Good post, and I'll do my best to give as good a response.
My background: Beta player that played exclusively in open till sometime around the time of the xbox release, now play in mobius.
My definition: My views on piracy have evolved - at one stage I was simply against it... now I separate it from "ganking" like this: Pirates are about "loot" and gankers are about "kills", usually easy thrill kills. Sure pirates may need to kill the occasional victim but in general it'd be a bad idea for them as it "bites the hand that feeds them", so a "real pirate" attempts to get the booty and attempts to avoid the kill.
· Whatever FD implement will still allow you to get destroyed by another player. (Bar a PVE mode which is unlikely, this is always going to happen)
Yeah, it's never guaranteed, but for a pirate it should be a last resort for self defence, not a goal within itself nor something desirable. It's all about the loot remember, not collecting bounties.
· Saying that any PVP player who kills another player should be pushed back into a sidewinder is just unrealistic.
Agreed
· Credits flow like water in this game if you know what you are doing and any changes to this will effect ALL players.
Yup
· Having instant endless spawning wings of Defence Cutters, Corvettes and FDL, is just immersion breaking.
Having ships that magically slow down when you turn off their engines is also immersion breaking. Sorry, but that stopped being a good argument when they made spaceships fly like spitfires and justified it for "playability".
· Currently there is no real reason to go into Anarchy Space, so saying that is only where PVP should happen just won’t.
Also agreed, and this needs to be part of the solution
So.. right now we have a system where you can go anywhere in space and do anything to anyone and it just doesn't matter... not one little bit. As you rightly pointed out there's no reason to travel to an anarchy, so there's no reason for pirates to be there either. Similarly there's no reason for pirates to NOT go to civilised areas of space, coz there's no effective policing there. None of it makes any SENSE, there's no logic to it, it's just a big pretty galaxy with no-one really in it, even in the occupied bits.
There's two parts to my suggestion which can broadly be described as building a case for business, and building a case for crime.
Firstly the business case. Business accepts risks, but it needs to know that the vast majority of the time the business will be profitable and successful. To support this I'd like to see several security levels at a star system level, applied in a logical, meaningful way according to the level of civilisation in a system. For instance a federation system with a high population and a bunch of high tech stations should have a high level of security. Similarly a system with a prison settlement should also have high security. A backwater mining platform that belongs to an independent system should have a very a low level of security, and an anarchy should have none, other that station security and bounty hunters. This would mean that traders on the "high street" in civilised areas could be very confident in making their deliveries as planned without molestation, but would leave them more fearful of going into the "dark alleys". It would give them more to think about when planning their routes than just "where's the biggest profit". Police response in high security areas to crime and to those incursions of those with bounties would be swift, brutal, and scaled to the threat level, but as the security level dropped so would the level and appropriateness of police response. Bounties would be major faction wide, so that if you had a federal bounty you would have it in ALL federal systems, not just the one you're in. Players who commit murder (in an non-anarchy system) would receive a higher level of bounty which would attract more police/bounty hunter response within that major faction and would be refused docking at that major faction's stations. Nav beacons in the highest security systems (but not compromised ones) would KWS scan ships as they jump in and alert the authorities to "be on the lookout", effectively raising the chance of random encounters with law enforcement officers. The idea is to make these systems hot and uncomfortable but not impossible for outlaws, and VERY uncomfortable for murderers. There also needs to be something in place to prevent people shedding a bounty with a sacrificial sidewinder - perhaps Sandro's idea to tie a fine (not bounty so it can't be collected by a friend) value of the value of the ship they committed the crime in to the person, so that a sacrificial sidewinder death would still cost them as much as losing their big ship, but their friend wouldn't benefit. Bounties need to MEAN something.
Now the case for crime. If we're going to chase all the pirates to the "dark alleys", they need victims which means giving them reasons to go there. To this end I'd be doing a few things
- I'd be putting most of the rares into these systems, and increasing their value somewhat.
- I'd follow the laws of supply and demand, and increase the profit margins of goods traded in dangerous systems (and consequently decreasing their value in safe systems).
- I'd be placing hazardous resources in these areas. For example dangerous but valuable stellar radiation, old mine fields that could be harvested, radioactive mine-able ores, alien artefacts, and I'm sure there's many more. This would not only give miners a reason to go there, but would also satisfy the logical question of "if there's such a valuable commodity there why is it an uncivilised anarchy" with the answer "because it's a dangerous and uninhabitable area". It would also (along with appropriate NPC pirate responses) make these areas dangerous in solo and group modes, without having to rely on players to balance it. (They might want to up the AI danger level in solo/group modes, whatever.)
- I'm sure there'd be a lot of other ideas that could be suggested to get the non-piratey types interested in a "walk on the wild side" too.
- Piracy NEEDS better tools for non-lethal piracy. I'm no game dev but I'd suggest non-weapon ways of affecting victim modules, some sort of electronic net that could be strung between 2-3 wing'd players, improved hatch breakers, and so on. Remember this is about supporting piracy while discouraging thrill kills.
An important feature would be that the areas with these valuable resources & high value stations would be very limited in number. This would
- allow those traders who want the safe life to trade in the "well lit" systems with minimal (but NEVER zero) chance of attack, and the knowledge that if such an attack should occur the attacker would face meaningful consequences
- allow those who seek higher profits, rare items, etc a certain number of places where they knew they could be found, at the acceptable of a suitably increased risk
- allow those of negotiable morals actual "hunting grounds" to look for "fat traders" who - having accepted the risk - were less likely to combat log or whine on the forums about being robbed.
- allow "real" pirates to operate with significantly less consequences than "psychos", as would be the case in the real world (a mugger will receive a lot less police attention than a serial killer).
An expansion on this would be to allow your "Pilot's Federation" reputation to go into negative figures, and to create an "Interstellar Cosa Nostra" underworld organisation (Mafia, maybe mafia cross triad, maybe several different competing crime syndicates). This would act as the opposing faction for the Pilot's Fed, and could support it's members with Mafia only missions and specialised equipment (improved hatch breakers, etc). To join you'd need to reduce your rep to zero then into negatives, find a contact, gain their trust etc. It would have a system of "Code" or "Omerta" (silence) and leaving would result in a string of assassins hunting you down to prevent you from breaking that Code.
