I disagree completely. Data remains if hull remains, even at 1%. And a pirate trying not to destroy you has much more work to do than a griefer trying to destroy you, which allows more time for escape if thats what you choose. Winging up for protection against Pirates is emergent gameplay, well it would be for me anyway.
How much data does a typical miner/trader have anyway, though? Certainly explorers can lose a lot that way, but for a trader or miner the loss of cargo is much more cost than the rebuy itself.
Agreed that since anyone half-way competent with a half-decent build can escape a griefer, pirates (with the much harder job) will only be able to steal any cargo at all from people who feel sorry for them.
On this bit specifically "Winging up for protection against Pirates is emergent gameplay", this is why I say there's no distinction between a "griefer" and a "pirate" in terms of game mechanics. If I'm flying escort for a trader, and they get attacked by a pirate, and I intervene ... well, to continue the robbery, the pirate has to kill me (a clean player) aka "griefing". Same if we come back later for revenge on the pirate - they have a bounty, we don't, any questions?
You cant take Piracy out of the game, its been a valid playstyle since 1984, you could take PVP Piracy out of the game but the proper RP ones do add a lot of flavour to the universe. Or add that NPC ships will drop X tons of Cargo on destruction but humans dont.
Piracy was an utterly terrible playstyle in FE2/FFE because the most you could scoop up from any ship was 1t - by the time you'd got that one, the realism of Newtonian Physics had meant all the rest had drifted well out of scanner range and you were never going to find them.
It was manageable in the original Elite but since - at least in the original BBC Tape version - peaceful traders to rob were extremely rare, it was more a case of doing a bit of salvage with your bounty hunting. Still good fun, and I do disagree with the whole "mark cargo as stolen" bit in this version as a result.
Obviously NPC pirates - as in the previous three games - need to continue pointlessly attacking players to get the traditional gameplay to work. But we need to accept that they're being complete fools in doing so and not expect it to work for players.
Griefers add nothing they only subtract and end up spoiling the game for everyone else by abusing the system until the system locks down for everybody.
I cant recall which thread it was but the main issue people had with griefers is the non-communications and no gameplay, they'd mind dying a lotless if there was some RP or gameplay in it.
Really? Because I remember a
lot of threads where people who do attempt to add some RP / Gameplay / in-game justification for blowing people up getting accused of just coming up with excuses for it. And a
lot of threads where people say that they'd just self-destruct to deny cargo to "proper Pirates" so that they aren't incentivised to continue trying.
And that's entirely fair, I think. If someone is shooting at me, I don't care what their backstory is or how many pages of self-justification they have: I'm not going to stop to read the comms panel anyway when I could be concentrating on dodging and escaping. (I'm perfectly happy for people to shoot at me for no "better" reason than they want to see the explosion ... equally, I'm not going to actually give them that explosion just because they have a justification I approve of for it)
The number of players who
in practice are quite happy for pirates to disable and rob them but
aren't also happy for killers to shoot at them is basically zero, in terms of the size of the player base.
I'm not a Pirate btw, I just like people who RP and try and give an experience to the other side.
Oh, I quite like the people who attempt to RP pirates too. I've occasionally gone back to get some cargo so that the second time they interdict I've actually got a few tonnes of Beer or whatever to drop for them. Doesn't change that it's basically unusable gameplay-wise, and doesn't change that in terms of both identifiable game mechanics and forum chatter there's no hard line between "piracy" and "griefing".
(Seriously, go and give it a try - fit some hatchbreakers, get those missile and railguns primed to disable drives, go hunting players in Open. See how many combat log on you, or call "griefer", or otherwise give some sign that they don't think PvP [1] piracy is valid gameplay...)
[1] A quick check through forum threads will also reveal at least some people don't think it's fun when the NPCs do it either, of course. But still.
