Sorry. Not "force them out", but "lure them out" then.
[Suggestion] Open only 'district'
Yeah, there's nothing wrong with an incentive to take a risk in a multiplayer game.. Don't go there if you don't want the risk. Simples.
Thanks for the info!
There's also nothinig wrong with being interesting content to players not interested in PvP. Try that as incentive.
Let me ask you, how does someone engage in pvp piracy when 90% of the traders carrying valuable cargo are in solo? Piracy is supposed to be a cornerstone of the game, yet the game's own design discourages it. This idea would at least make it viable in a small region of the galaxy.
Opposing the idea because you don't want players to be 'lured' into a high-risk area is clearly because you don't like the idea of players with a more aggressive playstyle having features aimed at them. Yet nobody at Fdev said this game is aimed and developed purely for PvE pacifists.
In your mind anyway.
The point is - assume you get a section of systems with enhanced rewards then the unaware player might see for example a lucrative trade opportunity reported in 3rd-party tools (the in-game relies on having been there previously) so they head for it.
That is exactly what you want - BUT - there is no guarantee that the player that you are hoping to ply your piracy on is at all aware that the situation is a trap.
So, to me you are asking for a trap to be embedded in the game to give you content, I say - not a good idea - if you want to ply piracy then you too should be looking for lucrative trade opportunities and go hunting it down.
Plus - if you want people to play in Open rather than avoid highly-engineered combat ships how about making an area where no engineered modifications are allowed? Or does that not suit your mindset?
They will not tell you this, because it's not in their best interest. Just look at the clues.
Three modes (Solo, Private and Open) and separate Arena, pure PvP mode. Look at early interview with DBraben when he describes how multiplayer will work and how this is designed to promote CoOp and avoid griefers. Look how Fdev treat and support explorers and look how griefers pretty much ruin everything else they do, including various in-game events or Fdev streams.
This game allows you to play aggressively, but it takes all precautions to make this as much avoidable as possible (why do you think they buffed ship defences?).
I play almost exclusively in Open, as a trader. I love PvP pirates. I enjoy being pirated. I really do. But that kind of piracy is very rare. Boring ganks, where you can either die or high wake are common though.
lol so piracy isn't an intended part of the game then?
Players get warnings about dangerous systems in the info panel when they jump, that could easily be adapted for this ..so not a problem. If they don't read it then that's on them.
It's not a 'trap', it's an incentive to take a risk to potentially earn a larger profit or better materials/data. Do you think Fdev would implement this in such a way where the player doesn't know what they're going into? Like they'd be sitting in their office twiddling their mustaches and cackling about all the non-pvpers getting attacked there?
That's exactly what we do - use eddb.io + inara to find out where to go... but 90% of the time it involves staring at the sun because everybody is in solo. NPCs don't carry void opals before you suggest it.
I've already suggested expanding CQC to include regular ship duels where engineering could be disabled: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/suggestion-cqc-duel-mode.424093/ Good enough?
While the game design certainly does discourage piracy (especially PvP piracy), it's not the modes that are the problem, and if you had an "open only" system people wouldn't be going there in the sort of shieldless T-9 which might plausibly be piratable.
A well-built trade ship can survive the small time needed to high-wake out, long before its shields go or a hatchbreaker can attach (especially with a well-placed point defence). So no cargo for you.
You seem to be expecting that it would go like this:
Frontier: "We've set up a high-risk high-reward PvP trade area"
Trader: "Great, I'll take my shieldless T-9 laden with Void Opals there immediately."
and not like this:
Pirate: "Your cargo or your ... oh, they've high-waked out again"
More importantly, the economics of piracy don't actually work very well anyway [0] in a game like Elite Dangerous. (Warning: maths ahead, feel free to just take my word for it that piracy is not economically plausible and skip to the end)
Trader: buys a hold full of goods for B, sells them for S (> B, of course)
Pirate: pirates goods for 'free' [1], sells them for the same unit price as the trader.
On an average trade trip, the trader has fraction P of their cargo stolen by pirates. (Sometimes more, sometimes none because they get through safely, of course)
Trader: profit is S*(1-P) - B
Pirate: profit is P*S
The pirate needs to make more profit than the trader from the encounters, or everyone just trades instead (or murders, because they hate traders and don't need the money)
So: P*S > S*(1-P) - B
So: P*S > S - P*S - B
So: P > 1 - P - B/S
So: 2P > 1 - B/S
So: P > (1 - B/S) / 2
But also, the traders need to make some profit [2], or they won't trade, and then there's no-one to pirate.
So: S(1-P) > B
So: S - S*P > B
So: S - B > S*P
So: (S - B)/S > P
Let's put some numbers in:
Palladium is bought for 12.5k, sold for 14.5k, so the pirates must steal at least 7% of the cargo (or they make less than the traders do), but they can't steal more than 13% of the cargo (or the traders make a loss on average and stop trading)
Military Grade Fabrics in ideal BGS circumstances are bought for 0.5k, sold for 10k, so the pirates must steal at least 48% of the cargo (or the traders make more money) but they can't steal more than 95% or the traders make a loss.
In the case of Palladium, the pirates need to be tuning their activity in a ridiculously narrow range to keep things sustainable - and even then, some traders will be unlucky or unskilled and get robbed more, and decide they can make better profits elsewhere. Also note: when the bounty hunters start coming after the pirates, the 7% the pirates need to steal goes up (to cover the costs of being hunted), but the 13% ceiling doesn't change. So if the bounty hunters are also making decent money by costing the pirates some rebuys, there might be no actual stable value at all.
In the case of Military Grade Fabrics, the range is much bigger - 48% to 95%. Keeping this sustainable, even when bounty hunters are added in, should actually be practical. Traders expect to lose a lot of cargo to piracy, but are making a high enough profit/ton to cope with that. On the other hand for the pirates to get up to 48% cargo stolen they either need to:
- successfully intercept every single trade ship and steal at least half its cargo
- steal basically all the cargo from at least half the trade ships (bearing in mind that a pirate ship is going to need more combat power than the trader it attacks, where exactly are you going to fit that cargo anyway?)
Even leaving aside the slowness of transferring hundreds of barrels between ships, and even assuming it's a perfect situation for the pirate where the trader is intimidated into handing over cargo without a fight, these are highly implausible circumstances. Better piracy tools for actually transferring the cargo would help, but that sort of near-perfect interception rate is implausible anyway, especially if you have bounty hunters escorting the traders as a way of finding their targets.
In neither the low-margin nor the high-margin case does it seem particularly plausible that both traders and pirates can be economically viable, and that's without even trying to give the bounty hunters a share of the action and model their costs, incomes, etc.
[0] Assuming here that people go into either trading or piracy for money nowadays. But you seem convinced that high trade profits will attract people to your pirate haven, so let's assume that both traders and pirates actually need the money.
[1] Lets ignore the marginal costs of limpets, ammunition, etc. Also ignoring the costs of being attacked by bounty hunters, to keep things simple ... and ignoring the black market's price penalty on the grounds it only makes things worse.
[2] Ignoring, here, the fact that they could make a guaranteed income elsewhere in the game with no risk, so the "ceiling" is actually lower ... and also ignoring for simplicity any repair or consumables costs incurred by the trader.
Piracy may be supposed to be a cornerstone of the game, but going right back to Elite I it was always something for the NPCs to attempt to do to the player as an excuse for shooting at them (and, fine, it still works okay for that in Elite Dangerous). It was never a particularly plausible thing for the player to do, even to NPCs, and it works particularly badly if both the pirate and trader actually have to care about their budget.
The modes are basically a complete irrelevance - they'd have to rewrite the combat, outfitting and economic models from scratch to make PvP piracy work.
I've seen the occasional shieldless T9s in void opal sell & CG systems, so that is immediately wrong.
Groms.
If their void opals fetched 2.5 million each there they would, I guarantee it.
Groms.
When there are traders and miners they work fine, I've been doing it for four years. The flow of targets is just unreliable.
With a void opal miner a pirate can make 16 million credits from one hatch breaker, sounds pretty profitable to me.
You've not looked at the main cargo types we look for, which are: Void Opals, Painite, Low Temp Diamonds, other high value minerals.
When a piracy encounter goes to plan the pirate makes money and so does the trader (sure their profit is reduced slightly but they dont get a rebuy and are usually ignored for 24 hours after they comply). With miners both parties still make vast sums due to the high prices and low outgoings.
Bounty hunter costs/viability is something else entirely.. A while back I suggested that bounty hunters gain a cut of the dispatched criminals rebuy cost. This would make Bounty Hunting very lucrative and encourage them to go after more expensive ships. It would also be very hard to exploit because of the net loss.
It's much about fun as anything, however since 3.3 came along, PvP piracy is very profitable.. but more players go into solo for safety when they're carrying high value cargo. This is why there needs to be a risk/reward system for some of these massively inflated profits, it's too easy to just go solo to be safe.
No they wouldn't, they'd just need to implement this suggestion.. players go where the huge profits are. They always have always will. Remember all those skimmer exploit systems? They used to have 24 hour traffic report numbers above 20,000. Likewise the Void Opal systems when they were new and constrained to one or two systems.
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OK, cool, but you can still kill a number of players before you're booted right? That's literally not "strictly forbidden" in practice, is it?
Any mined good the purchase price is zero, so the pirates make less profit than the miners if they steal under 50% of the cargo, and the miners technically make a profit if they get any of it through, but in practice it should be compared with how much they'd make by selling somewhere safer elsewhere. The ratios are not that much different to the Military Grade Fabrics, just the absolute numbers are much higher.
If you're happy to pirate when you're earning (considerably) less than you could with the same ship class in the same time through mining, then that's absolutely fine ... but why do you then expect that big money is going to motivate people to be the targets, if it doesn't motivate you to be the attacker?
This goes back to my earlier point - if the whole process is fun, and that's a more important motivation than the money, why is it so difficult to just pick a system and organise it?
To an extent. There's only so much money any player needs (if they aren't burning through PvP rebuys), and there's a big difference between a gold rush people expect to be nerfed, and a consistent way of earning big money.
Skimmers also had the issue that most people doing it believed that there was skimmers, which earned massive money, and other activities, which earned relatively little. They were wrong about that, of course, but it got 20k traffic because people thought it was the only activity possible for big money, and then only in one system.
So to get similar levels of traffic to this - when everyone now knows you can get 1.6 million per tonne from void opals all over the place - you'd need it to be offering earning rates which make void opals look like basic mission running. 2.5 million per tonne won't cut it ... 25 million per tonne might, at least in the short term.
The squadron leaderboards are interesting to look at for this - AX, Combat, CQC, Exploration all saw record totals in Season 4 both for activity and usually squadron counts ... whereas Trade peaked in Season 1 and has basically been downhill since. Why? Because the Trade board is driven primarily by core mining and presumably people are just doing less of it now they have their billions.
Are 90% of the miners now in Solo? Or are 90% of the miners retired with their billions and doing something else?
Sure, if there was a system offering inflated VO prices in Open only, in the short term it probably would get a rush of people, some of whom would be in piratable ships. After the first few weeks, though, it would either:
- be a 20,000 traffic system with a normal mix of weak and strong ships. Note in this case that even if only 10% choose to play in Open, that's still about one hyperspace exit every minute, so you're not going to be short on targets even without the Open-only restriction. (And with the Open-only restriction, instancing will mean you don't see most of the traders anyway)
- be mainly filled with PvPers and miners flying indestructible multi-role builds. Sure, you can hit their Cutter with a Grom, but you need five minutes to break its shields, so an extra 30 seconds won't help much.
I don't know the answer but I agree with your reasoning, it seems likely that it is 'discouraged' rather than disabled.
I was referring to your "Piracy is supposed to be a cornerstone of the game ". Your perception of it being a "cornerstone" is just a reflection of your desire to role-play being a pirate to have your fun in attacking other players. I suggest if piracy was a "cornerstone" then there might actually be a statistic in the game for it. So search as you will you will not find a stat in the game saying "ships pirated" or even "cargo pirated".
Back to the point - you want to set up an area to act as a trap to give you "content". I say no thanks, I don't see why the game and galaxy should be defaced to cater for people wanting to role-play parasites.
My initial post was just referencing this message, I'd just forgotten where I'd seen it. We can only go by what Fdev say.. I'm not sure how productive it is to go down the 'that's what they say but not what they mean' road, I understand the point you're making though. It is however an area of space where different rules of engagement apply, which is why I referenced it as support for this post.
I'm not sure I understand... I'll happily stop any trader/miner I see if I'm pirating, I just meant we tend to target systems that are most likely to contain high-value loot.
Because that would be contrived, not fun and fundamentally miss the point of an open world multiplayer game.
Yeah but the point is hotspots work, the fact that everyone was ignorant about other locations is not important. What we're discussing here is a feature limited to one region of the galaxy.
That argument kind've assumes the miner will only have one or two VOs, if they have 100 then the difference in total sale value is huge and absolutely will cut it.
It's getting quite time consuming to keep responding to these huge posts, but you do realise hatch-breakers go through shields right? If you're not aware of the basics of piracy then it kind've undermines your position a little.
So? The game includes hatch-breakers, Archon Delaine, hack-limpets, interstellar factors, black markets ,piracy livery, lore, etc .Piracy is part of the game, its even listed on the multicrew activities.. Your arguments are getting increasingly desperate and non-nonsensical.
Ah there's that salt again.. Thanks for your contribution.
I agree, the game does include all the tools a pirate needs, including that tool Archon Delaine, but that’s another matter... however, I do not entirely disagree with the sentiment, and for a good reason with which you should agree.
Let’s start with a very basic What Is Piracy? The basic premise is that of strong-arm robbery of starship cargo. It’s also illegal.
If you box that illegal activity into a known region of space:
1. People will simply not pass through there, even if it means going the long way around.
2. Bounty Hunters will know where to find you.
The beauty of piracy as it is right now is that you can operate anywhere, which makes you just that much harder to find. Sure, it can make targets harder to find as well, but think about it from the other side - freight haulers are not interested in giving up their freight. They want to haul it where it’s supposed to go, and your hold is not it. You’d probably not much care for being robbed by another pirate either, so you’d generally try to avoid it as well.
By creating zones like this that freedom is given up, and that’s not fun for anyone. Sure, space is big, and that’s part of the challenge of space piracy - finding your mark.
That's the whole point of making prices higher there...
Again, that's the point... I'm trying to suggest something that stimulates organic pvp.
Void opal hotspots would still exist, and pirates could still go there if they wanted less bounty hunters coming after them, but their profits would be less. So they would be subject to risk vs reward too..
A wing of three (a clipper and two vettes) tried recently, the outcome was amusing. I have the video saved on my archives somewhere... All these things you are thinking I would regard as negative, are actually positive and I welcome.
On the contrary, players would have the freedom to go there or not.. Nobody would be forced to go there.
It's hard to find your mark when they are in another mode.
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The difference in total sale value is only huge if you get almost all of the VOs safely to port and sell them. If the price here is 2.5 and the price in an anonymous system is 1.6, then if you lose more than 35% of your VOs to piracy or murder, you're not actually making more money.
Players have historically been quite happy to take moderate losses in potential earnings if it gives them an easy life - when long-range passengers was a thing, lots of people were spending half an hour board flipping to load up, and recording 50-100 MCr/hour, while others were thinking about it a little, finding a less well-known system which generated a ship's full of missions on one board, and getting 200 MCr/hour. But ... that required a brain and preparation, and board-flipping around Rhea didn't so most people were quite happy to take half the money in exchange for not having to think.
If it's only 2.5 you're relying on most of them not actually seeing a pirate or murderer because there's so many people in the system most of them might as well be in Solo because instancing means they never see you.
Sure. What if the miner is also aware of the basics of piracy and has some point defence covering their cargo hatch, or an ECM to kill the limpets altogether, or has engineered drives and just flies away at a higher speed than the limpets can go (also leaving any VOs that do get extracted smeared over several kilometres).
My point is that in a situation where most targets actually see a pirate, the incompetent ones will lose money compared with what they can earn normally so won't stick around long, so it'll filter to mostly competent ones who you can't actually steal from.
I've done a bit of PvE piracy in the past, but it quickly became clear that - like hauling Clothing, or mining in Rocky rings - that it was mainly implemented for the NPCs to do.
But that doesn’t create organic PvP. It creates artificial PvP. PvP is already as organic as it gets . Anywhere, any time, with or without warning.
Thing is, nearly all the risk in on the miner, and all the reward is on the pirate.
So either you’re too far out of their league, or they were just terrible pilots. Where’s the risk v. Reward here?
If nobody is forced to go there, then why would anyone go there?
RvR isn’t really that much of a motivator. Even if I could double the return on a cargo load going through such an area, I’d still opt to avoid it and make more trips. It’s not like it’s hard to make credits anyways, so they’re less of a motivation and reward, so what else could be offered as incentive?
I think my suggestion for CZ-type zones for PvP is the better route, and leave piracy be as it is.
What Piracy really needs is infrastructure to support it as a career. Right now it’s barely a hobby. But you add a Criminal Underground Network, where black markets both buy illicit goods as well as sell items not otherwise obtainable and attach standings and structures to really make this a full-blown career, and the rest will work itself out.