I hate pussy pirates.

The thing I absolutely despise the most of this game, if anything, are pussy pirates. I don't mean low-tier enemies whom clearly stand no chance against my combat-engineered Anaconda and get obliterated within seconds.

It's the f×cking big threats that actually can stand toe-to-toe with my most-hardened vessels, who then turn tail and run anyway like goddamn cowards.

I cannot STAND these Dangerous-ranked enemies in equally-hardened vessels whom jump me while I'm scanning the system for my mission target, rip my ass out of Supercruise, spend like five minutes battling tooth-and-nail with me, jump out of the area when I've almost ground them into dust….

Just to come right back as soon as I jump back into Supercruise, fully healed, restocked, shields charged, and acting like they didn't just flee in terror of me.

This is not immersive. This is not fun. It is a tooth-grinding waste of my f×cking time. They are a constant nuisance that turns what should be an otherwise simple (if not dull and routine) black box salvage mission onto a twenty-minute slog, slowly depleting my vessel's resources while these NPC pussies have an unlimited tap from the ether.

Frontier Devs. Make this shit stop, now.

It is physically painful to watch NPC enemies flee from me in fear of their lives after a tough battle, just to be right on my ass ten seconds later as if the encounter never happened. It doesn't iNcReAsE the ChAlLeNgE, it's blatant cowardice, NPC exploitation, and meaningless busywork to waste my time.

I have a pathos for this kind of thing: "You want to stop me and fight me? You get ONE shot. ONE. If you start losing and then run, I will not submit to interdiction again, because you are blatantly wasting my time."

So. Rather than just vent and be angery about it, I have a proposal on how to fix the issue: star system limits. Let's say that you get interdicted by an enemy tied to a mission you're running; you fight them, they're almost destroyed, and they jump away. Fine! That's perfectly realistic, I also flee when I don't think I stand a chance in a fight.

BUT– here's the difference. That NPC in particular, and all NPCs on that chain of mission-related enemies, cannot find you for three or more jumps. In that same star system where you encounter them and they fled, you can jump to at least two more star systems before encountering them again.

This way, the programming doesn't really have to be changed all that much; all that's really being altered is an additional timer(?) or flag in their coding that restricts their spawn based on a number of jumps or length of time in-game.

It's a really simple fix that will prevent players from being caught in this hyper-frustrating loop of being interdiction, wasting time and resources fighting, watching the enemy turn tail, getting back up to speed, and then immediately being interdiction again by the exact same asshat.

At least in this scenario, there is the plausibility that you and the enemy have equal opportunity to dock, repair, and reload, rather than the expected (and much-hated) probability of them insta-fixing offscreen whilst leaving the player zero time to recover or take a breather.

I get so tired of these encounters that I have to stop playing, lest I rip my controller in half out of sheer unvindicated rage. Nothing frustrates me about ED than the hypocritical bravado of people I just sent packing, coming back for a second swing that I know is going to end the exact same way as before.

Every time it happens, I don't feel like a vessel Commander being pitted against the overwhelming odds of the universe; I feel like an estranged uncle being forced to play nice with his nephews and nieces whom immediately begin to cry as soon as they start losing, ruining the mood and good times; then, as soon as they're over their tantrum, they get in my face less than five minutes later with the most annoying actions and words they can conjure up, including claims of victory.

I hate this shit. Make it stop. I want to kill myself. Please go die in a fire. The end.