More to the point, why is there this implicit assumption (from both traders and pirates) that pirates must gain 100% of their pirating income from pirating players?
There's NPCs that can be robbed, too.
If you can calculate 1+1, you know why pirates MUST earn less than traders.
- Thread starter BishopC
- Start date
More to the point, why is there this implicit assumption (from both traders and pirates) that pirates must gain 100% of their pirating income from pirating players?
There's NPCs that can be robbed, too.
Unfortunatly NPCs typical drop worthless cargo, hense why pirate players concetrate on other players.
NPC's needs to be upped in intelligence. Not in cheating their way to being better at combat but just given better maneuvers and logic at their disposal. Once that's done, they can be given as equal targets to players for piracy and as pirates.
At that point, I would say yes, piracy should be highly lucrative and extremely risky and do so by affecting your faction standing (supplementing the bounty system but persisting beyond death). But this kind of piracy requires proper in-game guild-like support because proper piracy requires a group of smaller, more readily available ships (since they wouldn't have access to proper stations) to handle the bigger expensive ships. IE. pirates wouldn't go running around in pythons and anacondas. They'd be in vipers or smaller ships. Bigger cargo-related ships acting as bases of operations. or so.
At that point, I would say yes, piracy should be highly lucrative and extremely risky and do so by affecting your faction standing (supplementing the bounty system but persisting beyond death). But this kind of piracy requires proper in-game guild-like support because proper piracy requires a group of smaller, more readily available ships (since they wouldn't have access to proper stations) to handle the bigger expensive ships. IE. pirates wouldn't go running around in pythons and anacondas. They'd be in vipers or smaller ships. Bigger cargo-related ships acting as bases of operations. or so.
Your math fails on many levels:
1. You have an equality inside parentheses? What the hell is that for an equation?
2. You make a totally unfounded assumption that the number of pirates equals the number of traders.
3. It's actually possible, even with a 1:1 pirate:trader ratio, for pirate income to not only equal but exceed trading income.
Your actual equation should be:
t = T - p
where T is the potential max income of the trader, t is the actual income of the trader, and p is the actual income of the pirate. p could certainly be larger than t, it just can't be larger than T.
For example:
Timmy Trader trades tin for 10,000 credits per trip.
On average, every trip Peter Pirate plunders 6,000 credits from poor Timmy Trader.
Timmy's actual income is 4,000 credits, and Peter's is 6,000, which is 50% greater than Timmy's.
NPCs are stupid, but you can always throw more of them at people. I'd take a Naval elite Anaconda with fighter escorts seriously.
Now if there where mechanics in place to enable the capture of large amounts of cargo, bigger ships become viable pirate vessels, even with the current interdiction overheads.
A pirate Clipper could haul out 100 Tons of cargo even with Class 7 Shields, at current black-market rates a haul of slaves or palladium would be worth 750K.
Now that could be worth the risk.
-*snip*
I see pirates in game as the Pakleds of Elite (We need to things; things to make us go. No things? You go boom).
*snip*
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Pls stahp dis... laffing hurtz me.