The Dance of Pirate and Traders. Advice for both parties

[xDreadnoughtx]

Traders.

If you fly a barebones tradeship focussed entirely on maximising profits, with no consideration to survivability, you can only blame yourself when a total ship and cargo loss occurs.

Ditch larger cargo rack for better shields.
Chaff is mandatory.
A shield booster can make a real difference in buying an extra 1/2 second.
A class thrusters and power dist. will help unless it's a space cow or T7 you are flying, in which case you are fish in a barrel.

All this helps give you a chance against murdering player killing sociopaths.

Against real pirates, you need to weigh up your options. Cargo sacrifice or run the risk of scarpering.

 

[CMDR Sun]

I have no issue where a pirate asks for cargo and then after you drop it he lets you on your way. I have an issue with the many murdering idiots who shoot first, cannot communicate and think its fun to just kill you for some sort of sick gratification.

The issue is that a trader can't distinguish between a real pirate and someone who just wants to pull you over and then kill you. As a result of this the best course of action is to assume they are going to try and kill you regardless of what they say.
Maybe in the future there will be in-game guilds/clans etc and you will be able to more reliably recognize the guild tag of known pirate organizations

 

[CMDR Sun]

Traders.

If you fly a barebones tradeship focussed entirely on maximising profits, with no consideration to survivability, you can only blame yourself when a total ship and cargo loss occurs.

Ditch larger cargo rack for better shields.
Chaff is mandatory.
A shield booster can make a real difference in buying an extra 1/2 second.
A class thrusters and power dist. will help unless it's a space cow or T7 you are flying, in which case you are fish in a barrel.

All this helps give you a chance against murdering player killing sociopaths.

Against real pirates, you need to weigh up your options. Cargo sacrifice or run the risk of scarpering.

This is very sound advice. It is far more fun playing in Open but you will need to take some steps to protect yourself a bit better than you would in Solo/Private.

 

[goemon]

The issue is that a trader can't distinguish between a real pirate and someone who just wants to pull you over and then kill you. As a result of this the best course of action is to assume they are going to try and kill you regardless of what they say.
Maybe in the future there will be in-game guilds/clans etc and you will be able to more reliably recognize the guild tag of known pirate organizations

that's why i recommend pirates to drop a line in sc directly before interdicting. when i get interdicted and i don't know who it is (pirate or pk), i directly start highwaking.

if i know it's a pirate, i might do my math.

 

[CMDR Sun]

that's why i recommend pirates to drop a line in sc directly before interdicting. when i get interdicted and i don't know who it is (pirate or pk), i directly start highwaking.

if i know it's a pirate, i might do my math.

While it is far from the norm, in my case I mentioned above in post #7 of this thread, I was told prior to interdiction that they were pirates and I was to throttle down and be prepared to be scanned. After scanning my empty hold it still just resulted in them trying to kill me because ... well ... words are cheap

Pirates just need to be comfortable with the notion that its more reliable for everyone to assume they are murdering psychopaths rather than listen to anything they have to say.

 

[Jockey79]

Traders

Always assume piracy. Never put all your capital in one load. Rushing for max profit us what loses you the most.

The best way to max profits is to stay alive.

Fly in a wing if you can.

Always carry some high value, low profit (to you) goods that you can part with.

Don't fight interdiction. It wastes your time and may irritate the pirate, making survivability less likely.

Drop good cargo immediately and then leave immediately. The pirates know the containers are on the clock.

Learn the ways to avoid being caught. I won't be listing them here, but they aren't hard to find. Remember that pirates will continue to interdict you and again, the survivability index lowers.
--

Pirates need traders for profit. Traders need pirates to enliven their game either in trading or in revenge.

Some good advice there - apart from;

"Don't fight interdiction. It wastes your time and may irritate the pirate, making survivability less likely."

Some trade ships can and do win interdiction, leaving the pirate sat alone in a n instance.
(Decent FSD and thrusters make fighting back a lot better - so A rate those!!!)

The sad, but true thing though;

For best chance of survival - when interdiction happens, full throttle (as it delays the time for interdiction to pull you out) > press "Esc" > Save to menu > wait.
By the time the interdiction fails you're half way through a logout timer. Then after you stop spinning and the "pirate" turns around to face you / type to you / scan you or just kill you - there is only a few seconds left on the clock and you're out of the situation with grace. To log back in via solo, dock up, repair the 2% damage (or 50% from them shooting) and move away from the area.

This *IS NOT* combat logging - despite what you get accused of from those who pull you over.
However it is a cheap way of dealing with an interdiction and you should be ashamed of yourself - also, why be in open in the first place?
But then again, those who pull trade ships over for a cheap kill (not *real* pirates) deserve to have it snatched away from them - so don't feel too guilty

 

[Midnight Sun]

In an ideal Open, where pirates are real pirates and PK-lolzers are punished by the law, we'd all have a lot of fun. Trouble is, the pond has been well and truly peed in and nobody trusts anybody anymore.

Vast amounts has been written on this forum lately by pirates trying to justify their existence. It is an effort that would be better spent on enforcing their own code.

 

[Agent2090]

pirates trying to justify their existence.

And pure PKers tend to use the same arguments to justify theirs which generates a colossal amount of distrust of anyone calling themselves a pirate. As a result, all pirates, "real" and "fake", are usually lumped together. There are people that roleplay the pirate perfectly. This is usually where I say that it's the minority giving them a bad name, but unfortunately, it isn't; it's the majority giving the minority a bad name.

The VAST majority of people that have interdicted me have been after an easy kill.

I've had maybe 50-60 interdictions with other CMDRs. Maybe, maybe 6 or 7 of them roleplayed as we'd expect a pirate to be. The rest simply started gunning me down.

 

[Jack Schitt]

I'm worried that this thread will have descended into lockable sniping by the time I post this reply, but here goes anyway.

The OP's points are reasonable and well considered, and indeed the recommendations are arguably the best (or least worst at any rate) for both "sides" in the current iteration of the game. And that's the key. The issues in the pirate/trader relationship in Open Play aren't primarily dictated by the behaviours of the participants, which is why modifying those behaviours isn't really a long-term solution. They're dictated by the limitations of the game which allow and/or reinforce those behaviours, and there is only one group of people who can resolve that problem.

So the OP I would add:

Advice to Frontier Developments

• Give us the game you outlined in the design phase, or at least something that more closely resembles it.

Many of those missing features (proportional authority response, cargo insurance, NPC wingmen, variable risk/reward through choice of route) would help to mitigate the imbalance between these gameplay styles which overwhelmingly favours the pirates in every metric with the possible exception of raw profit. But right now, as Anopheles rightly states, the best course of action for a heavy trader interdicted by a wing of PCs is to submit to interdiction, submit again by not running away, submit a third time by dumping cargo, then hope that the interdictors actually are pirates and not PKers or a combination of the two.

Bend over, bend over, bend over and pray. And that's supposed to be fun for the trader?

What we have in Open Play right now is not piracy. It's closer to taxation or tolls, with a high probability of being invoiced and a small but non-zero chance that the taxman is also a serial killer.

That's why Solo and Mobius are so popular. It's not the fault of the traders for being naturally risk-averse. It's not the fault of the pirates, or even the PKers, for being overly aggressive. It's the fault of Frontier for permitting this shell of a game to continue in its current form for so long that it more or less forces players from both camps to fall into those very stereotypes that cause so much animosity in game and on the forums.

If you're angry about this situation, direct your anger towards those who deserve it. Frontier have created this problem, and only they can resolve it.

 

[simo2003]

For best chance of survival - when interdiction happens, full throttle (as it delays the time for interdiction to pull you out) > press "Esc" > Save to menu > wait.
By the time the interdiction fails you're half way through a logout timer. Then after you stop spinning and the "pirate" turns around to face you / type to you / scan you or just kill you - there is only a few seconds left on the clock and you're out of the situation with grace. To log back in via solo, dock up, repair the 2% damage (or 50% from them shooting) and move away from the area.

This *IS NOT* combat logging - despite what you get accused of from those who pull you over.
However it is a cheap way of dealing with an interdiction and you should be ashamed of yourself - also, why be in open in the first place?
But then again, those who pull trade ships over for a cheap kill (not *real* pirates) deserve to have it snatched away from them - so don't feel too guilty

What? This is the very definition of combat logging. Interdiction is part of the combat IMHO. You are correct that anyone resorting to this probably doesn't belong in Open though.

 

[Katkon]

I choose to trade in open. Why? Because it's fun - adds some excitement to an otherwise dull profession. I've been playing since premium beta - a year and a half? In all that time I've never once - not once! - been pirated. Thinking of getting into a T-9 just to make me a bigger target. Of course, in a 400B system Galaxy, the odds of encountering a player pirate are very, very small. I can only assume that those that get pirated regularly are hanging around starter systems or rare goods hubs. My advice for anyone that doesn't want to be pirated: don't do that! Simple, really.

 

[Yabba Addict]

What? This is the very definition of combat logging. Interdiction is part of the combat IMHO. You are correct that anyone resorting to this probably doesn't belong in Open though.

Nope. Combat logging is killing the process through task manager. Logging through the menu is perfectly legal.

 

[Bomba Luigi]

Don't fight interdiction. It wastes your time and may irritate the pirate, making survivability less likely.

That part wonders me, I have seen a fair share of complains from Pirates that Traders just submitted and jumped away again all the Time. And when submitting, jumping away is the best option for the trader anyway since he can do it so quick, while the Pirate has hardly any Time to do anything.

Isn't submitting good for the trader and bad for the pirate while fighting the interdiction is good for the Pirate? He in most cases should have an advantage against a tradership to win the interdiction and the trader is then on a longer cooldown.

 

[Quineloe]

If you get blown up these days by a player, it's 90% of the time someone who would have killed you regardless of cargo.

The "trader advice" shows this very much. He's not even interested in giving good advise "I won't be listing them here".

The perfect advice for traders is obviously: Trade in solo mode. Solo mode has NPC pirates as well.

 

[Defacto]

Nope. Combat logging is killing the process through task manager. Logging through the menu is perfectly legal.

Combat logging is logging out when in combat, in order to disrupt the combat.

What you want to say, is that this form of combat logging isn't bannable, because FD can't control it.

 

[Jockey79]

What? This is the very definition of combat logging. Interdiction is part of the combat IMHO. You are correct that anyone resorting to this probably doesn't belong in Open though.

That is not "combat logging"

Combat logging is removing yourself from combat through either an exploit, by killing the process in your task manager or unplugging your network cable.
All of which are instant and remove you from harms way.

Also, Frontier will take action against those who combat log.

Using the games logout option is a "graceful" exit and it also creates a logout file on the server - so FD know if you have logged out through the menu (allowed) or by cheating/exploiting (not allowed).

But yes, the point of - why play open in the first place? Still stands.

 

[Katkon]

As someone else said: you can ALWAYS avoid getting killed as part of an interdiction by simply selecting a neighboring system and hyper jumping away. You cannot be mass locked when trying to hyper jump; it only applies when trying to enter local SC. So traders should be able to escape pirates 100pct of the time. Pirates won't like that, of course, but it really is that simple.

 

[Robert Maynard]

Pirates need traders for profit. Traders need pirates to enliven their game either in trading or in revenge.

Pirates need traders - certainly. Traders need pirates? Some traders will go out of their way to avoid pirates. So, not "need", no.

Some player pirates certainly seem to need player traders to enjoy the encounters that they instigate. Equally, some player traders seem to like player pirates spicing up their game.

 

[Defacto]

Pirates need traders - certainly. Traders need pirates? Some traders will go out of their way to avoid pirates. So, not "need", no.

Some player pirates certainly seem to need player traders to enjoy the encounters that they instigate. Equally, some player traders seem to like player pirates spicing up their game.

Yes, traders need pirates. Not player pirates, not NPC pirates, but pirates, because pirates are a cornerstone in balancing the profit of trade. In legal trade, the optimal trade would be the one with the largest amount of profit/time invested. Elements such as piracy adds in more factors to the calculation, turning a game of numbers into a game of intuition, risk-taking and - yes, skill. In illegal trade, the authorithies also become a factor, and balance out the fact that smuggling is (or should be) more profitable.

 

[khaitom]

Unfortunately, as a trader, due to there being no punishment for player killing, submitting and instantly dropping all your cargo means there's still a very high probability that your still going to get your ship destroyed.

Unless you know it's a "real" pirate, assume it's a player killer. Reasonable pirates don't really exist they're more like low-level gangland wannabes running a sloppy protection racket, but play along if you want.

For PKrs, or unreasonable wannabe Gs;
Avoid a straight line from the Nav beacon to your destination and fly a detour instead, it doesn't add much journey time.
Keep an eye on your tail in supercruise, fly like a drunken monkey to avoid them getting an interdictor lock on you.
Never submit, make them work for it, following the escape vector needs practice, use every chance to practice.
Always carry chaff.
Make sure you've maxed your ability to boost (not that there'll be much difference).
Have Big shields and max shield boosters.
Find that cheapskate pirates are only using lasers? Reflective armour.
You don't need to upgrade your life support as they can't shoot out your cockpit from behind
Switch your target to another system (just grab the first one in the nav panel. Hyperspace jumps are not subject to mass lock.
Boost, chaff, evasive flying, jump to another system, drop to normal space, pick another system, jump again.

You'll still probably be destroyed but at least you tried.

Piracy should be the hardest least profitable profession for the work-shy scoundrels, make sure it is.

Edit: Make sure you have "Report Crimes "Against Me" turned "On" in the right-hand panel to ensure a response from the security forces (who normally turn up too late). Don't worry about being called a grass or a snitch, those are insults used by guilty cowards.

Whatever you do don't accidentally drop your cargo while boosting and rolling, it gets thrown all over the place.