Devs should really think about giving piracy and trade a big overhaul
I agree, but issues with travel/escape and the economy are what underlay both.
Travel has been trivialized by massive jump ranges and too short drop out distances, while limiting a target's ability to immediately escape has always been very difficult.
The economy is still MIA...it's been a placeholder the entire life of the game, and doesn't even apply to a tenth of what it should.
A problem with PvP piracy is that it needs willing targets
Yes.
This is because there it's far easier to escape and evade than it is to pursue and corner. There are also minimal consequences for destroying a ship, or allowing your own ship to be destroyed...and these are often not even enforced.
And the obvious answer is that the pirates should be willing to take turns playing as pirate victims.
No one should
want to be a piracy victim, but it should be possible to pirate someone, even if they are fighting tooth an nail against it, if they are wise, skilled, or lucky enough.
The old smuggling missions where you had, like, 20 NPCs on your case after every jump were great fun and high risk for the high reward.
They were repetitive tedium of near zero risk and absurdly inflated rewards.
The only CMDRs that were at any risk from the NPCs these missions spawed were on the same level of competence as those who can be unwilling victims of piracy now...novices or abject fools.
The reality is that in ED if you want to play as a pirate, you need willing players to play the other role. There's no other way.
You
cannot have real piracy with willing victims, that's as big an oxymoron as consensual .
It's just a kinky fetish or a second layer of role-play where in-game CMDRs decide to LARP with each other because they are bored.
Why is this even an issue?
Because, like it or not, it's a persistent multi-player only game and always has been.
It's virtually impossible to do anything without impacting another players game in some fashion. We are all eachother's content, even if it's limited to miniscule BGS contributions.
relogging into the base non-horizons game for
planetary problems.
Something that should be considered cheating via exploit unless it's to work around a clear bug.
Agreed. From a piracy point of view, would some cargo still be left in the wreckage? I remember a Cmdr telling me it would, that was many years ago.
It should be, but it's not. Any cargo you see is because some was dropped before ship destruction.
Of course, there should be ways to rig cargo to self destruct or otherwise be rendered unusable if it's ownership is not transfered via proper procedures.
Exactly - and there's nothing to force players to play among players who like to pirate - hence the need for the target to be willing to select Open when playing the game at all.
My CMDR isn't the one clicking open.
If I wasn't accepting of the risk as a player I wouldn't click Open. This hardly means my CMDR is going to be willing to surrender his cargo to a pirate...chances are he'll escape, cargo intact, and come back five minutes later with an apex PvP vessel to hound the pirates, either by shooting them down directly, or, if my CMDR it out matched, destroying/driving off their would be victims before they can profit from them.
So yeah, I can be completely accepting of all play styles that don't involve cheating, as a player, while playing a CMDR who has nothing but scorn for the activities many other CMDRs engage in.
