The current situation is pretty much this: Get in a fresh server (50fps) Everybody spawns their ships (down to 20-25 fps) Everybody races to be the first at the lucrative outposts for the sweet deals. On their way there, they spawn pirate encounters (fps plummets to unplayable levels) Most people can't fight the pirates due to ships being to weak or engagements making no sense whatsoever. So they just flee the engagements and the pirates seem to remain at least temporary. This seems to be one of the reasons for high memory use on the clients. On top of that, even if you try to fight the pirate NPC's, they seem to just spawn backup so that the framerate drops even more. (might be because of other players using the same route). This is completely out of hand!!! Nobody will fight multiple pirate groups at a time. I tried it several times (in a Cutty and a Glaive) but every time, the client crashes after a while (probably just the sheer amount of npc's being to much for it). Proposal: - Do not spawn any pirates in the first 15-20 minutes of the server going online! Since this is when everybody is spawning the first wave of ships at Port Olisar. -After that, do not spawn more than one pirate encounter per instance at a time. -Do not spawn ships, that can not be fought by whoever triggers the encounter. Since this only leads to people fleeing the encounter, and the pirates remaining on the server while not giving any useful gameplay. -Do not let pirates spawn or follow people to Port Olisar. Since this is high traffic area anyway, it is not adding useful gameplay, as long as these encounters are so resource heavy on the servers/clients. If at all, only spawn small groups of ships up to Cutty size (never more than 3 at a time, and no Cats or Connies). Bigger ships make no sense. -PO should be security protected, and as such, should not have pirates anywhere in sensor range. The pirates should not go into a 30km zone around PO. Which would leave them out of sensor range (with buffer). All this would be just temporary, so that we can play and test the current build without these horrendous framerates. When range culling and Object container streaming is in, it could be changed to whatever makes sense for gameplay. (Caterpillars spawning on another caterpillar with only a pilot make no sense, since both can't kill eachother with no gunners). Bigger pirate groups should never be spawning on single players (depends on their ship) as long as the needed gameplay elements to fight the big groups are not in game (service beacon to call in support).