Mission-spawned pirates are fundamentally flawed

[BDelacroix]

One of the things that gets me is how sometimes you will be told you will get a bonus if you kill the four pirates all named Dave that will be coming after you. That is just so weird.

0/4 Dave What? At least just say they are four generic pirates.

 

[Vorxian]

ED as real life:

Person walks into a shop, looks about... no one in sight.
Person peers over a shelf, still no one about, no one in sight.
Person gingerly reaches out and takes a penny sweet.
Person closes hand around penny sweet, continues to browse the shop.
Person edges closer to the exit, nods and smiles at the till clerk who bids person a good day.
Person leaves shop and...

3 officers spawn right infront of them. Person runs around the corner easily out pacing them.
the same officers spawn again right in front of the person, as the only viable exit is to jump over a fence. 4 more officers spawn infront of the person, then so do the original 3, now 7 officers chasing the person down.. The person dives into their car, and drives at high speed away. Enforcement cars spawn on the motorway and a high speed chase ensues. The person now driving like Jason Statham, is able to somehow outwit ALL the cop cars, and arrives at his destination. 3 cops spawn right ouside the car causing the person to take off once more, and upon ditching the car, and locking themselves in a building, walks upstairs, closes the door, sits down with a cold drink, and 6 cops spawn in the room with him, and shoot him dead.

Welcome to ED.

 

[Gaiseric]

I think being mobbed is a fair way to stop mission stacking. Can't handle it? Don't stack.

Exactly right and repped for it. If you take on more, you're taking on more risk. To not have that is yet another request for a version of the easy button. I really can't see that reducing/eliminating the chance of interdiction is improving gameplay. That is just making it blander.

 

[NecasekO]

Good points OP. Another thing that always bothered me is ship choice for pirates.

If they can afford a FDL, why are they stealing 20k worth of cargo? Why would they fly combat ships with limited cargo space at all? Why is it always one ship at a time?

I would really like to see pirates use cheaper ships (possibly heavily modded though) and come in wings consisting of combat and cargo ships - so that they could in theory win a tough fight and scoop a considerable amount of cargo. Single FDL coming after a Cutter with 600-700 tons of cargo simply does not make sense.

 

[Iskariot]

I know some of these issues are not specifically caused by or limited to mission-spawned pirates, but exacerbated by them (e.g. the way how sensors work in supercruise can cause ships to magically appear when you are flying slowly, but they could conceivably just have been moving fast and thus seen you from further than you can see them; which is an issue worth its own separate discussion...).

• They spawn right behind you in supercruise to immediately commence an interdiction. Sometimes you get the incoming enemy alert and by the time you have checked out the "incoming mission critical message", the interdiction has already started.
• They always magically know where you are and spawn in your instance. You can successfully evade their interdiction, process to a mission objective (e.g. a mission USS for a salvage mission), and *poof* there they are again at the mission target (even if that is not the mission they spawn from).
• They follow you across systems even through jumps their ship could not conceivably do in the same time as you.
• Since you have no control over their faction, they can get randomly assigned Magical Reputation Armor, i.e. spawn as members of an otherwise legal faction you intend to gain or maintain reputation with, and thus cannot attack.
• The bonus payment for killing them is laughable, as are the bounties. I just killed a deadly Anaconda and got 90,000cr from the mission giver, and 11,000cr bounty (with KWS!).
• There is always multiple. Incoming enemy alert always means you have to fend off or evade multiple pirates, one after another, so even if you sigh and stop to kill one to get it over with, it's not actually going to be over. You either get no interruption, or 4.
• While having a faster ship allows you to consistently escape a pirate in a slower ship, they never realize that they can't catch you, and will continue to pester you no matter how often you evade their interdiction or fly away from them in normal flight.
• You have to kill them personally or they will just respawn. I've seen mission-generated pirates get smokes by the police, only to respawn and interdict immediately after I went back to supercruise.
• Their demands are impossible to comply with unless you decide to prepare beforehand to bring some cargo to drop. You cannot give them a part of the mission cargo to appease them and deliver the rest; you would have to abandon and thus fail the mission to even be able to give them a portion of the goods. I frankly doubt barely anyone ever gives them anything for this reason. If I have to transport 120t and the pirate demands 20, I might feel inclined to give up 20 if I could still complete the mission for a proportionally smaller payment, but not if that means cancelling the contract, having now stolen cargo aboard, a hefty fine and reputation loss.
• On top of the mission-generated pirates, random regular ones can spawn as well, potentially doubling the amount of ships to fight if you decide to submit and battle.
• There's ultimately no winning move for the player. No matter what you do, the system wins, steals some of your time (for a laughable reward) and annoys you. If you kill them, the system has successfully expanded what would have been a quick delivery into a 15 minute slog. If you submit and run, the system will pester you with interdiction after interdiction. Also if you submit, you get magically teleported away from your destination; one moment you are 0.2Ls from the station, interdiction starts, you submit, now you are 100Ls away; if you decide to evade, the supercruise maneuvres can bring you quite a sizable distance away, too.

The good thing is, the system just needs some tweaking to improve. We reduce the annoyance factor and turn the enemies into an actual bonus event that enhances the mission:

• Increase the bonus payment for the pirates. 100,000cr base value, +50% of the mission payout per successful kill. And the pirates should always have a very high bounty (within the range of what a pirate of their rank could normally spawn with).
• Only ever spawn a single wave, not 4. If you decide to stay and fight, that should mean you will be left alone for the rest of the mission.
• If your mission is for a legal (i.e. non-anarchy) faction, the pirates will always belong to a proper pirate faction, or be factionless altogether, so as a law-abiding citizen, you can blast them with impunity reputation-wise.
• If the mission is for a pirate faction, the mission may either spawn pirates from a rival pirate faction (or factionless), or bounty hunters from a legal faction (or factionless).
• Any mission-spawned enemy ship is guaranteed to drop at least 1 unit of very rare materials upon destruction or very rare data upon scan (only once even if you flee and scan multiple times, of course).
• If the enemy dies from any cause (including police NPCs), they are gone for the remainder of the mission. This also applies to wings of pirates - if you kill 1 out of a wing of three, then decide to leg it, after the next interdiction there will only the two other ships be left.
• If you personally kill the enemy, this greatly increases the amount of reputation awarded by the mission.
• If you successfully evade their interdiction, you are granted a grace period of at least 5 minutes during which they will lose your trail and cannot at all appear in your instance under any circumstances.
• If you escape them by jumping to a different system that is further away than their jump range, they will lose your trail for the remainder of the mission. (If you are in an AspX with 30Ly jump range, no way should an FDL be able to catch you across a series of (or even a single) long jumps.)

The issue with the pirates' demands being unfulfillable without either cancelling the mission or carrying a some (valuable) dummy cargo might be harder to solve, as this would probably require significant changes to the underlying mission system itself.

Good suggestions. Would certainly improve the experience.

 

[evanevery]

What Pirate worth his/her salt is only going to ask for a limited amount of cargo - and NOT care what it is. That's just plain WRONG. They want it ALL and will sort through it and throw whatever they cant carry overboard. What kind of milk-toast Pirates are these anyway. This just gives Prirating a bad name...

On the upside, I do find the interdictions do help break up the monotony of a grind that ED really is. Melting a Pirate or two makes for less-than-boring gameplay and makes for a sunny day. I actually look forward to the occasional interdiction. If I'm not equipped to fight, I just run (one of my Cutters is built "rag-and-tube" for a 752 ton capacity - the other one ISN'T!)

 

[Werewolf13]

Good ideas here. I hope the devs are paying attention.

With that hope and $1 you still won't be able to buy a decent cup of coffee...

 

[Red Anders]

They need to rewrite the entire npc spawning system from the ground up. Mission NPCs, pirate NPCs, bounty hunter npcs, background instance npcs, police npcs, every single one of them feels extremely fake an artificial from their dialog to their behavior to their spawning patterns. Everything is wrong with the way this game handles npcs. OPs points are only the tip of the iceberg.

You're right of course but when you take a look at some of the reactions from players to having anything even resembling a threat appear in their fluffy little gameplay bubble, I've long been if the opinion that the npcs are primarily intended to provide a little local colour and nothing else.