Mission-spawned pirates are fundamentally flawed

[Mephane]

I know some of these issues are not specifically caused by or limited to mission-spawned pirates, but exacerbated by them (e.g. the way how sensors work in supercruise can cause ships to magically appear when you are flying slowly, but they could conceivably just have been moving fast and thus seen you from further than you can see them; which is an issue worth its own separate discussion...).

• They spawn right behind you in supercruise to immediately commence an interdiction. Sometimes you get the incoming enemy alert and by the time you have checked out the "incoming mission critical message", the interdiction has already started.
• They always magically know where you are and spawn in your instance. You can successfully evade their interdiction, process to a mission objective (e.g. a mission USS for a salvage mission), and *poof* there they are again at the mission target (even if that is not the mission they spawn from).
• They follow you across systems even through jumps their ship could not conceivably do in the same time as you.
• Since you have no control over their faction, they can get randomly assigned Magical Reputation Armor, i.e. spawn as members of an otherwise legal faction you intend to gain or maintain reputation with, and thus cannot attack.
• The bonus payment for killing them is laughable, as are the bounties. I just killed a deadly Anaconda and got 90,000cr from the mission giver, and 11,000cr bounty (with KWS!).
• There is always multiple. Incoming enemy alert always means you have to fend off or evade multiple pirates, one after another, so even if you sigh and stop to kill one to get it over with, it's not actually going to be over. You either get no interruption, or 4.
• While having a faster ship allows you to consistently escape a pirate in a slower ship, they never realize that they can't catch you, and will continue to pester you no matter how often you evade their interdiction or fly away from them in normal flight.
• You have to kill them personally or they will just respawn. I've seen mission-generated pirates get smokes by the police, only to respawn and interdict immediately after I went back to supercruise.
• Their demands are impossible to comply with unless you decide to prepare beforehand to bring some cargo to drop. You cannot give them a part of the mission cargo to appease them and deliver the rest; you would have to abandon and thus fail the mission to even be able to give them a portion of the goods. I frankly doubt barely anyone ever gives them anything for this reason. If I have to transport 120t and the pirate demands 20, I might feel inclined to give up 20 if I could still complete the mission for a proportionally smaller payment, but not if that means cancelling the contract, having now stolen cargo aboard, a hefty fine and reputation loss.
• On top of the mission-generated pirates, random regular ones can spawn as well, potentially doubling the amount of ships to fight if you decide to submit and battle.
• There's ultimately no winning move for the player. No matter what you do, the system wins, steals some of your time (for a laughable reward) and annoys you. If you kill them, the system has successfully expanded what would have been a quick delivery into a 15 minute slog. If you submit and run, the system will pester you with interdiction after interdiction. Also if you submit, you get magically teleported away from your destination; one moment you are 0.2Ls from the station, interdiction starts, you submit, now you are 100Ls away; if you decide to evade, the supercruise maneuvres can bring you quite a sizable distance away, too.

The good thing is, the system just needs some tweaking to improve. We reduce the annoyance factor and turn the enemies into an actual bonus event that enhances the mission:

• Increase the bonus payment for the pirates. 100,000cr base value, +50% of the mission payout per successful kill. And the pirates should always have a very high bounty (within the range of what a pirate of their rank could normally spawn with).
• Only ever spawn a single wave, not 4. If you decide to stay and fight, that should mean you will be left alone for the rest of the mission.
• If your mission is for a legal (i.e. non-anarchy) faction, the pirates will always belong to a proper pirate faction, or be factionless altogether, so as a law-abiding citizen, you can blast them with impunity reputation-wise.
• If the mission is for a pirate faction, the mission may either spawn pirates from a rival pirate faction (or factionless), or bounty hunters from a legal faction (or factionless).
• Any mission-spawned enemy ship is guaranteed to drop at least 1 unit of very rare materials upon destruction or very rare data upon scan (only once even if you flee and scan multiple times, of course).
• If the enemy dies from any cause (including police NPCs), they are gone for the remainder of the mission. This also applies to wings of pirates - if you kill 1 out of a wing of three, then decide to leg it, after the next interdiction there will only the two other ships be left.
• If you personally kill the enemy, this greatly increases the amount of reputation awarded by the mission.
• If you successfully evade their interdiction, you are granted a grace period of at least 5 minutes during which they will lose your trail and cannot at all appear in your instance under any circumstances.
• If you escape them by jumping to a different system that is further away than their jump range, they will lose your trail for the remainder of the mission. (If you are in an AspX with 30Ly jump range, no way should an FDL be able to catch you across a series of (or even a single) long jumps.)

The issue with the pirates' demands being unfulfillable without either cancelling the mission or carrying a some (valuable) dummy cargo might be harder to solve, as this would probably require significant changes to the underlying mission system itself.

 

[Ananym]

Some consideration should be made of the unit worth of the goods.
What's a Fer-de-lance going to do with 300 tons of algae?

 

[CMDR KRITIKOSK8]

I know some of these issues are not specifically caused by or limited to mission-spawned pirates, but exacerbated by them (e.g. the way how sensors work in supercruise can cause ships to magically appear when you are flying slowly, but they could conceivably just have been moving fast and thus seen you from further than you can see them; which is an issue worth its own separate discussion...).

• They spawn right behind you in supercruise to immediately commence an interdiction. Sometimes you get the incoming enemy alert and by the time you have checked out the "incoming mission critical message", the interdiction has already started.
• They always magically know where you are and spawn in your instance. You can successfully evade their interdiction, process to a mission objective (e.g. a mission USS for a salvage mission), and *poof* there they are again at the mission target (even if that is not the mission they spawn from).
• They follow you across systems even through jumps their ship could not conceivably do in the same time as you.
• Since you have no control over their faction, they can get randomly assigned Magical Reputation Armor, i.e. spawn as members of an otherwise legal faction you intend to gain or maintain reputation with, and thus cannot attack.
• The bonus payment for killing them is laughable, as are the bounties. I just killed a deadly Anaconda and got 90,000cr from the mission giver, and 11,000cr bounty (with KWS!).
• There is always multiple. Incoming enemy alert always means you have to fend off or evade multiple pirates, one after another, so even if you sigh and stop to kill one to get it over with, it's not actually going to be over. You either get no interruption, or 4.
• While having a faster ship allows you to consistently escape a pirate in a slower ship, they never realize that they can't catch you, and will continue to pester you no matter how often you evade their interdiction or fly away from them in normal flight.
• You have to kill them personally or they will just respawn. I've seen mission-generated pirates get smokes by the police, only to respawn and interdict immediately after I went back to supercruise.
• Their demands are impossible to comply with unless you decide to prepare beforehand to bring some cargo to drop. You cannot give them a part of the mission cargo to appease them and deliver the rest; you would have to abandon and thus fail the mission to even be able to give them a portion of the goods. I frankly doubt barely anyone ever gives them anything for this reason. If I have to transport 120t and the pirate demands 20, I might feel inclined to give up 20 if I could still complete the mission for a proportionally smaller payment, but not if that means cancelling the contract, having now stolen cargo aboard, a hefty fine and reputation loss.
• On top of the mission-generated pirates, random regular ones can spawn as well, potentially doubling the amount of ships to fight if you decide to submit and battle.
• There's ultimately no winning move for the player. No matter what you do, the system wins, steals some of your time (for a laughable reward) and annoys you. If you kill them, the system has successfully expanded what would have been a quick delivery into a 15 minute slog. If you submit and run, the system will pester you with interdiction after interdiction. Also if you submit, you get magically teleported away from your destination; one moment you are 0.2Ls from the station, interdiction starts, you submit, now you are 100Ls away; if you decide to evade, the supercruise maneuvres can bring you quite a sizable distance away, too.

The good thing is, the system just needs some tweaking to improve. We reduce the annoyance factor and turn the enemies into an actual bonus event that enhances the mission:

• Increase the bonus payment for the pirates. 100,000cr base value, +50% of the mission payout per successful kill. And the pirates should always have a very high bounty (within the range of what a pirate of their rank could normally spawn with).
• Only ever spawn a single wave, not 4. If you decide to stay and fight, that should mean you will be left alone for the rest of the mission.
• If your mission is for a legal (i.e. non-anarchy) faction, the pirates will always belong to a proper pirate faction, or be factionless altogether, so as a law-abiding citizen, you can blast them with impunity reputation-wise.
• If the mission is for a pirate faction, the mission may either spawn pirates from a rival pirate faction (or factionless), or bounty hunters from a legal faction (or factionless).
• Any mission-spawned enemy ship is guaranteed to drop at least 1 unit of very rare materials upon destruction or very rare data upon scan (only once even if you flee and scan multiple times, of course).
• If the enemy dies from any cause (including police NPCs), they are gone for the remainder of the mission. This also applies to wings of pirates - if you kill 1 out of a wing of three, then decide to leg it, after the next interdiction there will only the two other ships be left.
• If you personally kill the enemy, this greatly increases the amount of reputation awarded by the mission.
• If you successfully evade their interdiction, you are granted a grace period of at least 5 minutes during which they will lose your trail and cannot at all appear in your instance under any circumstances.
• If you escape them by jumping to a different system that is further away than their jump range, they will lose your trail for the remainder of the mission. (If you are in an AspX with 30Ly jump range, no way should an FDL be able to catch you across a series of (or even a single) long jumps.)

The issue with the pirates' demands being unfulfillable without either cancelling the mission or carrying a some (valuable) dummy cargo might be harder to solve, as this would probably require significant changes to the underlying mission system itself.

VERY GOOD POINTS. i suffered from this disease so much. Currently at PS4, so no idea how Beyond is. I hope they are changed.

repped !!!

 

[Adept]

Good ideas here. I hope the devs are paying attention.

 

[Codger]

I too hope that NPCs get some attention soon. The smoke and mirrors they rely on becomes more and more apparent as the game and missions become more complex.

Their behavior is nonsense in many cases (like how they announce they are after you, but never show up until you drop into the station instance. Then they suddenly appear inside the no-fire zone and wander around uselessly. That's just one example.).

They do things they should not be able to do (jump long distances, heal their damage in seconds, etc etc etc). They forget they already attacked you. They can even change rank. It's just weird.

As OP says, much of this could be made better with just some tweaking and a bit more state persistence (ie remembering if they were damaged, or if they ran away, whatever).

Here's hoping improvements are on the table!

 

[Mephane]

Their behavior is nonsense in many cases (like how they announce they are after you, but never show up until you drop into the station instance. Then they suddenly appear inside the no-fire zone and wander around uselessly. That's just one example.). !

Yeah, one moment they jump in and gloat how they will kill you, then they turn around and fly away because obviously attacking you in the NFZ of a starport would be a bad idea. so why drop in at all lol. (And sometimes they happen to get scanned and attacked by the police, and even killed, but they just respawn the moment you leave the instance...)

 

[cyberus]

I too hope that NPCs get some attention soon. The smoke and mirrors they rely on becomes more and more apparent as the game and missions become more complex.

Their behavior is nonsense in many cases (like how they announce they are after you, but never show up until you drop into the station instance. Then they suddenly appear inside the no-fire zone and wander around uselessly. That's just one example.).

They do things they should not be able to do (jump long distances, heal their damage in seconds, etc etc etc). They forget they already attacked you. They can even change rank. It's just weird.

As OP says, much of this could be made better with just some tweaking and a bit more state persistence (ie remembering if they were damaged, or if they ran away, whatever).

Here's hoping improvements are on the table!

Well.... Dont hope too much. Op is right about everything..... but FD won't do much about it... even if they want it. They simply can't pull off this changes.

 

[Mephane]

Well.... Dont hope too much. Op is right about everything..... but FD won't do much about it... even if they want it. They simply can't pull off this changes.

Most of my suggestions would be minor tweaks, actually. Greater rewards and bounties, better material drops, only 1 wave of mission-spawned enemies...

 

[IndigoWyrd]

Some consideration should be made of the unit worth of the goods.
What's a Fer-de-lance going to do with 300 tons of algae?

I'm more "amused" by the fact that if I'm in a Dolphin, I can always count on these to be FdL's.
If I'm in an Orca, they'll be Anacondas.
If I'm in a Beluga, they'll be Cobras or DBX.

Any guesses as to which ship I choose for most of my mission running?

 

[Artie]

Nice ideas, I agree with almost all of them. At this moment the mission-generated pirates usually means just unrewarding and pretty annoying distraction. With a capable ship, you will shoot them fast for negligible rewards and with a trading ship, you will just try to run and face the annoyance for the rest of the travel. I am trying to avoid such pirates as much as possible not because of challenge, but because I simply do not want to loose time and be bothered by them for nothing.

 

[Darty]

They need to rewrite the entire npc spawning system from the ground up. Mission NPCs, pirate NPCs, bounty hunter npcs, background instance npcs, police npcs, every single one of them feels extremely fake an artificial from their dialog to their behavior to their spawning patterns. Everything is wrong with the way this game handles npcs. OPs points are only the tip of the iceberg.

 

[Gaiseric]

I agree with the sentiment that npc pirates are often unrealistic, but I disagree with some of the suggestions

• Only ever spawn a single wave, not 4. If you decide to stay and fight, that should mean you will be left alone for the rest of the mission.

I don't see why you should expect only one wave. The number and quality of the opposition should be related to the value and quantity of your cargo, but there is no reason to think you will only ever get one attack.​

• If the mission is for a pirate faction, the mission may either spawn pirates from a rival pirate faction (or factionless), or bounty hunters from a legal faction (or factionless).

Pirates are untrustworthy criminals. They can be expected to betray their own faction by attacking you for their personal profit occassionaly, although this should only happen rarely. A nice touch would be if the pirate faction enforcers turned up to deal with them when this happened.​

• Any mission-spawned enemy ship is guaranteed to drop at least 1 unit of very rare materials upon destruction or very rare data upon scan (only once even if you flee and scan multiple times, of course).

Pirates often seem to be poor and desperate ("my children will go hungry tonight"). No reason to expect them to be carrying rare materials. Maybe from a high class elite pirate, but not as a matter of course.​

 

[Lee Archer]

I’ve abandoned missions because it felt like the game was conspiring against me, exactly as the op described it, leaving me -
Oh, c’mon, really, F$#kit. I just assumed there was some savy techniques used by the fighting Elite that I wasn’t aware of.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

I generally agree with the iffy mechanics, but I don't want the missions to be made any easier.

If (big if) I managed to get a mission to spawn 4 attackers, I often reach my destination before the second one spawns. Lol

IMHO, the missions rank should govern the NPC's spawned to intercept you in a different way.
Your Combat Rank should determine their Combat Rank.
But the Missions Rank should determine how big a wing they spawn in, rather than how many individuals are sent...
So low ranked (1-2) missions spawn either 1 ship or nothing.
Medium ranked (3-5) missions spawn 1-2 ships in a wing.
High ranked (6-8) missions spawn 2-4 ships in a wing.
And Highest rank (9-10) missions always spawn 4+ ships in a wing, multiple times.

The current system of fighting 1 hostile at a time isn't even challenging, it's just an annoyance. Lol

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[Mephane]

I don't see why you should expect only one wave. The number and quality of the opposition should be related to the value and quantity of your cargo, but there is no reason to think you will only ever get one attack.

The reason for only one wave would be as extra motivation to stop and fight even if you don't need or want the bonus rewards. Right now if you just want to quickly get rid of them, you can't. You have to wait for the interdiction, submit, fight, reenter supercruise, repeat, four times.

Plus, one often has multiple missions running at the same time, if two or more happen to spawn pirates, this multiplies quickly.

Pirates are untrustworthy criminals. They can be expected to betray their own faction by attacking you for their personal profit occassionaly, although this should only happen rarely. A nice touch would be if the pirate faction enforcers turned up to deal with them when this happened.

Well if you were running an interstellar corporation, wouldn't you immediately fire any employee who turns out to break the law and rob your own freelance contractors? I don't think it makes a lot of sense to see so many pirates from regular, legal factions - these would be thrown out of their factions quickly and thus either be factionless, or join a real pirate gang. Plus, all of my suggestions are primarily about gameplay, not about story or lore. It's simply annoying to get some pirates spawned from the mission and lo and behold, they belong to a faction you are trying to rep up with...

Pirates often seem to be poor and desperate ("my children will go hungry tonight"). No reason to expect them to be carrying rare materials. Maybe from a high class elite pirate, but not as a matter of course.

First of all, I am certain that quoted line from the game is just the pirate lying to you, or maybe even trying to crack a joke. Second, material drops are not stuff that the ship had in its cargo hold or something like that, but simply pieces of debris that happen to be potentially useful to an engineer.

 

[Lily from anim.o.v.e]

yes mission spanws of enemies in gneral are sadly done, so preidcable, so repetitive for the same mission.

Some consideration should be made of the unit worth of the goods.
What's a Fer-de-lance going to do with 300 tons of algae?

this alone seems to be fishy enough to raid it, because thats too unusal to be a standard trade,

 

[metatheurgist]

I think being mobbed is a fair way to stop mission stacking. Can't handle it? Don't stack.

 

[Mephane]

I think being mobbed is a fair way to stop mission stacking. Can't handle it? Don't stack.

See, I want this idea to be turned on its head. The mission-spawned pirates should be a rewarding, welcome addition, not a time-wasting nuisance.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

I think being mobbed is a fair way to stop mission stacking. Can't handle it? Don't stack.

I don't think you can even get mobbed anymore.

I've stacked loads of missions but the "hostile" ships are still sent 1 at a time.

I'd actually be overjoyed if they ganged up on me in a massive wing. Lol

Like I said earlier, these single ships sent after you are just an annoyance. They pose no actual treat, especially one at a time.

The mission should state roughly how many ships might be sent after you*, and they should be in a wing, attacking you all at once. Especially higher up the ranks.
Then it's no longer an nuisance, but a proper attempt to stop you.

*For example, the mission description could say "our intelligence suggests that a small/moderate/large/massive force might be sent to intercept you."
Small being 1, moderate being 2-3, large being 3-4, massive being 4+ ships in a wing.

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[B1rdy]

ED needs more consistence and persistence - simply put.