Essentially headhunters scale differently than region based enemies... Hmm. It's still rather disturbing considering my main ship was strong enough to solo several Wipe Out Pirate missions within trinium space. My ship, having been made of entirely trinium itself had outgrown the challenge of trinium space. If Headhunters scale in accordance to my ship's material (or maybe hiring faction) it is still baffling that the omicron was roughly 10x higher than my own. I've encountered head hunters with 2x or even 3x omicron to my own ship in regions from time to time but considering that I ran no mods and the server was only 1 difficulty up from normal it came as a shock to witness a 2 second destruction of a ship that otherwise should have been seeking xanion region challenges.
I dunno.
In any game where I die or lose everything because I took a risk/gamble or did something stupid I can live with that. That's on me. Jump a naonite corvette into xannion space and get lit up by 10 ships. My fault. Try to take on swokes with a multipurpose ship lacking decent guns and explode. My fault. Forget to repair inertial dampeners and slam into a friendly station. My fault.
In this case I did everything in my power to not risk jeopardizing that ship and RNG omicron of god levels the likes I've never seen (for that area) came in and wiped me out. It's like a level 100 dragon spawning in a starter zone in a fantasy game and torching all the low level newbs lol. Even if declarations of war happen you'd think the headhunters difficulty would be on par with or noticably higher than the faction that hires them... But that level of power was just insane. If it's normal for headhunters to scale up that high while everything else was pathetic at that point... I dunno. The balance as is just doesn't feel right. I had no time to turn, no time to boost, or target the ship. It was over in 2 seconds. There's challenge and then there's that. I don't think I'll be making a return if headhunters can warp into lower level areas and potentially wipe out your entire fleet and chain of established stations.
I do appreciate the response though Echo. As it stands though I'm not eager to deal with potentially going through that again. Maybe later down the line with more updates and improvements. Great game but it's kind of a deal breaker when you lose weeks of progress in that manner while paying for a server.