Beyond C&P - Must admit I'm slightly concerned about PvP piracy outcome

[Siobhan]

Why needlessly dress up this matter, only to try and insult? Odd!

You were insulted by that? Wow, that was not my intent, which was rather, to educate.

OK look. If a life of crime is more work for less fun and payoff than honest trading, then why do it? People claim to want realism in this game, yet somehow they want the pirate life to be a glorious romanticised Hollywood vision of piracy. As a pirate, you're basically asking for something-for-nothing. You want a trader to give you their cargo for no reward with little to no effort, but are unwilling to take the restrictions that gives.

Look at it from the other side. What fun is it to a trader (particularly a newbie) to have their cargo stolen? At the very least, they lose time and progress toward their goal. They potentially fail a mission and get a fine (or in extremis an enforcer chasing them down), and if they refuse to comply, they get damage to their ship and still lose the cargo, or worse, get sent to the rebuy screen. There is NEVER any positive outcome for the victim. Even escaping by high-waking costs time which can lead to failed missions.

For the pirate, they either get some free cargo or they have to force it in which case they get a tiny fine or a bounty that lasts about as long as the smell of a fart. No real negatives except that the profit isn't as much as they like.

Even with the new C&P proposals, pirates have it easy. In reality, even anarchies protect their own people, at least close to port, otherwise they'd lose what legitimate trade they do have. (They need to supply the base somehow, or else you'll not be able to make repairs/upgrades.)

Lawless is only fun until you need to make use of facilities. Because even where said facilities exist (and are available to you as an outsider), they need maintenance and supply themselves. Granted, this could be a great source of pirate missions; get us n tonnes of such-and-such raw materials by any means you can... we heard there may be a ship carrying x% of n passing through system Y at z time. If you can do that, we'll give you access to the repair shop.

etc.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

All this is going to do is drive PvP into the low security and anarchy systems where it should be.

PvP constantly in HIGH or MEDIUM security systems makes no sense at all.

Player combat will be fine! ganking and griefing will decrease I see no issues with these changes and there match more to Elite II and Elite III and the previous game mechanics than the current free for all.

That is fine, but traders will need incentives to go to low sec or anarchy systems, otherwise PvP pirating will have no chance.

 

[tagos]

Yes, it does need to be improved. Using Hatch Breakers at the moment, and collector limpets is a mess, and just makes an already poor paying, frustraing Piracy role, even less well paid and more frustrating.

As for Hatch Breaker, unfortunately one of Sando's changes was to dumb them down, so they can go through shields. So piracy was in effect dumbed down. Aim fire, hatch breaker! Dull!


Instead, IMHO, if there are shields you should need to take them down to say 50% (2 bar), before you can lock a Hatch Breaker on. This then means a trader can heavily shield themselves if they want. And the pirate at least has a modicum of a job to do, to lower the shields a bit before employing a Hatch Breaker.

What? Hatchbreakers ignore shields? That’s just about the dumbest change ever?

 

[Lecitron]

LOL!

A trader does a dozen runs and loses 10t of the X thousands of tons of cargo he delivers. Each run he'll make multiple times more profit than the pirate will even spending days at the location. The pirate loses money simply for shooting another ship with a limpet. The pirate risks seeing a rebuy screen for his bounty. And the trader will get numerous millions more in the CG bonus payout too.

Inconvenienced... LOL! A random periodic interdiction, and a few tons of cargo. Boo hoo!

And most comical of all, you have Mobius and SOLO to use too! Inconvenienced!

Hilarious

 

[Siobhan]

That is fine, but traders will need incentives to go to low sec or anarchy systems, otherwise PvP pirating will have no chance.

Sometimes it's the only route. Bottlenecks exist in the game already, especially for ships with a lower than normal jump range - that are weighed down by cargo.

 

[tagos]

That is fine, but traders will need incentives to go to low sec or anarchy systems, otherwise PvP pirating will have no chance.

They could just man up and go find victims and take all the risk and consequences that entails.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

What? Hatchbreakers ignore shields? That’s just about the dumbest change ever?

All hatchbreakers ignore shields. You send a collector limpet our when mining, your shields don't have to go down to get that limpet back.

 

[Siobhan]

They could just man up and go find victims and take all the risk and consequences that entails.

Oooh, that's starting to sound a lot like "git gud". You can't say that about PvP pirates. They're already "gud" by definition... or so they'll have you believe.

 

[Han_Zen]

So yes, illegal destruction (of a CMDR) should result in significant penalties.

But, if you're simply trying to be the nicest pirate you can, and even only use the existing crummy limpet mechanism to extract cargo from another CMDR, surely you're now going to be even worse off due to this new C&P mechanism? ie: Lose station facility access etc etc?

Have I understood clearly?


EDIT: Can you at least always pay off fines and bounties at a station (that currently is denying you facilities)?

Buff the limpet! It needs to drop much more cargo.

 

[Lecitron]

Why needlessly dress up this matter, only to try and insult? Odd!

It's not about hard? it's simply about balanced mechanics resulting in fun and reward!

On the subject of Hatch Breakers and collector limpets, they're basically terrible at their current application to be honest. ie: Meaning using them makes piracy clunky and hard to get even a reasonable amount of cargo out of a ship with 400+t on board.

And more importantly, on the issue of the new changes of losing facilities, as long as the black market (if there's one available) is still accessible (as Marra suggests), then that's hopefully alleviated my concerns. BUT, FD would IMHO then need to make sure if you cannot access the Commodity Market, and cargo you have, legal or illegal, can be sold on th Black Market. This seems logical and simple to me.

Do the role, explorers spend more time and his reward is low compared with smeaton.

No discussion

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

They could just man up and go find victims and take all the risk and consequences that entails.

Or you could have higher sell prices of commodities the lower the security. So traders can trade in high security but have less profit, but know that they very unlikely to be attacked, or take some risks and trade in the lower security areas for higher rewards.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

If someone could tell me these C&P changes also applies on NPC pirates, eh ?

Well, how could I tell if they respawned at a detention facility when I blew them up? Do I really care how big their rebuy was?

In all seriousness, I think the game should attempt to model player behaviour in the NPCs - both in the sense of role-model and approximation-model. If it's not practical, desirable or sensible for a player to carry out a particular action, then there shouldn't be NPCs doing it either indicating that it's supposed to be part of the game.

In other words, if piracy by murdering someone until they hit their jettison cargo button isn't how you're "supposed" to do it according to FDev, then the NPCs shouldn't do it - they should go for hatchbreakers and/or be allowed to subtarget and disable ships (and be given suitable weapons for the purpose rather than trying to disable your modules with a frag cannon) - or should restrict where they do it to Anarchy systems where the murder bit is also legal.

 

[CMDR Carbo]

I'm all for piracy, but not for lazy pirates.

Maybe robbing traders in a high security system with a CG, flying to a station with lot of security with that very stolen cargo and turning it in to also parttake in the CG is asking a bit too much, lol?

Sandro said criminals will have it a bit harder with the new C&P system.

 

[Siobhan]

Or you could have higher sell prices of commodities the lower the security. So traders can trade in high security but have less profit, but know that they very unlikely to be attacked, or take some risks and trade in the lower security areas for higher rewards.

It should depend on demand as well.
Why should a commodity sell for more in low (or no) security systems if they are already drowning in the stuff?

 

[Lecitron]

What pirates need are tools to block or hamper high-jumps because you can always flee from a pirate. These should also be tools available to law enforcement to stop pirates from getting away.

The are weapons side effects created by engineers that increase cool down.

 

[Rafe Zetter]

errr piracy is robbery with threat of death.

without the death bit you are a space begger.

I really wish people would learn a bit of history about piracy before commenting about "how it should be".

It was the space death WITHOUT the robbery part that was annoying most people. - Only a stupid pirate kills, because even if he didn't get any loot this time - there's always the next; smart pirates know this and space is big enough that opportunites for piracy in "unpatrolled waters" aren't so common.

Why do you think so many used to work the carribean trade lanes?

If a specific pirate continually killed his victims, I'm fairly certain after a while HE would become a target from the other pirates sick of him killing thier potential loot paydays. Not even the most notorious pirates killed ALL of thier victims ALL OF THE TIME - which I have on pretty good authority as my father has been reading books about them for 50 years.

yes yes respawn - blah blah, doesn't change the fact that a pirate that kills his victim either with or without demands of cargo is very likely to make the number of people who stop playing in open by 1 - or just block YOU (the pirate) - either way, you lost.

And we all know how popular playing in OPEN is don't we, it's teeming with potential victims, you can't throw a Lavian brandy without hitting three at once....

NO? what do you mean, no?

 

[NeilF]

You were insulted by that? Wow, that was not my intent, which was rather, to educate.

OK look. If a life of crime is more work for less fun and payoff than honest trading, then why do it?

Because Piracy is a corner stone profession of the game supposedly? Because if trading simply becimes travel from A to B at no risk, is that ideal? - And by risk we're not talking rebuy, but just a few tons of cargo?

Now, at the moment, I'd suggest the main issue to traders are simply murder hobos? And hopefully the changes will thankfully rein them in!

But as regards, piracy, who will simply ask/obtain a small amount of their cargo, which in truth, over a few runs will make a negligable difference, is that really a significant "threat"? Note: From the pirate's point of view, this financial reward is already petty.

So if I see any more hurdles being put infront of PvP Piracy my eyebrows risk going up.


That said, my biggest issue, of not being able to hand in cargo at a CG station hopefully is partially a non-issue:-
1) Hopefully it appears even though you lose access to the station facilities, you still have access to a Black Market if there is one.
2) I've raised a request to allow Legal cargo to still be handed in to Black Market under such conditions, which will also smooth things out IMHO - https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...cilities-sell-LEGAL-cargo-on-the-Black-Market


So as long as it ends up with Pirates having to go elsewhere to repair/re-arm I'm happy with that compromise.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

It should depend on demand as well.
Why should a commodity sell for more in low (or no) security systems if they are already drowning in the stuff?

Of course demand should also play a part. High demand in a medium/low sec and anarchies should pay more then high demand in a hi sec system. The reason why is that nobody would bother trading to those systems if they can trade in the nice comfort of a hi sec system getting the same amount of money for very little risk. The less the security the better the price due to the increased risk. These places need the commodities to survive so they give better rewards to entice people to trade there. It's called risk reward, which is needed in the game.

 

[Siobhan]

errr piracy is robbery with threat of death.

without the death bit you are a space begger.

Yes, the threat of death.
But if you ever follow through on that threat, then you don't get to rob that victim again - either because they are dead (RL) or because they might move to a PG or Solo or block you (E: D).

The idea is to make them think they'll lose less by complying.
If you can't make them believe that without shooting, then you've already lost the engagement.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Player combat will be fine! ganking and griefing will decrease I see no issues with these changes and there match more to Elite II and Elite III and the previous game mechanics than the current free for all.

In some respects but not others.

Elite II/III piracy was basically trivial to get away with - you blew up the trader, scooped the cargo [1], and the police were 2 days travel away so wouldn't even bother launching. Sure, they wouldn't let you dock at the station until you'd paid a fine, but so long as you sold the cargo in a different jurisdiction that wasn't a big deal. You could blow up ships for piracy in (e.g.) the Empire for years with no police interference, so long as you went elsewhere to sell up.

The big difference between the previous games and Elite Dangerous is that:
Elite had 1 jurisdiction
FE2 had 3 jurisdictions
FFE had 4 jurisdictions
Elite Dangerous has tens of thousands of jurisdictions. Bringing superpower bounties in might help a bit (but as I understand it they're not bringing back the FE2/FFE 'global independent bounty', so you can still take advantage in independent space)

[1] Well, scooped a cargo pod by which time the others had Newtonianly drifted outside scanner range never to be seen again. In FFE you could nav target one pod to keep track of it, combat target the one you actually wanted to scoop, and get *double* the number of cargo pods from the encounter. The "how are you supposed to actually get enough cargo to make money from doing this" problem hasn't changed at all.