2) We should not think of issues relating to grind in terms of reverting to prior behaviours of farming bots with mines. If grind needs to be tweaked, like drop rates and such, then that's really a different discussion.

Part of the challenge of designing tasks of relative difficulty is that players will often find some optimal economy-of-scale model for achieving the task at an industrial level, which basically makes the task easier than intended (game balance issue). However, the problem here wasn't really that, so much as the particular technique of economy-of-scale causing a server-performance problem.

So, let's separate grind-issues into grind-discussions, and mine-issues into mine-related discussions, and keep them definitively separate.

That's actually a mind clearing answer. Completely understand. Can I make a seperate thread for drop rates and grind improvement? After static routes and mine fields being unusable alot of the economy in VO has been considerably harder on capital ship users, as there really isn't any trade routes that capital ships can make that are worth the haul (IMO, as I haven't seen any routes worth taking outside of one system jump)

Yes, please make different threads about different topics.

Noting that we made NPCs ignore mines that are further than 1000 meters away, in non-station sectors, as-of 1.8.547, this week.

NPCs in station sectors will still be very aggressive towards mines.

Seems to me bot farming with mines is a problem

but bots shooting mines makes them useless

so why not mines only kill players not bots (bots ignore mines)

so why not mines only kill players not bots (bots ignore mines)

I use TU mines to take enemies off my butt when flying capital ships. This would make the TU mine even more useless. -1

so why not mines only kill players not bots (bots ignore mines)

Basically because: Bots and players have "reasonable" equivalency in VO, and always shall.

It's up there with "no safe place" and "real-time combat".

The reason being.. I'm trying to move towards a place where we have.. player trade-captains and NPC trade-captains, player combat fleets and NPC combat fleets, and they're all mixed up together.

I don't want to get into "and mines can damage this group, and not that group".

Also, because the whole reasoning behind the initial thread here, while well-intentioned, was going in the wrong direction: If we have a grind-balance issue, then let's look at that. Let's not try and introduce other problems that used-to-exist so that we can avoid a grind-balance issue.

NPCs are now good at mine clearing. But then, so are players, frankly. So, life goes on.