Interdiction Dodgers
- Thread starter Snakebite
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Sadly, that is not as completely far fetched as it should be; I recall players on Eve forums pushing to tax high-sec trade into oblivion since the profitable commodities in low and null sec still were not attracting enough fish to the barrel.
It is. We want pirates in Elite. People who REALLY want to be pirates and are prepared to play with the serious consequences of their actions. But that's probably only about 5% of the pirate players.
Snakebite
Banned
id say its actually 100% of the pirate players, the rest are mostly Griefers.....
Can you imagine the cacophony of crying, if Traders travelled across the Galaxy, only to arrive at their destination (the entire point for them playing) and the Station decided to disappear as soon as they disengaged SC, because the Station changed it's mind and didn't want to trade today, after all!
Maybe. That means there's not really many actual pirates in the game. If we had multiple commanders I'd be up for a real pirate career. huge bounties, hunted high and low, no docking privileges outside anarchy systems, upgrades hard to find etc.
The difficulty there would be in providing a rough analog to "good guy" space. Even back in the Golden Age of Piracy, the pirates had strongholds and Tortuga and such.
I'd honestly like to see a sort of "mirror world" built, expanding on anarchy systems. Make piracy a sort of "career" profession, with legit pirate PvE style things to do to help provide funds, status within the assorted criminal worlds, such like that. Perhaps even pirate ships you can only get by having "rank" with criminal enterprises.
A run into civilized space should be dangerous for a piratical sort, and on the flipside, ducking into an anarchy system should be pretty hair-raising for a good guy.
Hence my mention of anarchy systems. pirate bases were ramshackle ports unsupported by a manufacturing base comparable in any way to what countries had.
Anarchy systems need to be, like you say, a hairy run like they were in elite/frontier.
The only thing I'd want to avoid in such a situation is the perception that playing a pirate lifestyle has "punishments". It should be a different style of play, but not too much more substantially difficult than being a "good guy". I wouldn't mind the whole idea of not being able to dock up in "good guy" ports, having the police chase, etc, so long as there's the ability to duck into Elite's version of Mos Eisley and get things done.
Just needs a kind of balance and trade-off. Sure a pirate station, it's going to be more expensive to kit out your ship, you might be making do with jury-rigged stuff, but on the flipside, the local smugglers have great deals on "performance enhancing" drugs, lack of regulations means you can get some crazy strong (and crazy dangerous) weapons, and the Black Market guy has a stall the size of Wal-mart and is paying top dollar for goods that just fell off the back of a type-9.
Contrast with an authority station, where the police are protecting you, you've got a nice selection of ships, plenty of modules...but the SpaceFDA won't let you take SpaceAdderall to improve your reflexes, all your weapons are safety-tested and lower yield, and the dude in the hipster jacket claiming to be a "Black Marketeer" is only offering 10 creds for all these crates of Motrona Experience Jelly.
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Snakebite
Banned
This is a great idea, you should start a thread....
Seriously I really like this idea.... Pirate enclaves and anarchy systems that give pirating missions.... +1
If you are a trader and managing to get blown up there should be a fail state that is a form of punishment for … well … failing at the game. If you are a pirate there should be as well those faile states, like for example blowing up a trader instead of robbing him. Actually it sounds kind of fair in the situation that the punishment for the trader and the pirate is kind of similar for failing. Getting a bounty that represents the same amount of credits that the trader will have to pay for blowing up sounds reasonable to me.
Perhaps you could think a little more outside the box here. Having a bounty is nice and all (and the higher incidence of bounty hunter encounters that should go with that), however the real effect should be that you end up being a "known criminal". In high security systems this could mean things like being shadowed by police ships (or even being pulled over for "inspection" far more often)(i.e. They turn up far quicker and in larger numbers, a la "viper spam" in the original Elite). This effect could extend to having police ships show up if you interdict someone, even without committing an overt criminal act. Obviously there should be a mechanism to avoid this - tampering with your ship's ID etc. This would be illegal, perhaps but moderately difficult to detect.
Of course, to be fair you should get treated somewhat better than the norm in anarchy systems - you may even get assistance (unwanted or not) from "fans". It could perhaps change access to missions or even equipment - a known criminal would perhaps be less likely to be given high value transport missions but more likely to be given assassination missions.
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Snakebite
Banned
Really like this....
Pirate stations could perhaps have access to illegal/banned ship upgrades, stolen military equipment etc....
You can just fine pay out a bounty in incremental junks, based on the damage that has been done to the pirate (aka insurance costs). Exploitation mostly solved.
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That is working as intended and it is imho even a fine design decision to make an harsh open universe controllable even for the clumsiest players on earth, simply by offering the chance to recover in solo from literally any loss in open.
I would say even the griefers know how to start their game in solo or mobius and don´t care at all about such a wanted status.
Just as long as by "top dollar" you mean a small fraction of what you would get for legitimate goods. Fences need to sell at below normal price, and for them to make a profit they need to buy at much lower prices.
And by crazy dangerous, I hope he means something like a higher damage missile that has a small chance to explode before it leaves the mount. I mean, it is not like pirate equipment has to pass safety standards.
What I'm saying is, a fence out in the middle of pirate stronghold anarchy land is going to give a much better price to someone he knows (our proverbial pirate) , over joe schmoe just wandering in. lets say, just for hypotheticals, said fence gives the people with high standings .75 on the credit for items. He gives random people just walking in .50 on the credit.
Your "black market" guy working over in organized not-anarchy space, he's got to put a lot more work in laundering the goods. Make THOSE black market fences a lot more rare, and give them, say, .10-.15 on the credit.
Exactly right. Sure, that beam laser might be cranking out %125 damage compared to a "safe" one, but it might just decide to blow up on you if it overheats. Crazy Bob, he packed these rockets FULL of explosives, and his own "secret formula" propellant, but it has a bad habit of just...exploding in the launcher when you deploy them.
That pirate ship you got, yeah, it's got some amazing power and weapons mounts, but.....well, we kinda had to put the RemLok in with some duct tape, it may not work. C'mon though, how many times to you REALLY need emergency O2 anyway?
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Snakebite
Banned
Michael, I do hope you're still following this thread, some fantastic ideas here....
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