Jita: so why do I have the feeling that the players who profit the most from this mechanic are the veteran players with multiple accounts, not the newbie alpha dwellers who we are supposed to cater to the most nowadays. Or in other words, I think there are more players who can't afford multiple accounts and have a disadvantage because of this, than players who would have a harder time if we make this change.

on the contrary, the longer the bugged system is online, the more you will get used to it, and then get complaints later when its fixed.
single-account new player are not affected by this fix to the aggro mechanic, except them not learning from day1 that a support account can be afk.

Zoom - do you see what they are asking for:
you are not supposed to do itterative develepment - you have to keep all your game changes on your DEV server until you have finished EVERYTHING you have on your todo-list, and then patch it in one go...

I would well be in favour of this change if they balanced the farming bots not needing support. Both new and old players will be happier. Do you think I like taking extra accounts to farm?

Make a specialized PVE bot tier with same bot chasis, so it does not mix balance with the pvp ones.

I remember bullshit like this.  Do you?  Don't *** up the game.  Don't go backwards.

More like walking a tight rope that you're jumping up and down on.

And I know your trying to be funny but actually this is kinda right. I'd much rather every three months have a bunch of stuff pre announced and teased come at once that seemed to be coherently linked together than little changes over that period.

Well as the saying goes, business would be great if it wasn't for all the customers.

Nobody disagrees with the patch, just the timing.

People don't go around "just PvPing someone" in your game.  Any half decent mech/heavy fleet will involve RSAs and that will agro the NPCs.  This may not be such a big issue but it's symptomatic of your one-size-fits-all approach to balance changes.

As for "Ville's easy mode", do you think people who have played this game for more than a month log in every day thinking "ooh I wonder if I will be able to farm that hard spawn today, let me go and try". 
People farm spawns just to make NIC and get resources to do things that are actually fun, like PvP or even production and research.  Please find me one person who plays the game because they just love to farm spawns.

Farming spawns is never going to be "hard" because people will simply move to easier spawns or do something else that gives them better NIC per hour rather than risking their pve bot day in day out on a "hard" spawn.

What you are really doing with a change like that is
1) Changing the economics of farming.  Weather NPCs do or do not shoot your support is not the issue here.  The issue is that you are again increasing the number of man hours required to obtain things in the game.
2) Introducing a bunch of side effects that people will try to exploit in PvP and god knows where else.
3) Also nerfing people who use energy transfer for mining (filthy multiboxing bastards had it coming I guess).

So if your idea of a challenging game is one in which people spend 95% of their time farming, don't be surprised if you are not getting a lot of players.

Again I am not saying that NPCs should not attack follow bots but please be consistent.  With this change it becomes more dangerous to RSA someone than to actually lock and shoot an NPC. It would make sense if RSAing the character actually shooting the NPC caused agro.  It would also make sense if you made the NPCs red but that is a whole different story.

P.S. nice work on the shooting of land tiles, that one's a bit overdue.
P.P.S. space bar does not seem to work in the current test build

I actually agree with Kaldenines, IMO the only fun thing in this game is PVP the rest is mostly garbage.

+ 1

too bad you are making all these changes to AI when all you need is to go back to all red NPCs and Roaming spawns on Alpha  ... and roaming observers as well .... you could never leave your miner truly AFK ... but with so many small changes invested into changing NPC mechanics you have forgotten how well the old ones worked.

It appears you guys are trying to eliminate the "grinding" aspect of pve in perp, but I think you are forgetting players need something to reliably grind in order to accumulate wealth to do other things in game, its unfortunately a basic tenent of all MMOs.

well last time npcs aggroed by module activation like sensor amps, they aggroed a lot further away than usual