Not many pirates since 3.0

[Sapyx]

I've been running stacked courier missions in low-sec and med-sec space for the past week, usually with a full cargo hold of either mission cargo or regular trade goods. Was very, very rarely attacked by pirates and not once did I get a "mission update" that pirates were after me. I'd agree it did seem much less frequent than pre-3.0. And I'm cool with that. Too many interdictions and they become ho-hum; less frequent, and they can lull you into a false sense of security.

 

[askavir]

Maybe it varies according to system security (like it should)?

Anyway, interdictions is something I wouldn't miss much, except if they became very rare but very dangerous (instead of very frequent and very harmless).

My favorite scenario would be to have pirate attacks to be a rare event, but a very dangerous one, where releasing the cargo would become a serious option. As they have always been, they're nothing but a mere (but constant) travelling annoyance.

 

[Vingtetun]

Ran three passenger missions over the weekend within which I had pirate earnings via email in game. Set a trap for them with 2 wingman. They didn't show up at all.

 

[smiths121]

Seriously though, my gut tells me that the servers/instance might just be too busy to generate NPC interdictions as quickly as they used to... Sure, I still get the warnings, but now they just never show up.

I have a couple of stations I typically run missions between when I want to make credits. One has a crazy short arrival (10 LS?), the others are about 500 and 2000 LS. Prior to 3.0, stacked with missions, I could always get in to the close station (10 LS), and almost always to the middle station (500 LS), WITHOUT interdiction. However, pre-3.0, I had about a 50-50 chance of getting interdicted on my way to the 2000 LS station. Chance of interdiction always seemed relative to the time spent on arrival. It always felt to me that the servers didn't have the necessary time to generate the interdictions on the closer arrivals. Now, I'm hardly getting interdicted at all, even on a 2000 LS arrival. I probably played for 3-4 hours this weekend in these systems and only got interdicted once! (and yes, it was on the 2000 LS arrival)

BTW - These are all cargo delivery missions from an extraction station. So yeah, 400-740T of Gold, Platinum, etc depending on which ship I am flying...) usually topped off with a bunch of Sensitive Data Missions as well.

I think instancing has changed in 3.0 as well.
I get plenty of pirates doing haulage missions, sometimes when I get Interdicted it is to empty space. This is more often in 3.0 - gut feeling.

Monday night, I did some wing assasination missions with a friend, it had been a fun the night before. We met up and winged up, I followed him into instance - different instance. Back in SC we both got mission targets! Inability to get together meant we failed both missions, I was busted down to Cordial with my adopted faction! Eeeek. Oh and top tip, spread your small.medium fleet between different factions now, as we then had to spend time finding a ground base with an Interstellar thing so my mate could pay off his bounty for firing before scan completed, in a large ship!

I play on super-duper laptop and tend to sleep it rather than turn it off. Doing this with ED has worked fine for a few years, never had instancing problems before last night, and used ot wing up with 3 or players 5-6 times a week back in 1.3-1. days, when instancing was considered sub-optimal. Rebooting laptop sorted the problem, so guessing it is stale PnP holes in the firewall. Assuming its ED, but come to think of it had a Windows update as well recently. Thought I would add this bit in case anyone else is having instancing problems recently.

Simon