Make piracy more viable by dramatically increasing the prices of common commodities.

[DemiserofD]

One of the biggest limiting factors of piracy is the fact that it takes so long to steal Commodities from a Target, that it pays virtually nothing.

Take agronomic treatment, for example. At its best, it can pay upwards of 30 K per ton. A Trader can get about 5000 tons per hour, but a pirate, who must steal these Commodities one at a time, will be lucky to get a tenth of that.

This means that the Trader, who makes 30k of profit each, will end up making an impressive 150m/hour, while the pirate, also getting about 30k/ton, will only make a mere 15m/hour.

But there's a simple solution!

Increase the purchase price and sell price by about 300K each. The Trader will now be making... exactly the same amount as before. By contrast, when the pirate steals their 500, they will now make 500×300k×.75 (stolen goods penalty)= 112.5m!

Still not quite as good as the trader is making, but nonetheless a very respectable income.

Of course, you wouldn't want to do this to all Commodities, as that would shut out lots of newer players with less money. But I think it's only natural that, as the income increases, the investment required to make that income would also increase correspondingly.

 

[varonica]

Piracy is about the fun of it, not the profit!

However if you want to do something like this, I wouldn't change commodity pricing, I would introduce a desirable piracy specific good that say provides reputation and not money when delivered to the desitnations station to encourage people to take it, but that can only be sold for a good profit at a black market when it's "illegal". So you literally can't sell it when it's legal, it has no value, that only comes as a result of piracy. It would also be limited in the number a ship can legally carry to prevent reputation spamming. So you can buy a half dozen and trade them for reputation, but a pirate can steal it but only sell it for profit to the black market.

 

[DemiserofD]

Piracy is about the fun of it, not the profit!

However if you want to do something like this, I wouldn't change commodity pricing, I would introduce a desirable piracy specific good that say provides reputation and not money when delivered to the desitnations station to encourage people to take it, but that can only be sold for a good profit at a black market when it's "illegal". So you literally can't sell it when it's legal, it has no value, that only comes as a result of piracy. It would also be limited in the number a ship can legally carry to prevent reputation spamming. So you can buy a half dozen and trade them for reputation, but a pirate can steal it but only sell it for profit to the black market.

Honestly, they said the same thing about AX combat. But it sure didn't hurt when they quadrupled the payouts.

Why not change commodity prices? You say it shouldn't happen, but not why.

 

[varonica]

Honestly, they said the same thing about AX combat. But it sure didn't hurt when they quadrupled the payouts.

Why not change commodity prices? You say it shouldn't happen, but not why.

Because the economy isn't an economy, it's a managed system, changing commodity prices is bound to have repercussions we and FDEV don't expect, some of them may be good, some of them may be bad, but all of them unpredictable. My suggestion increases piracy payout without playing around with something that is working perfectly alright at the moment. And I have never taken part in AX combat so it really in fact did nothing at all for a player who doesn't take part in AX combat.

Changing commodity prices won't just affect piracy, whereas changing AX combat rewards can only affect those taking part in AX combat, they are two entirely different things. Changing commodity prices has the possibility of affecting the entire game for all players. What if, for instance, the increase of commodity prices pulled people away from AX combat because they can now make more money carting stuff around.

Basically if you are going to change something to affect the dynamics of a particular activity it should only affect that activity and not flow through to the rest of the game with unexpected and unpredictable results.

 

[DemiserofD]

I can't really think of anything that would be impacted too terribly.

Wing bonuses are based on profit, not on the raw commodity prices, so they should work fine.

Source missions would be impacted in some cases, but could easily be corrected by just lowering the amount required for the higher-priced commodities.

POIs would pay dramatically better for salvage, but that's a great thing.

Delivery missions could theoretically be an issue, but as long as the fine for failure is based on the price of the hauled commodities, it should adjust itself automatically.

Mined commodities would obviously be excluded from any changes, so they'd remain the same.

Commodity production by stations, maybe? But you could just apply the same multiplier to production as you did to the price, so that shouldn't be an issue.

I dunno, most potential issues seem fairly straightforward to fix, and would result in a more immersive and overall better universe, as far as I can tell.

 

[Sensei Jacksama]

I think Varonica's idea is pretty good. Alot of talk about this subject has been circulating for some time and consensus generally seems to be 2 fold. We need a more viable method of halting a freefloating ship (grappling hooks for example). And the other is to introduce other more valuable commodities into the mix such as void opals, musgravite serendibite, etc. As of now you can find LTDs to pirate but that's it. Having a wider variety of higher value commodities would increase your chances of finding something valuable.

 

[DemiserofD]

I think Varonica's idea is pretty good. Alot of talk about this subject has been circulating for some time and consensus generally seems to be 2 fold. We need a more viable method of halting a freefloating ship (grappling hooks for example). And the other is to introduce other more valuable commodities into the mix such as void opals, musgravite serendibite, etc. As of now you can find LTDs to pirate but that's it. Having a wider variety of higher value commodities would increase your chances of finding something valuable.

Those methods would work, I just don't see why we can't just make normal commodities work too. The amount of credits owned by the average player has increased a hundredfold since release, but the prices of commodities has remained largely unchanged. It's long overdue for a correction.

 

[Sensei Jacksama]

Those methods would work, I just don't see why we can't just make normal commodities work too. The amount of credits owned by the average player has increased a hundredfold since release, but the prices of commodities has remained largely unchanged. It's long overdue for a correction.

You still need to have a large chance for failure or it wouldn't be fun. Right now you can find LTD's but it's so rare most players don't think its even in the game anymore. By adding additional valuable commodities increases the chances of finding something valuable among the junk.

 

[varonica]

I can't really think of anything that would be impacted too terribly.

That's exactly the point, you can't think of any, but it doesn't mean there aren't any! You just don't know, nobody does, the world is full of little changes that have major effects, butterflies and all that guff!

 

[varonica]

Those methods would work, I just don't see why we can't just make normal commodities work too. The amount of credits owned by the average player has increased a hundredfold since release, but the prices of commodities has remained largely unchanged. It's long overdue for a correction.

So the amount of credits owned by the player has increased dramantically, so your answer is to....increase the amount a player can earn dramatically? No, you only need to increase the amount it's possible to earn by piracy, that's it!

 

[DemiserofD]

You still need to have a large chance for failure or it wouldn't be fun. Right now you can find LTD's but it's so rare most players don't think its even in the game anymore. By adding additional valuable commodities increases the chances of finding something valuable among the junk.

At the moment, the junk piles are just that; junk piles. I can't remember the last time I went to a salvage site and actually picked anything up!

Boosting their value would make them occasionally worth picking up, but not always. Say you increased the value of all commodities by 10x, the same as Agronomic Treatment; you still wouldn't bother picking up food canisters or biowaste, but you actually would want to pick up some other stuff, like Nerve Agents, which would now be worth 130k each.

But even then, the rate of income would still be quite slow. Say you're relogging to reset the same instance over and over, getting you generously 10 tons of nerve agents per minute. You'd still only make about 78m/hour, far less than you can make by trading, even by abusing a game mechanic. And realistically, you're not going to find a POI with nothing but nerve agents anyway.

That's exactly the point, you can't think of any, but it doesn't mean there aren't any! You just don't know, nobody does, the world is full of little changes that have major effects, butterflies and all that guff!

Sure, I might be missing something, but you can make that argument about just about anything. Don't live in fear!

So the amount of credits owned by the player has increased dramantically, so your answer is to....increase the amount a player can earn dramatically? No, you only need to increase the amount it's possible to earn by piracy, that's it!

Not really. Currently, a player can buy Agronomic Treatment for 4k and sell them for 34k, with 30k net profit.

I'm proposing increasing the buy and sell prices by something like 300k. So now you would buy agronomic treatment for 304k and sell them for 334k. Still 30k net profit.

The trader makes the same amount. The pirate makes far more, true, but still not as much as the trader.

 

[varonica]

Sure, I might be missing something, but you can make that argument about just about anything. Don't live in fear!

What are you on about, what's this useless and pointless and meaningless "fear", it's a GAME, no-one is living in fear, I don't know what your agenda is here, but bringing "oooooh fear" every time someone disagrees with you is getting really tiresome! Let me post this here;

This is what the devs think of most of the ideas posted here, probably mine as well. You don't have a magic understanding of the game that goes beyond everyone elses and you don't get to go around accusing everyone of being afraid simply because they disagree with you as a way of denigrating their argument...get over it!

 

[metatheurgist]

The entire economy is hopelessly broken. Why are pirates in 'condas risking life and limb (and ship!) to steal when a guy in a sidewinder makes more money popping a few rocks. Driving up prices is only going to make things worse.

 

[DemiserofD]

What are you on about, what's this useless and pointless and meaningless "fear", it's a GAME, no-one is living in fear, I don't know what your agenda is here, but bringing "oooooh fear" every time someone disagrees with you is getting really tiresome! Let me post this here;

View attachment 272405

This is what the devs think of most of the ideas posted here, probably mine as well. You don't have a magic understanding of the game that goes beyond everyone elses and you don't get to go around accusing everyone of being afraid simply because they disagree with you as a way of denigrating their argument...get over it!

I dunno, I think quite a few of the ideas posted here are pretty great. It's all a matter of time management; they don't have time to do everything, and they almost certainly don't have much desire to work on something they don't feel any passion for because someone else thought of it.

But that doesn't mean they can't come here from time to time, see something that inspires them, and come up with their own version of it! Heck, I've seen my proposals make it into multiple games before! I suggested a weapon concept that went into an MMO about 10 years ago, name and all, and I suggested the plotline for the 14-heart event for Elliot from Stardew Valley virtually word for word about a year before it happened!

So it is possible for it to happen!

 

[DemiserofD]

The entire economy is hopelessly broken. Why are pirates in 'condas risking life and limb (and ship!) to steal when a guy in a sidewinder makes more money popping a few rocks. Driving up prices is only going to make things worse.

I think the opposite is true, honestly. The condas don't make sense right now because piracy doesn't make sense. But drive up the price of commodities and suddenly that piracy makes a lot more sense!

 

[metatheurgist]

Making everything else more stupid to fix piracy is not a solution though. Not that it fixes piracy (which has far bigger problems) it just makes it marginally profitable.

 

[DemiserofD]

Making everything else more stupid to fix piracy is not a solution though. Not that it fixes piracy (which has far bigger problems) it just makes it marginally profitable.

Why is it more stupid? Bigger startup investment, sure, but it's not like people don't have the credits these days.

And after that, it's pretty much completely normal.

 

[TheDragon2001]

Boosting prices is not the way to do it.
Instead, just make piracy take more brains. The easiest way to do this would make NPC traders behave and have ships and escorts more appropriate to their cargo. For example, if I see a t-6 traveling alone, I should be assuming that he has nothing of value. If I see a keelback with a couple eagles in toe, well he might be worth interdicting. If I see a t-10 with three condas in escort, he about has to have a hold full of void opals. Naturally, a few traders would spawn with defenses far below (or above) what their cargo warranted.

I can't really think of anything that would be impacted too terribly.

Unlocking some engineers... "Yes please give me 200 units of gold." "Yes I know the galactic average price of gold just went up 500%." "Yes that will cost you over 57,000,000." "Yes I know you could buy many ships for that much." "Now you see why I want that gold so much?"
Unlocking some tech-trader modules... "Yes this cargo rack is going to cost you several million in commodities, and that's not counting the alien meta-alloys or the odds and ends you'll have to throw in as well..."
In other words, a new commander is going to have to slave even more to unlock things.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

Ships carrying LTDs are easy enough to find when you know where to look. Just go to a high population industrial system, preferably with no ringed planets (unless you don't mind finding the occasional ship with limpets). It is the issue though that as long as the best commodity is LTDs, it'll always earn less than mining due to the black market cost and the rebalancing of these that happened a while back. I have no problem filling my hold with them, but I don't bother with it because of the time spent sat in supercruise just waiting for the right target. You don't feel that what you've done is worth the time.

My thought is that if there is to be a commodity buff, it should be on what is carried by private and military couriers so as not to affect the rest of the commodity market. Anything that is routinely bought and sold by players trading/mining should be left alone.

The entirety of criminal gameplay needs a whole risk/reward balance though. Being a criminal is supposed to be the quick and dirty way to make credits and arguably it does neither.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The amount of credits owned by the average player has increased a hundredfold since release, but the prices of commodities has remained largely unchanged. It's long overdue for a correction.

Agreed - and this would actually help balancing in other areas, I think. At the moment, extraction exports are just so much more profitable than everything else that it puts a massively distorting effect on the economy. A trader can get 18k/tonne easily trading Silver or Gold, while almost no other purchasable commodities sell for 18k full stop unless there's a very ideal combination of BGS states. Bringing the other commodities up to the level of the already-rebalanced Extraction ones would have benefits in general. (Obviously, as with Extraction, there'd need to be a few with sub-1000 credit prices so that new players can start with trading if they want)

Unlocking some engineers... "Yes please give me 200 units of gold." "Yes I know the galactic average price of gold just went up 500%." "Yes that will cost you over 57,000,000." "Yes I know you could buy many ships for that much." "Now you see why I want that gold so much?"

Gold is one of the few commodities which has been rebalanced substantially since the game launch - it used to be 9-11k/tonne and was recently changed to the 40-55k/tonne it currently is.