Add a Reason to Pirate Passenger Ships

[wstephenson]

Hah, that would be actually awesome if we could snatch people from someone else's ship.

But the main problem here is that very few people roleplay pirates and even fewer people are willing to roleplay victims. So... it would really be a feature for three people, I'm afraid.

You'd be surprised. I was pirating the CG on Sunday afternoon in a ViperMk4. 30 tonnes of other people's cargo delivered, about 15 ships successfully interdicted, 6000 Cr bounty accrued, 0 rebuys (on any side). I'd say about 1/4 had a laugh and went along with my charity chugger patter, the rest needed hatch breaker encouragement. There were 2 possible combat logs, both when I'd won the interdiction, and then there was nobody in real space. I think it helps if you're not in a FdL or FAS.

 

[Marra Morgan]

I think it helps if you're not in a FdL or FAS.

It certainly does!

And yes, I wholly support the ability to hatchbreak and swipe passengers in the form of escape pods / stasis thingies and being able to black market them into slavery. I've mentioned it a few times

 

[Eriseley]

Again, I guess the over-arching theme I want to convey is PIRACY IS ADDITIVE, but murdering is not. I LLLOOOOVE the thought of piracy in open but just being killed is boring. Reward piracy? Kinda negates murdering.

 

[CMDR Carbo]

There is a reason passenger missions pay well above the average. And that frontier have consistently made them this way. Not suggesting this is a good thing. But it’s pretty bloody obvious at this point, that that is a thing.

Frontier lavish on pet projects. I can’t blame them for being super into stuff they like. But this doesn’t lead to either consistent or broadly approachable outcomes. It just funnels people into highly focused tasks, and causes a huge degree of salt.

They did say they would farm salt. So I suppose we can’t say they didn’t warn us.

But a lot of this is intentional. It’s just folks at times refuse to accept that. And that commanders endlessly blame everyone else for it, means frontier can just continue doing the stuff they want to do, because they are super into it, and the community basically wears the outcomes.

A lot of stuff needs an overhaul, but the highly highly inconsistent relevant value is leading to pretty toxic outcomes.

Buffing the gains of passenger missions like FDEV did was the nail in the coffin of game balancing credit wise. I will forever be angry at them for doing that.
It opened insane ways of money printing all over the bubble. Not saying you couldn't grind money before with locations like Ceos/Sothis but it was concentrated to a few systems and the cr/h gain was considerably lower.

I will never understand why transporting 20 tourists or whatever from A to B will earn me 10 times the credits of transporting 200 tons of gold or palladium the very same route.
This completely ruined the mission balancing and messed up the whole game balancing.

 

[kofeyh]

The reality is, passengers are just talkative cargo. There should be relative value in all mission types, that take into consideration relative risk, and relative time spent.

At some point, the developer has elected to promote some, over others; one can argue the relative merit of encouraging broader mission use, but when it takes massive distortion to drive demand — and then not consider the influence this would have on demand curves and the impact on mission selection, instance hopping and so forth — it does actually make me genuinely wonder what Frontier want to achieve here.

Do frontier want a vibrant, broad mission platform with a lot of choice. Or do they want to funnel players into specific tasks? Given what’s going on elsewhere, I tend to think they do want us funneled into specifics. It’s hard to draw any other conclusion.

When you look at engineers. The missions system. CGs. Thargoids, and now the new tech stuff. It’s all funnelling people into highly specific tasks. If this isn’t the intention, then I have no idea what’s going on and why they’re doing what they’re doing; because this is the only conclusion available

I love the team. I love the game. It does make me sad at times that it’s come to this. People drawing battle lines, and a developer who seems oblivious to the fact that they are just feeding that cycle.

 

[Eriseley]

At the end of the day I'm not down? I guess...it's still a fun game. I just want them to embrace proactive player inaction. They can even make it pay off for both parties, no problem. If they don't...it's a loss, but I'll still fly this .

 

[CMDR Valleys]

Good thread OP, I was hoping to find some bounties on them when they first showed up but after scanning loads of them I can confirm that all the passengers are clean.

Heres to beyond and and more thoughtful gameplay.

 

[Lily from anim.o.v.e]

The initial issue is that passanegrs so far only appear as a mission, which means once people get kidnapped the mission taker would fail it entirely, sicne missions atm are binary.

What we need is no passanger missions, instead natural passanger traffic where a ship with cabins can load them intot heir ship from a lobby and trasnefr them to their destination. No fixed amounts and stuff, just like:

Lobby:
200x Businessclass to System A for price Z/passanger
400x Economy class to System C for price Y/passanger
300x Economy to System A for price X/passanger
.
.
.

So you enter the lobby and can either handpick them or just click a "autoload" to System A. Which fills up your cabisn with the repective passangers.



then if such a better and proper passanger transport system is established, kidnapping as a pirates task could exit in a better way.


On the other hand, pirates should also be able to do human trafficking where they bring people for money form A to B. refugees, terrorists illegal and wanted criminals and whatevers.

And then bounty hunters should be able to catch and scan for such illegal passanegrs as well.

 

[Shadowed]

I actually joined Elite like 2 days after the engineering release so I never got to pvp pre-engineers. Iv heard from a couple people that engineers caused about half the Pvp groups to disappear and the common belief is the only reason it didn't kill the game is because NMS bombed so bad. Did they really cause so much disruption?

Before engineers, PvP was a lot more balanced. It really killed off a lot of PvPers and many of them are still solo to this day. It nearly killed this game for me. I was an avid PvPer before Engineers and it took me MONTHS to enjoy it again.

Another problem was the awful heat meta on Engineers release. It was so stupid that I lost faith in FDev's decision making.

Before engineers, PvP was available to everyone. All you needed was a station with parts and credits. It made the game a lot less of a time sink as earning credits in Elite was always super easy. Now a new player must enter the grind if they want to enjoy the 'end game content'.

I still despise Engineers because of this. The grind of engineers scared away a lot of potential players.

 

[Chris Simon]

You'd be surprised. I was pirating the CG on Sunday afternoon in a ViperMk4. 30 tonnes of other people's cargo delivered, about 15 ships successfully interdicted, 6000 Cr bounty accrued, 0 rebuys (on any side). I'd say about 1/4 had a laugh and went along with my charity chugger patter, the rest needed hatch breaker encouragement. There were 2 possible combat logs, both when I'd won the interdiction, and then there was nobody in real space. I think it helps if you're not in a FdL or FAS.

I'm glad to hear that.

And yes, I agree that people are more inclined to talk when you're not in something screaming "You're dead in 5 seconds"

 

[Lateralus]

Frontier really have to think before they implement a feature, ship or mechanic: Will this cause a meta that will distort all the professions and break the mmo side of the game?