Crime and Punishment not fit for purpose - needs overhauling

[Mr Lindsay]

How much of what is being discussed here solely relates to Interdictions scenarios, rather than gameplay at Station instances and such were help from system forces isn't far away?
Wouldn't a better solution be to remove interdictions altogether, and force gankers/pirates to ply their trade at resources sites and stations outside the No Fire Zone? (PvPers could still meet at agreed locations, beacons, etc.)
How much would be lost from the game from losing Interdictions versus how much would be gained by making Open a less hostile environment for less experienced players?

That, or make the barrier for Interdiction higher. Not by changing the mini-game, but the rules. Maybe you can only Interdict a ship with a equal/lower hull mass than your own, forcing gankers to use off-meta ships if they want to annoy more people, and giving peaceful traders the option of the T10 as a genuinely safer ship to use.

 

[CaptainPugwash]

How much of what is being discussed here solely relates to Interdictions scenarios, rather than gameplay at Station instances and such were help from system forces isn't far away?

The discussion in general isn't limited to SC and interdictions.

Wouldn't a better solution be to remove interdictions altogether, and force gankers/pirates to ply their trade at resources sites and stations outside the No Fire Zone? (PvPers could still meet at agreed locations, beacons, etc.)
How much would be lost from the game from losing Interdictions versus how much would be gained by making Open a less hostile environment for less experienced players?

You would lose a fundamental aspect of the game, which has been there from the start: many ganking scenarios have taken place around stations, and a weak ship can easily be destroyed via ramming for example. You can't do PvP piracy via previous agreement, and it's rare nowadays (but not impossible) to find a cmdr with a mining ship in a RES. It used to happen during the Borann days (good memories of that one).

That, or make the barrier for Interdiction higher. Not by changing the mini-game, but the rules. Maybe you can only Interdict a ship with a equal/lower hull mass than your own, forcing gankers to use off-meta ships if they want to annoy more people, and giving peaceful traders the option of the T10 as a genuinely safer ship to use.

Any changes to interdictions will have the same effect on gankers and pirates alike. The discussions here are centered around possible changes to the C&P system in general.

 

[Screemonster]

The main issue is that CMDRs not interested in PvP have no practical defense against gankers.

I need to make one of those integrated survivability onion memes these days because that's simply not true. You may have no practical offence but that's an entirely different thing.
"Don't be there" is the outer layer of those defence in depth things for a reason and I'm not even talking about modes - you don't have to go into the hot zone. Why are you even in deciat anyway? Or shinrarta - are you buying a new ship? How often do you buy and outfit new ships anyway?
"Don't be detected" is difficult while the bandwidth meter exists, but possible if it's not a lone operator and your bandwidth gets concealed among others.
"Don't be acquired" - don't show on sensors and don't let them see/find you, fly a build that isn't easily identifiable as a target, throttle down in supercruise to reduce your sensor footprint.
"Don't be engaged" - SCO the hell out of there, drop and highwake before they get on your tail, don't let them get behind you.

The outer four layers of defence, the most important ones all take place before anyone has even popped hardpoints. If you even see an interdiction tunnel there's a lot you could have done to prevent that happening, so the assertion that there's "no practical defense" is nonsense.

It takes seconds to destroy someone unprepared, even in the most severe ATR deployment (as in, instant drop on shots landing post ATR warning and auto-targeting) an attacker would 'win' since many don't care about destruction (since its just credits).

I was doing my joke pirate routine last night and pulled a shieldless cutter in sirius - when we both dropped, my phantom (which I specifically built to be light enough to achieve maximum boost speed) bumped into him while we were tumbling. I was completely unscathed, the cutter was knocked to a little over 70% hull. From an accidental collision. There's absolutely no way he would have lasted more than two volleys if I'd actually decided to open fire. Hell, a single deliberate plasma-ram would probably do the job. There's no police response that will save someone who can literally be killed in a single shot.

The sheer disparity of build strengths in this game turns any argument on whether attacking someone is fair into a debate on the Eggshell Skull Rule.

(We got chatting about builds and I told him even a class 6 shield would massively improve his survivability.)

 

[Rubbernuke]

I was doing my joke pirate routine last night and pulled a shieldless cutter in sirius - when we both dropped, my phantom (which I specifically built to be light enough to achieve maximum boost speed) bumped into him while we were tumbling. I was completely unscathed, the cutter was knocked to a little over 70% hull. From an accidental collision. There's absolutely no way he would have lasted more than two volleys if I'd actually decided to open fire. Hell, a single deliberate plasma-ram would probably do the job. There's no police response that will save someone who can literally be killed in a single shot.

The sheer disparity of build strengths in this game turns any argument on whether attacking someone is fair into a debate on the Eggshell Skull Rule.

(We got chatting about builds and I told him even a class 6 shield would massively improve his survivability.)

Exactly. No matter how draconian C+P gets, it all starts with the person on the end. If they don't prepare, nothing will help them.

Also you must be mistaken about the shieldless Cutter as no one ever ever ever runs without a shield, or so I'm told on another thread about Open.

 

[Kira Goto]

Also you must be mistaken about the shieldless Cutter as no one ever ever ever runs without a shield, or so I'm told on another thread about Open.

Well, “akshually”… points toward own Cutter which has always run a shield even in solo play (because I would occasionally have fun with an interdicting NPC pirate)

At some point I even began to use the military slots for hull reinforcements. The horror.

 

[aRJay]

Just because you have a shield fitted doesn’t mean you have the power (priorities) to have it working when not landed.

 

[Kira Goto]

Just because you have a shield fitted doesn’t mean you have the power (priorities) to have it working when not landed.

… then you’d probably be flying an explorer, not a trader.

Although it wouldn’t be the first time I heard of such build… ‘choices’.

 

[Robert Maynard]

Reminder to participants: please discuss the topic. Other partipants are not the topic. Failure to comply will result in advisories, warnings and / or reply bans.

 

[Rubbernuke]

 

[Rainbro]

Better tutorials and outfitting information would go a long way, I think. New players build to the threats they face, which 99% of the time is like, one interdiction from a Mostly Harmless Asp every so often. They have no idea about the 1% chance of encountering an actual ship until it happens and deletes them in a single click, and that feels really bad.

Part of that is just NPCs being bad which is much harder to fix, but a few warnings in Outfitting like "you have allocated 2% of your ship's capacity towards defensive modules, are you sure that's a good idea?" might help. The current tutorials do nothing to teach you about the actual reality of the game either, everything is like "use your convienient wing of allies to fight off the attacker" and not "you are in danger, run". The Pirate Defence tutorial is straight up broken, if you need a laugh just load it up and take notes of everything that's wrong with it.

 

[Screemonster]

everything is like "use your convienient wing of allies to fight off the attacker" and not "you are in danger, run".

Yeah, of the combat tutorials that are there, all of them are focused on "defeat your enemy" - whether it's the SLF one telling you to use a fighter to kill the guy attacking your keelback, or the basic/advanced combat tutorials having you use a sidewinder to kill some eagles, there's nothing that tells you about defence or evasion.

None of the tutorials anywhere tell you about sys pips for instance.

A tutorial where you get hyperdicted by a cyclops in a ship that doesn't have any AX weapons fitted would be fantastic. The voiceover could start by telling you to put pips into sys to keep your shields up longer, telling you to not to fly in a straight line, if you try to low-wake the masslock warning comes up and your tutor screams at you "he's mass-locking us, jump to another system or we'll never get out!" etc etc etc

 

[Rubbernuke]

Yeah, of the combat tutorials that are there, all of them are focused on "defeat your enemy" - whether it's the SLF one telling you to use a fighter to kill the guy attacking your keelback, or the basic/advanced combat tutorials having you use a sidewinder to kill some eagles, there's nothing that tells you about defence or evasion.

None of the tutorials anywhere tell you about sys pips for instance.

A tutorial where you get hyperdicted by a cyclops in a ship that doesn't have any AX weapons fitted would be fantastic. The voiceover could start by telling you to put pips into sys to keep your shields up longer, telling you to not to fly in a straight line, if you try to low-wake the masslock warning comes up and your tutor screams at you "he's mass-locking us, jump to another system or we'll never get out!" etc etc etc

Basically Freespace Intro as a mission?

That would be intense....

 

[Screemonster]

Back onto topic, one of the big problems with the crime and punishment update is that the most egregious parts of it, the parts that cause the most gameplay problems to minor, accidental or incidental criminals while posing little trouble to career criminals, were solutions to things that were already solved or rendered moot by other parts of it.

"Bounties never expiring", for instance, imposed a massive inconvenience upon people who incurred an accidental friendly fire assault bounty (especially since "reckless weapon discharge" fines didn't exist at the time!) by turning it from "wait 10 minutes" to "go find an interstellar factor". Murder on the other hand already had a week long timer on it, so the new system - even before turning yourself in was a thing - allowed you to clean yourself of a murder charge in less time. This strikes me as, well, backwards.

And the other angle is a sentence that stuck with me in the middle of a gamedev argument in a completely unrelated game where someone was trying to push for something "immersive" about the "purity" of the game experience by banning a basic human interaction, and someone replied to them as follows:

"The moment you lose sight of the fact that this is a game, the objective of which is to have fun, is the moment you are out of touch."

If I had my way that sentence would be nailed to the door of every gamedev studio on the planet. Whatever system you implement should not be an impediment to the overall objective of the game.

Personally, my ideal C&P system is a hybrid of the new and old. Bring back the old flowchart.

• FINES:
  • If you commit a fineable offence, you get a fine of whatever value and have one week to pay it off.
  • If you don't pay it off, you incur a bounty of the same value as the fine, for a duration equal to the log10 of the value in weeks.
  • Anonymous access protocols are not imposed for fines.
  • Any work carried out for the issuing faction (or profits earned from trade at their stations, etc) are garnished to pay off fines prior to paying you.
• BOUNTIES:
  • You're a valid kill, obviously. Stations will shoot at you if their cops spot you.
  • Anonymous access protocols are enforced.
  • All offences to have fixed durations, rather than based on value. Assault is 10 minutes, etc.
  • MURDER bounty values to scale with notoriety according to the current model. Duration is 1 week per point of notoriety, min of 1 week.
  • Timers are not consecutive, committing an offence resets the timer to whichever is longer out of the crime you just committed.
  • Remove paying off by IF - the only ways to clear a bounty are to wait out the timer or get sent to a detention centre (by claim or by turning yourself in)
• LEGACY FINES (renamed to "outstanding warrants")
  • An expired bounty becomes an outstanding warrant.
  • Can be paid off like fines at authority contacts. Unlike fines, anonymous access protocols are imposed.
  • No longer a free and valid kill, but it is added to your rebuy like anything else if you die in that jurisdiction.
  • Like fines, earnings are garnished to pay them off if you do work in the faction's jurisdiction.
  • Slowly diminish on a proportional basis either over time or by completing missions / gaining reputation.

The purpose of this flowchart is, essentially, to reward staying clean or laying low and actively flying around with a price on your head rather than the current system of just getting rid of your bounties ASAP.
Notoriety and anonymous access protocols were the best parts of the C&P update under Sandro and imo they were all that was needed - people just flying around while wanted without a care in the world was solved by anonymity protocols, while the frankly pitiful "5000 per kill" murder bounty was solved by notoriety. Incorporating those two features into the existing system is all that was ever needed imo.

You might notice that I left hot ships and modules out of the flowchart - that's because it's, in my opinion, an awful system that causes more problems than it solves. The entire reason it exists was because "oh no, people are ganking in their ferdelances then getting their friends to claim them in a sidewinder so they don't have to pay a ferdelance rebuy" - this was solved by the introduction of scaling murder bounties with notoriety (so the bounty for a murder spree would very quickly end up being more than the rebuy regardless of whether it happened in the FDL or the sidewinder) and rendered entirely moot by the introduction of the "hand yourself in" system which allows you to bypass the rebuy entirely.

Now, you might be asking, now that Interstellar Factors are no longer able to clean your bounties, and odyssey already made them so you don't need them to claim out-of-jurisdiction vouchers, what purpose are they?

My proposal? The dodgy criminal organisation that can only exist in lowsec and anarchy should be used to commit CRIME.

Specifically, PLACE HITS ON PEOPLE. DO IT. IT'LL BE FUN. IT'LL BE GREAT. DO IT.

• Your friendly local Interstellar Factors contact allows you to place HITS on people. Like OTHER PLAYERS JUST DO IT.
• You pay a BUNCH OF CASH into a cash pot that gets assigned in your name against that other player. That player now has a HIT on them for that value minus the 25% cut taken by interstellar factors.
• Blowing up someone who has a HIT on them is obviously a goddamn crime and imposes murder bounties where applicable but notoriety is not considered as per murdering a mission target.
• You get paid whatever their rebuy was out of the pot per active pot. Yes, this is largely to avoid the "get my mate to claim me while I'm in a cheap ship" problem.
• Yes, if they have multiple separate hits against them then a kill will pay you for all of them.
• If the pot exceeds the target's rebuy, any excess remains and can be claimed by a subsequent hit.
• The target can visit the interstellar factors themselves and pull an UNO REVERSE by doubling the pot. This "whatever they're paying you" reversal is not subject to the 25% fee - if A pays 1.25 million to put a hit on B, B now has a 1 million price on their head, B can pay 2 million to not only remove the 1 million from themselves, but put the million credit hit on A.

Basically people are already doing this outside of the game so might as well make it official.

THIS IS A CRIME AND PUNISHMENT THREAD AND EVERYONE KEEPS TALKING ABOUT PUNISHMENT ONLY LET'S ADD SOME CRIME

 

[ꝁestrel]

The outer four layers of defence, the most important ones all take place before anyone has even popped hardpoints. If you even see an interdiction tunnel there's a lot you could have done to prevent that happening, so the assertion that there's "no practical defense" is nonsense.

Casual PvE players do not want to:

• Spend any time learning ship builds or even minimal engineering.
• Fly ships they don't want to fly even if those ships are more survivable.
• Go somewhere else.
• Focus all of their attention on the game while listening to a podcast/audiobook or watching Youtube.

Destroying a casual PvE player in open is a near 100% guarantee and that will never change. No amount of guides, essays, or tutorial videos is going to change that. Occasionally you'll run into an experienced (read: not casual) CMDR and they'll know how to high wake out.

Years ago I spent a year doing PvP piracy in this game. Once I fine tuned the build it was braindead easy. Eventually I quit because there was no challenge involved, no real credits to be earned, and I realized that all I was doing was annoying noobs most of the time.

Your defense-in-depth example completely misses the point. Trust me, I get it. Concepts like defense-in-depth are fun for you as they are for me. I love the idea of jumping into a system with unknown PvP dangers and then having to use situational awareness to stay safe. Bonus points if mechanical skill (eg: aim, timing) is involved. But what you're missing is that these concepts (defense-in-depth, situational awareness, etc) are not fun for casual PvE (majority) of players. They either don't have time to spend on it or they don't like wasting time on things they don't enjoy.

That's why I'm saying defense isn't practical. I'm not saying defense isn't possible. I'm saying that, realistically, casual PvE players aren't going to spend time gearing up to defend themselves in an activity they have no interest in.

There's no police response that will save someone who can literally be killed in a single shot.

The way Eve Online solves this problem is to make high-sec ganks such a pain in the ass that you'll only ever waste the time on it for someone worth killing. There are some corps that still do it just for fun but it's so inefficient that you could autopilot through high-sec systems and the risk of getting ganked is like <5%.

One of the many ways Elite's C+P is broken is that there's no cost/risk associated with ganking.

That shieldless Cutter you interdicted? It doesn't matter how well equipped it was. It could have been a fully engineered build. There was zero risk to you for doing it. If they tried to fight back they'd lose. If they ran away you lost like 60 seconds of time and no resources. If you somehow managed to start losing to a Cutter (lol) then you could just jump away and lose nothing at all. No risk, no skill -- but the Cutter had their time wasted for being forced into an activity they didn't want. And it was a lose-lose for them no matter what. Even if they got away they earned nothing and lost time.

 

[Darrack]

Casual PvE players do not want to:

• Spend any time learning ship builds or even minimal engineering.
• Fly ships they don't want to fly even if those ships are more survivable.
• Go somewhere else.
• Focus all of their attention on the game while listening to a podcast/audiobook or watching Youtube.

Destroying a casual PvE player in open is a near 100% guarantee and that will never change. No amount of guides, essays, or tutorial videos is going to change that. Occasionally you'll run into an experienced (read: not casual) CMDR and they'll know how to high wake out.

Years ago I spent a year doing PvP piracy in this game. Once I fine tuned the build it was braindead easy. Eventually I quit because there was no challenge involved, no real credits to be earned, and I realized that all I was doing was annoying noobs most of the time.

Your defense-in-depth example completely misses the point. Trust me, I get it. Concepts like defense-in-depth are fun for you as they are for me. I love the idea of jumping into a system with unknown PvP dangers and then having to use situational awareness to stay safe. Bonus points if mechanical skill (eg: aim, timing) is involved. But what you're missing is that these concepts (defense-in-depth, situational awareness, etc) are not fun for casual PvE (majority) of players. They either don't have time to spend on it or they don't like wasting time on things they don't enjoy.

That's why I'm saying defense isn't practical. I'm not saying defense isn't possible. I'm saying that, realistically, casual PvE players aren't going to spend time gearing up to defend themselves in an activity they have no interest in.


The way Eve Online solves this problem is to make high-sec ganks such a pain in the ass that you'll only ever waste the time on it for someone worth killing. There are some corps that still do it just for fun but it's so inefficient that you could autopilot through high-sec systems and the risk of getting ganked is like <5%.

One of the many ways Elite's C+P is broken is that there's no cost/risk associated with ganking.

That shieldless Cutter you interdicted? It doesn't matter how well equipped it was. It could have been a fully engineered build. There was zero risk to you for doing it. If they tried to fight back they'd lose. If they ran away you lost like 60 seconds of time and no resources. If you somehow managed to start losing to a Cutter (lol) then you could just jump away and lose nothing at all. No risk, no skill -- but the Cutter had their time wasted for being forced into an activity they didn't want. And it was a lose-lose for them no matter what. Even if they got away they earned nothing and lost time.

Much of what you say is excellent, i cant be bothered with folks wasting my time, however don't tar all PVE players with the same brush, i don't do the same to real Pvpers who actually want a fair fight which I'm always up for.

Casual PvE players do not want to:

• Spend any time learning ship builds or even minimal engineering.

I have over 50 fully engineered ships (i enjoy the grind) most would easily survive in Open but my time is my own

• Fly ships they don't want to fly even if those ships are more survivable.

The reason i fly in a PVE PG is exactly this reason, i can fly anything i want, maximise it for the reason it was built as long as it can shrug off NPCs

• Go somewhere else.

Not an option, if i want to go to Deciat, then to Deciat i shall go avoiding the muppets

• Focus all of their attention on the game while listening to a podcast/audiobook or watching Youtube.

Actually all i want is to fight Thargoids without worrying about muppets attacking folks with AX loadouts and occasionally to mine/explore in a relaxing format (NPCs excepted).

There was zero risk to you for doing it

Never a truer word spoken and in many similar threads this is always what they always forget.
Yes i can get away from pretty much any ganker with a decent build and the skills i have, why should i have to bother?
I do play in Open from time to time, neither my Combat Cutter or Combat Vette has ever been interdicted more than once by the same person.

I did say some time ago that this thread would soon be driving up to the front door, i can hear the bell boy approaching for the bags.

O7

 

[ꝁestrel]

Much of what you say is excellent, i cant be bothered with folks wasting my time, however don't tar all PVE players with the same brush, i don't do the same to real Pvpers who actually want a fair fight which I'm always up for.

Yea you're right. I wasn't trying to tar but I was generalizing. The reality is more subtle but I couldn't think of a way to express it concisely.

I'll try to clarify on some of the points below.

I have over 50 fully engineered ships (i enjoy the grind) most would easily survive in Open but my time is my own

So do a lot of PvErs. Just keep in mind I'm referring to casual PvE players which I'm assuming you're not. Obviously there's a spectrum there too. I'd wager a lot of casual explorers have fully engineered FSDs.

My experience when pirating was that most players just had a mish-mash of whatever components were available to them. When I talked to a few they didn't even know about EDDB (when it was still around) and that they could just look up whatever they need. Some didn't even know what engineering was. They just went to the CG because it was the big yellow icon on the map.

And IMO that's perfectly fine. I just find the idea of telling someone (who plays casually on weekends, for example): "You can't go to this yellow icon CG place because you haven't engineered your ship to survive a gank yet".

The reason i fly in a PVE PG is exactly this reason, i can fly anything i want, maximise it for the reason it was built as long as it can shrug off NPCs

Not an option, if i want to go to Deciat, then to Deciat i shall go avoiding the muppets

Actually all i want is to fight Thargoids without worrying about muppets attacking folks with AX loadouts and occasionally to mine/explore in a relaxing format (NPCs excepted).

I read a CMDR's story on Reddit recently.

They were out exploring. When they were finished they went off to sell the exploration data like everyone else. They stayed in open and were ganked on their way back. Story as old as time in this game.

Why were they in open in the first place? Because their buddy explores and sometimes they like race back to the station to see who can sell their data first. Obviously since it's a race they want to be able to see each other at the station.

Anyway people told this CMDR about private/solo modes and the CMDR said from now on that's where they'll be. I thought this story was pretty sad because here you have a CMDR who wants to socialize and meet other CMDRs... but they're pushed into a private space for no good reason.

Never a truer word spoken and in many similar threads this is always what they always forget.
Yes i can get away from pretty much any ganker with a decent build and the skills i have, why should i have to bother?
I do play in Open from time to time, neither my Combat Cutter or Combat Vette has ever been interdicted more than once by the same person.

It's because many PvPers only look at the world through the eyes of PvP. I know because that's how I used to think. But after two decades of playing open world MMOs and PvPing in them... I've come to learn that there's a wide diversity of preferences and PvP is only one of them. Telling someone to "git gud" at combat mechanics (even if just for defense) so they could safely enjoy their mining/exploration/trading gameplay doesn't make any sense.

A good C+P system needs to represent these realities if we're to have an open space for everyone to hang out. Otherwise everyone is just gonna lock themselves in their private rooms and the game will be worse off for it. There are IMO bad ways to solve it ("PvP toggle" approach) and IMO good ways to solve it (incentives, risk/reward).

 

[Darrack]

Anyway people told this CMDR about private/solo modes and the CMDR said from now on that's where they'll be. I thought this story was pretty sad because here you have a CMDR who wants to socialize and meet other CMDRs... but they're pushed into a private space for no good reason.

Which is why me and my mates all jumped into Mobius, we can meet up, meet new folks with no issues.

O7

 

[metatheurgist]

Which is why me and my mates all jumped into Mobius, we can meet up, meet new folks with no issues.

O7

And this is the double failure of the "We can't restrict gankers" mindset which was the basis of the C+P (calling it that is a joke, it doesn't exist) system. The current system restricts a chunk of the player base away from Open into places like Mobius. Apparently only ganker players matter or something.

And I'm not about punishing gankers. Anyone that plays a bad guy should have consequences, whether they're a ganker or not. That mindset is removing a boatload of gameplay possibilities and a more credible universe.

 

[Rubbernuke]

And this is the double failure of the "We can't restrict gankers" mindset which was the basis of the C+P (calling it that is a joke, it doesn't exist) system. The current system restricts a chunk of the player base away from Open into places like Mobius. Apparently only ganker players matter or something.

And I'm not about punishing gankers. Anyone that plays a bad guy should have consequences, whether they're a ganker or not. That mindset is removing a boatload of gameplay possibilities and a more credible universe.

Ganking would not be a problem (and its really not now, honestly when you care to learn a few tricks) if the game as a whole made more of an effort to push unlawfuls away using other things like the BGS.

I read a CMDR's story on Reddit recently.

They were out exploring. When they were finished they went off to sell the exploration data like everyone else. They stayed in open and were ganked on their way back. Story as old as time in this game.

And where did they go to sell it? This illustrates the mindset of 'anywhere at any time in anything' and it causing problems. When I was doing granular C+P testing I scouted for systems that had never seen players (at least, not for weeks on end) so I could get firm results. They exist in plentiful numbers on the fringes and with planning decrease the chances of attack. If you want to be in open with such high stakes you can't be causal about it.

A good C+P system needs to represent these realities if we're to have an open space for everyone to hang out. Otherwise everyone is just gonna lock themselves in their private rooms and the game will be worse off for it. There are IMO bad ways to solve it ("PvP toggle" approach) and IMO good ways to solve it (incentives, risk/reward).

If players are unwilling to take steps to even be able to escape, or weigh up the risk of a particular system no C+P on earth will help them.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

And it was a lose-lose for them no matter what. Even if they got away they earned nothing and lost time.

And this I think goes over to the PvE design; PvP is a problem in this respect because it breaks all the assumptions of the PvE design, so of course it doesn't "work".

In FE2, for example:
- pretty much every system has (NPC) pirates
- they're pretty rubbish in terms of AI but four of them at once can still give an underdefended ship a bad day and even a single light fighter can eventually kill an unshielded unarmed freighter.
- you can't really avoid "interdiction" from them - if they're in the system, they're almost certainly going to intercept you, and your usable choices when that happens are kill them, be killed, or hyperspace out
- but in FE2 you don't enter a new system conveniently close to the star, and the new system also has pirates, so if you keep hyperspacing out you'll run out of fuel eventually
- you get at best a token bounty for killing them that will barely pay for repairs and ammunition; the "reward" for doing so is that you survive to sell your goods.

So by ED standards, every pirate encounter in FE2 is a "lose-lose" - you'll probably kill your aggressors easily once you've got even a semi-decent ship (and FE2 doesn't have the same "target-class" ships as the Lakon freighters, for example), but if they weren't there, the time saved on trade runs (and extra capacity for cargo over defences and weapons) would massively boost your profit per hour. But in FE2 terms that's the wrong way to think of it: your trade profit is your reward for getting the cargo past the pirates, which is why that game doesn't need separate Trade and Combat ranks: an Elite Combat pilot is an Elite Trader if they want to be.

ED having completely separated "trade" and "combat" as activities ... well, of course a PvPer combining them again doesn't work. PvP attacks still wouldn't be popular if cargo ships were expected to routinely fight back - it's still potentially a much tougher opponent than NPCs and therefore a much greater chance of losing - but at least they wouldn't break the assumptions the rest of the game was built around.