Traders are simple creatures. They go for the bigges money in the easiest way.
Make open the easiest mode and they will all come. Make anarchy trading far more profitable and the will come there to.
It’s not rocket science, it just design choices.
PvP How to make PvP piracy be made engaging/rewarding for both participants
- Thread starter Powderpanic
- Start date
Traders are simple creatures. They go for the bigges money in the easiest way.
Make open the easiest mode and they will all come. Make anarchy trading far more profitable and the will come there to.
It’s not rocket science, it just design choices.
Okay - capacity of a cargo-only Cutter is 792t. Round trip times on a short trade route are probably about 10 minutes ... and you want a bit of supercruise time so there's actually some chance to interdict.
Passenger missions currently pay ~200MCr/hour, so you'd need trade profits of around 42k/tonne to beat that. That sounds pretty silly, but if you adjusted Palladium sale prices to what you can get for cargo missions, it would work out about right.
So, the traders are here. Unleash the pirates! Oops, now it's not the most profitable. One moment while we double the sale price and try again.
Raw profit is 84k/tonne, so the pirate can steal half of that and the trader is still making more money that they could elsewhere.
Next problem, stealing 400t of cargo (with an instance limit of 20t at a time) takes the pirate about 20 minutes. Now the trader can only make two trips an hour, so their trade profit is way down again. (Also, the need to keep pressing Jettison means they can't take a break)
Profit increases again, this time to a massive 250k/tonne. The trader makes two trips an hour, giving half their cargo to a pirate each time. Both professions now make about 200MCr/hour.
However, there's trouble ahead - the pirates have 400t holds, so if they just traded the supercargo themselves rather than spending hours slowly stealing it they'd make 600MCr/hour. So by pirating rather than trading, they're giving up 2/3 of their potential income. Rather than the traders making 1.2BCr/hour and the pirates making 600MCr/hour ... both are now making 200MCr/hour.
So most of the pirates ... a few dedicated souls aside ... switch to trading. Now most of the traders go unpirated, because there's far more traders than pirates. Trade profits rise further ... more pirates give up the job. Eventually, everyone just trades the pirate-attracting cargo.
(You can break out of this, but it requires the trader to actually make a loss on the cargo on any trip a pirate catches them, at which point they'll - in Elite Dangerous - just go and do something else which has a guaranteed profit instead)
Goose4291
Banned
I know I harp on about it but its something that needs to be discussed otherwise its going to cause major issies in the future.
Anarchy factions need to not be hurt by Blackmarket interactions.
Because otherwise, pirates are going to be shutting down the ports the devs seem to want them to they use by their actions when they sell their stolen goods.
Anarchy factions need to not be hurt by Blackmarket interactions.
Because otherwise, pirates are going to be shutting down the ports the devs seem to want them to they use by their actions when they sell their stolen goods.
Powderpanic
Banned
Lets correct a few issues with your post
Firstly, the Cutter is not a trade ship. Now because of the stupid design of internals being generic ( bar passenger stuff in some ships ) the combat ships often turn out to be better traders than the trade ships. If everyone started running trade cutters, pirates would just move to 100% Cutters as well because of the masslock factor.
BUT
If all trade Cutters pilots were smart and replaced a single C6 module with a prismatic and then 8 boosters, then engineered the shields and boosters.
There is not a gank wing in the game that would take that shield down, let alone disable it before it submit/high wakes.
Lets hope that traders dont work that out and if they do.. well the issue of piracy is solved.. There wont be any.
Now the maximum amount of cargo you can instance with is 100 tonnes. You can scoop all of that with 12 limpets before it explodes easily.
Throw a wing at it and it is gone within a minute or so.
If you managed to disable a trader or were able to put them under the threat of rebuy if they tired to move away from the heist. You could easily empty 792 Tonnes into 4 hungry pirate ships, in under 10minutes. Probably a lot under 10minutes to be honest. What a cool robbery that would be for the pirate and a learning lesson on how to build a stronger Cutter trader for the "piratee"
You are also under the illusion they will be pirated on every single run.. If they get pirated more than once on the same run, again a smart pilot would change trade routes.
Once you consider that and how making money would involve working a trade route again, rather than the current cash exploits. Its a much better outlook for Elite as a whole.
You should make more by delivery 792 tonnes of slaves, than by dropping a tourist in a system 30 minutes away... Surely
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Deleted member 110222
D
And therein lies the problem.
Being the "piratee" isn't pleasant.
But as this is a game, the point of purchase is to extract pleasure.
It's a tough nut to crack.
Being the "piratee" isn't pleasant.
But as this is a game, the point of purchase is to extract pleasure.
It's a tough nut to crack.
Just a thought...
Does PF bounties have any effect at all right now?
If it were me, and it's not, I know, but if it were...
PF bounties would start to restrict access to stations. The higher your bounty, the fewer stations would allow you to dock. Starting with stations in a high sec, then outposts in high sec, then planetary, then med sec start refusing to let you dock and so on down the line until the only places you can dock with a high enough bounty are stations in anarchy systems. And I hope you stay at least above hostile with the controlling factions there (easy enough I know).
As for clearing a PF bounty, maybe if you die to a player you respawn at a prison ship where you have to pay the bounties off.
On to the point of the thread, piracy.
I said it in the other thread, the mission system works against piracy. You deliver all the cargo, or you fail the mission costing you rep, credits and time.
The system would need to have missions, available in open only, with flexible delivery conditions. Carry this cargo, x tons must be delivered for a good fee to that anarchy system. For every additional y tons you get a bonus payment. If you log to the menu it reverts to a standard haulage mission with standard payouts.
That gives a bonus to open, entices traders to make risky runs to places pirates can hang out to stalk said traders and removes the 'just drop to PG/Solo and avoid the pirates' problem.
Does PF bounties have any effect at all right now?
If it were me, and it's not, I know, but if it were...
PF bounties would start to restrict access to stations. The higher your bounty, the fewer stations would allow you to dock. Starting with stations in a high sec, then outposts in high sec, then planetary, then med sec start refusing to let you dock and so on down the line until the only places you can dock with a high enough bounty are stations in anarchy systems. And I hope you stay at least above hostile with the controlling factions there (easy enough I know).
As for clearing a PF bounty, maybe if you die to a player you respawn at a prison ship where you have to pay the bounties off.
On to the point of the thread, piracy.
I said it in the other thread, the mission system works against piracy. You deliver all the cargo, or you fail the mission costing you rep, credits and time.
The system would need to have missions, available in open only, with flexible delivery conditions. Carry this cargo, x tons must be delivered for a good fee to that anarchy system. For every additional y tons you get a bonus payment. If you log to the menu it reverts to a standard haulage mission with standard payouts.
That gives a bonus to open, entices traders to make risky runs to places pirates can hang out to stalk said traders and removes the 'just drop to PG/Solo and avoid the pirates' problem.
PF bounties are a nonsense and are getting ditched in preference for bounty being tied to ship, from what I understand.
And unfortunately, any kind of Open-only mechanics are not going to work with P2P connections. It is too easy to exploit (I'm no expert on networking but even I know that a router can be configured to whitelist some things and block others).
And unfortunately, any kind of Open-only mechanics are not going to work with P2P connections. It is too easy to exploit (I'm no expert on networking but even I know that a router can be configured to whitelist some things and block others).
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There are(or at least should be) more than one way to skinn a cat.
If all the traders run beefed up Cutters, a Pirate could go in a fast smaller ship and do a hatch breaker hit and run.
Personally I would like that no one had access to shield boosters or SCBs with HRPs and MRPs only allowed in military compartments.
Powderpanic
Banned
Even with aN 800 speed eagle and limpets, the time between submit and low wake would make it maybe possible but mostly pointless and vasty unrewarding in a credit sense.
Anarchies have a bunch of rules that make no sense. First, as you mention there is black markets taking away from the ruling faction. In an anarchy, that should not be happening (and one could even make a reasonable argument that the ruling faction in an anarchy should benefit from black markets). Then there's security response - in an anarchy, if you're allied with a faction and you get attacked, you should see ships of that faction coming to your rescue (and if you are hostile with some faction, ships of that piling on to help with the beatdown). Instead, anarchies are treated as lawful systems where the cops are on their day off.
Glad you're starting to understand this.
Yes. Though the same is largely true of law-abiding factions, too.
Two law-abiding factions, A and B. A controls the system. Actions below take place in general space a long way from stations.
You see a ship belonging to B, with an A-issued bounty on it. You kill it, and A gives you a reward. Your reputation with B drops slightly.
You see a ship belonging to B, without any bounty on it. You kill it. Your reputation with B drops significantly, A puts a bounty on you, B does not put a bounty on you.
B takes control of the system. You see a ship belonging to B, with an A-issued bounty on it. You kill it. Your reputation with B drops significantly, B puts a bounty on you. A pays you.
I think they would need to move to a "political consequences" rather than "crime" model before it started to make sense.
Yeah. It's no quick fix. Lots of parameters would have to be changed to get PvP piracy to work.
FD would first have to decide to make it one of the game play cornerstones of ED. Then they would have to decide how they want it to be played. Finally they must balance equipment, ship strength and rewards up against other corner stone features.
Danger level of player pirate, danger level of NPC pirate, system differentiation, strength of trader, effectiveness of equipment and reward level compared to other aspects of the game are all adjustable variables. They have to bee seen as a hole, when balancing the game.
This is certainly one major part of the problem - being pirated is voluntary because even a lightly-equipped trade build can get away with all its goods intact ... with engineering it probably has time to type a few paragraphs of insults in chat first ...
Throw a wing at it and you're splitting the profits four ways. That doesn't help make piracy more profitable than trade.
Given the size of the inhabited bubble compared with the number of players, this means that smart pilots - even now - just don't meet pirates.
I certainly agree with this. But... this would require extremely substantial changes to how ships are priced (or to how the entire outfitting and flight model works, which is even less likely)
Trade profit scales linearly with the size of your hold - and in this respect it scales a lot better than any other profession in the game. Ship prices are on a steep exponential curve. That can't be balanced.
There's also an extremely tricky balancing question about how you keep both trading and piracy profitable.
- if you make trading too profitable and piracy practical to generally avoid, it becomes more profitable for all the pirates to switch to trading
- but if you make piracy too profitable, then you need some way to stop the traders switching to piracy (which will make trade profits even worse and lead to more people leaving trading)
- in theory you can balance this by making piracy illegal, so bounty hunters try to track down the pirates, balancing out their greater gross income ... but this just adds a lot more moving parts.
The balancing points vary with player density, ship capability, goods prices, etc.
I think it's possible in theory to make a game with a balanced trader-pirate-hunter player economy ... I just wouldn't start from Elite Dangerous.
I think the key is to make it so that there's a self-correcting balance: if there are too few people doing a particular profession, then people can make more money than they currently are by switching to that profession. In the current set up, people will generally make more money by switching away from under-filled professions. But that's really not straightforward...
Powderpanic
Banned
Ian tbh the economy and money making in ED is so fundamentally borked now that is really too late to fix.
Not saying they cannot make changes. I am saying that the majority of players have so many credits that rebuys or even buying new ships, are a non issue.
The exploits and EASY money systems, that has made everyone billionaires are now so ingrained in player psyche. That to remove them and make it so future players need to work harder to get credits and ships. Would be met with such hatred, it is just not going to happen.
The best thing ED could do and this is NEVER EVER EVER going to happen. Is for FDEV to fix the game, fix the economy, re-balance costs, careers.. well basically everything and then put EVERY SINGLE PLAYER back into a sidewinder. Full Galaxy wipe and have people start again.
Early game when moving from a Viper to an Asp and fitting that Asp, was a big deal and made the game special.
But thats never going to happen because its just not.. So the best we can hope for is for FDEV to create things for rich players to sink they funds into and balance the careers around that.
There is even a post on reddit today how all missions under pay except passenger ones.
As with passenger ones it will only take you a whole day to make a billion. This level of money making now, is pretty much expected. Which is just sad.
A billion in a day... back when this game launched ( without the bounty hunting exploit ) would have been laughed out of Leesti,
Not saying they cannot make changes. I am saying that the majority of players have so many credits that rebuys or even buying new ships, are a non issue.
The exploits and EASY money systems, that has made everyone billionaires are now so ingrained in player psyche. That to remove them and make it so future players need to work harder to get credits and ships. Would be met with such hatred, it is just not going to happen.
The best thing ED could do and this is NEVER EVER EVER going to happen. Is for FDEV to fix the game, fix the economy, re-balance costs, careers.. well basically everything and then put EVERY SINGLE PLAYER back into a sidewinder. Full Galaxy wipe and have people start again.
Early game when moving from a Viper to an Asp and fitting that Asp, was a big deal and made the game special.
But thats never going to happen because its just not.. So the best we can hope for is for FDEV to create things for rich players to sink they funds into and balance the careers around that.
There is even a post on reddit today how all missions under pay except passenger ones.
As with passenger ones it will only take you a whole day to make a billion. This level of money making now, is pretty much expected. Which is just sad.
A billion in a day... back when this game launched ( without the bounty hunting exploit ) would have been laughed out of Leesti,
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I would condone a full asset reset. Let players keep their ranks, permits and engineer access.
Powderpanic
Banned
Can we not remove engineers as part of the wipe?
Maybe change some of the base stats for ships to keep some of the more popular choices. Like faster more agile combat ships, with better distributors. Bin the rest.
In a dream world and for game reasons.
Small ships. super duper fastand agile as hell. Weaker weapons, need to work as a wing to take down a bigger ship.
Medium. Support class. Stronger shields and weapons, less agile than a small fighter but able to trouble a large ships on its own.
Large ships. Lumbering hulks with insane firepower and the turning of a disabled whale stuck in tar. Useless at taking out fighters, so needs support ships.
Its a little EvE, sure... but would be hella interesting.
Glad you see how screwed up the multiplayer content is because of that design.