There never was parity between trade/all-around ships and pure combat ships. Never. It's cooked directly into the ships themselves. The natural gap between those builds would remain even with both sides fully engineered. You are just looking for a bogey man. "Those darned traders won't engineer to stay competitive, we must punish them." to purpetuate the 'us v. them' thing.
Karma vs PvP Piracy
- Thread starter Riverside
- Start date
There never was parity between trade/all-around ships and pure combat ships. Never. It's cooked directly into the ships themselves. The natural gap between those builds would remain even with both sides fully engineered. You are just looking for a bogey man. "Those darned traders won't engineer to stay competitive, we must punish them." to purpetuate the 'us v. them' thing.
Tgey will, but as has been explained a small ship taking out a large ship will face a small negative karma. Do you really think karma will be independant of power play or faction alignments? Of course not. Many PvEers believe C&P and karma will stamp out ganking and are utterly wrong. C&P bounties won't mean anymore than the current bounties and anybody in a well equideped PvP has nothing to fear.
Sort of. I was under the impression it's strictly a pilots federation thing and also that the issue wasn't so much players combating each other in general, but rather seal clubbing. So, for example, an elite cutter taking out a harmless hauler in a high sec system would be about as negative as it gets, but an Elite Vulture attacking another (even if breaking the law) would not incur much, if any, negative Karma.
I may have misunderstood, but I thought the point was not to coddle credit grinding commanders in cutters, but rather to protect new or inexperienced commanders from harassment by far more experienced and well equipped ones. That and eliminate the suicidewinder exploit.
They have a lot of work ahead of them. I'm grateful they're discussing it on the forums.
blowing up ships isnt ever piracy unless they are forced to by the victim fighting back - even then they are most likely to high wake out. pirates run a business of extortion. if they stop traders making any profits eventualyl the prey dries up. if they kill them all and take what cargo is left eventually same thing happens but they get far higher bounties except in anarchies and i can see even inhabited anachy systems setting a bounty - because you are basically interdicting all trade to stations in the system. even a lawless system has law on the stations and around them, though they wont go looking for you and it might not show until someone runs a kws on you or you try to dock at that station say to sell the goods on the black market. you might find the station hostile despite it being anarchy.
real pirates wont risk the damage. they may destroy you but get so little cargo and it is all hydrogen, that it doesnt cover their own fuel cost let alone damage repairs and ammo restock. and traders wont go where there is too much risk for them to handle and no profit. pirates sometimes even try to call it a form of taxation for access to the system. or protection money - but mostly they are bluffing. npc pirates right now behave more or less like how real pirates behave (except desperate ones who wont be rational unless cargo is dropped).
where one side is in a CG interdicting other players who run cargo for the enemy - both sides will be signed up to the relevant CG so the karma argument DOES NOT APPLY. unless you are stupid enough to not sign up deliberately then try to take part - because you wont be getting the combat bonds due to not being signed up!
real pirates wont risk the damage. they may destroy you but get so little cargo and it is all hydrogen, that it doesnt cover their own fuel cost let alone damage repairs and ammo restock. and traders wont go where there is too much risk for them to handle and no profit. pirates sometimes even try to call it a form of taxation for access to the system. or protection money - but mostly they are bluffing. npc pirates right now behave more or less like how real pirates behave (except desperate ones who wont be rational unless cargo is dropped).
where one side is in a CG interdicting other players who run cargo for the enemy - both sides will be signed up to the relevant CG so the karma argument DOES NOT APPLY. unless you are stupid enough to not sign up deliberately then try to take part - because you wont be getting the combat bonds due to not being signed up!
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I think we will see an issue with disparity, not just ship sizes. Winged groups represent a disparity to a lone trader. I would expect this to be accounted for in any Notoriety system. One may go a long way towards saving re-buys by using gangs of smaller ships, but the karmic costs should be roughly equivalent to FdL on T-6 type attacks.
You can't decide who can and/or can't post their opinions here. Not any more than you can decide how or where others decide to play the game. You can decide how much value you (and I mean just you) will assign it, but you can't go around trying to control the flow of opinions here.
As an exercise in tolerance you might want to try going one day without making a judgement value on another player/poster. It could become habit forming.
well yes and no. i dont see it as stamping it out myself though i can see some expecting instant results. i see gankers finding it more and more expensive when they do it because of ship destruction if they do it near a station rather than getting fined a trivial sum, and finding fewer and fewer stations and outposts willing to let them land to repair and restock. over time it may deter some, although its also possible those people just GREW UP and began acting their age and realise the anger they cause and that its not clever or funny to ruin someone elses enjoyment - because they find out they suddenly have karma doing that to them. but i also see some ganker jerks seeing it as a challenge to get around a high karma level. if its not linked to their copy of elite by product key, then resetting their commander would clear it. if it remains even after that then they may buy (or go looking for hacked copies) a new copy of the game to get around the karma issue.
Don't know what do you mean by "Legit Pirate" thing, most of the time disabling prey and breaking open cargo hatch works, but rarely if warnings and intimidation fails, Pirates do kill.
"Legit Piracy" has become to mean; stealing from without destroying the victim.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
It would pretty much have to remain after reset - otherwise an account could be kept solely for Sidewinder ramming, resetting every time karma began to take effect.
hmmm... how many people do that? Also, sheesh... follow the speed limit entering a dock and they just go harmlessly into the void.
it is my preferred option yes.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Who know - although I expect that Frontier have an idea regarding how many Station Rammers there are (that may become disaffected if their main account would suffer karmic consequences if they continued - and at £10 a copy of the game it'd be cheap to continue....).
Indeed.
They could look at it like renting the character. They pay $10.00 for how ever long it takes the Notoriety system to catch them up.
I hope karma is not accountbound as some people might want to play drastically different characters per "life". Also, I think whatever solutions are proposed, they should be in game and against commanders, not the players behind them. This issues of Karma should be between the Pilots Federation and its Member Commanders, not FD and it's customers.
No. It has to be account, one character per account, wide. Otherwise, clearing your save will just make the Notoriety system useless. If there were a delay in getting back to being capable, then a Clear Save might be a deterrent to serial clearing to evade karma, but there really isn't any impediment for an experienced Commander to be back in an FdL in no time. Plus, this account would never be the player's main character. It would be their troublemaker accounts. One so much easier to clear. And, to loose for that matter, at least loose your goodwill in the galaxy.
I do believe there should be a decay, or method to repair your Notoriety if one so chooses. It is expected, and acceptable that on occasion Commanders may make troubling choices, but that is not what the Notoriety system is intended to control. The system should be targeted at long term behavior. Sandro consistently talks about determining 'intent'. Intent is not a thing associated with an avatar, but rather with the power behind that avatar, which implicitly means the player.
so you are basically arguing for what we have now in case someone wants to be a ganker ruining other peoples games for fun, and no karma system at all then.
There speaks somebody who was engineering anyway. No particular hardship if you're chasing the RNGDragon anyway to take an extra hit or two in order to shine up a trade ship.
My trade ships already had guns, armor, uprated drives and shields, boosters and defensive modules. They weren't combat ships by any means but they sufficed to give the occasional overconfident pirate a hard time and get away from anything I couldn't shoot down. Not always intact, to be sure, but apart from the bugged multirailcannon NPCs that briefly appeared at teh same time as the engineers did I usually got out with my ship unexploded when I decided to vacate the premises. They also hauled enough volume that I could afford a little bit of a "pirate tax" and still make a profit.
Then the combat pilots found engineering metas and they embraced the RNG grind the same way they embraced grinding the "best" hull and module configurations earlier. That was an obligatory part of their game style - it was already necessary to grind in order to have a build that could hold its own in straight combat, maybe not so much for piracy because you at least made a little coin from that, but for straight PvP combat definitely. Engineers just meant they had to do more of it for the new shiny stuff. And let's not forget that the vast majority of engineered options - pretty much all of it in those early stages - was combat kit.
This unbalanced combat badly. Because of the greater capabilities of combat kit FD chose to buff the survivability of ships. They did, and that, my friend, that was what effectively killed piracy.
Engineers didn't balance anything between pirates and traders. It did nothing for the viability of the pirate profession, it slaughtered it.
Now, when a player pulls you over in open you never ask yourself "is he a pirate or a murder-hobo?" You just know he's a murder-hobo. I haven't seen a player pirate in over a year, but I've been shot at by players a hell of a lot. I don't even know why I bother hauling the weight of the guns or spending the power to run them and not another shield booster, because I just get out of there and don't ever consider whether to pay the tax or make a fight of it. I've got real good at evading them in SC, winning the interdiction game or just simply high-waking out.
As a trader I'd LOVE to have more than eurotruck in space, and I did until engineers landed. But if eurotruck in space is all that the fallout from the engineer implementation has left me, then I guess that's my game now, so why bother playing it in open?
So don't you DARE claim that engineers balanced the gulf between pirates and traders, tell me I "want" to only play eurotruck or tell me to "git gud" - because I AM bloody good at what I do in ED and I'm pretty hard to catch and harder to kill. I didn't mind being a pirates "content" when they had an even-money chance of being mine. I didn't even mind making mistakes and finding myself facing the inevitable hard fight and probable rebuy when I got jumped by a wing of folks who were only after the kaboom. They were still going to have to earn it! But with the pirates gone, so are the armed traders prepared to be the other half of that ecosystem - because there isn't any point. If you can haul enough to cover your repairs, your reloads and a few rebuys, you aren't going to stand a snowballs chance in Hades trying to mix it up with a combat-engineered ship so unless the pirates come back, in sufficient numbers that they may not outnumber the pewpews but at least there's a reasonable chance that a hostile hollow blip IS one, neither will their content.
When it's possible to build a reasonable armed trader that stands a fair ("fair" is enough, not even "decent") chance of surviving a scrap with a viable prate build, without completely sacrificing the trading profession in the process. When that pirate build stands a similar reasonable chance against a combat-optimized bounty hunter and both of those balances work together, you'll have viable piracy again and probably more traders in open willing to play tag with the pirates. With the current RNGineering metas I don't see that happening but until it does nothing that FD do with C&P, karma, or anything else will make a blind bit of difference to piracy.
No. I'm not arguing that at all and nowhere in any of what I've written can that conclusion be reasonably extrapolated.