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[Graelyn]

Ok, so, events have always been hampered by the lack of ingame coded tools for event actors/producers. I have an idea for making this incredible (I hope).

In the past, actors had only the ability to make one's own ship not register to CONCORD, and that was it, with volunteers unable to, say, spawn NPCs in support, or give any orders for any such NPCs. This limited the hell out of scenarios in space.

Currently, with Devs running the events, NPCs are somewhat more fluid, spawning and de-spawning on command, however, control of the actions of those NPCs is still quite lacking, and I've seen sansha NPC battleships open fire on their own controllers.

Today, while watching the Alliance Tournament, CCP Atropos discussed a new system for load testing on Singularity/Tranquility. A special program running on a blade server duplicates hundreds of 'players' at the same time within the game, and while these drone players cannot duplicate all human player actions, they can jump gates, target specific ships, and other simple commands.

Sounds great for server testing, but when I heard this, I sat up straight. Is it a great leap in logic to adapt this sort of code into use for the events team??

Imagine a hundred (or two!) NPC warships, tackling, targeting, warping around, and even pursuing through gates. Imagine the event actors able to issue these commands and guide in-space action.

I wonder if this application of server testing tech has crossed the minds of CCP.

[Ghost Hunter]

It's an interesting concept, one I definitely would like to see at least the event NPC groups to have.

The lack of control over the NPC behavior, even by developer tools, has disturbed me to a degree. Understandable to be forced to work around, but an odd problem nonetheless.

[Arvo Katsuya]

That's one thing I was curious about. When you're working with a pirate faction that under normal circumstances would open fire on your ship, when you have decent standings with them... shouldn't that stop occuring? I remember hearing that it does to an extent from Ghost, but is unreliable.

Are they ever going to fix that issue? Seems like a hindrance if CCP wants to get people involved on both sides for this event, or future hosted ones.

[Ghost Hunter]

Memory tells me that if you have +5 or +7 (something like that), pirate complex NPCs will ignore you unless you open fire. Belt rats don't have that code line, mostly to stop people from stripping 0.0 belts in total peace I imagine.

[Arnulf Ogunkoya]

Memory tells me that if you have +5 or +7 (something like that), pirate complex NPCs will ignore you unless you open fire. Belt rats don't have that code line, mostly to stop people from stripping 0.0 belts in total peace I imagine.

So belt rats spawning on a pirate loyalist could be from an opposed pirate faction, or maybe even a CONCORD raiding party. That said I don't know if that could be varied based on the people who are in the belt at the time.

[Seriphyn]

If you have +5.00 factional standings with empires, their rats (which come as red on overview) will not shoot you, regardless of whether you in militia or not.

I imagine it would apply to pirate faction NPCs too.

But yeah, that idea is awesome...how much load would it put on the node though?

Heh. lode on ze node...

Fuck.

[Ghost Hunter]

A thought occurred to me looking at some test fittings.

Although making sure the NPCs don't liquefy their own allies would be nice, what about making some of them henchmen? Graelyn's remark about using the CCP stress testing prototype to create "simple AI players" might not necessarily have to be at a huge scale. The current simple AI swarming can be kept, but specific "AI players" could be assigned to loyalists for commanding.

Kind of like having battleship drones, essentially. In this manner, if the loyalists are coordinated, they can focus fire their henchman onto different targets and really give the attackers a run for their money. It would also put more emphasis on killing the loyalists, rather than bludgeoning through the NPCs. Ideally, once all the loyalists are dead - rather than the X number of NPCs - the event/invasion/what not is over.

Edit;

Expanding on that, loyalists could earn some type of credits or "loyalty points", given to them by their respective actors. In the case of the Sansha event, imagine enough of us gathering together to use our own points to spawn a wormhole and accompanying henchman guard. And then we go sansha party time on the planet below.

[Casiella]

The potential for abuse frightens me already.

[Ghost Hunter]

The potential for abuse frightens me already.

Yeah I thought about it some more.

And then I thought about City of Heroes Architect Edition.

So forget that last part of my post - how about the henchman idea in general?

[Graelyn]

edit: nm