I guess it could work out. If there were in attractive reason for traders to risk pvp in unsafe systems I guess it could make piracy a little more 'legitimate'. However, I can't imagine that it would be any different in the end of the day. The same people who complain about getting killed now will still complain later even if FD uses this idea. It will just be a slightly different conversation.
In bold:
Safe Systems:
A) Boasting the fastest and strongest police responses, pilots are more safer here than anywhere else. The consequence of this however is that the presence of NPC Pirates are lower, making NPC-bounty hunting not as viable. Player Pirates will have a hard time making a successful pirating career in these systems as well because of how fast and hard law enforcements responds, benefiting traders.
B) These systems features stations ranging from the smallest outposts to the largest stations and populations in the hundreds of millions or billions. Most stations/economies are High Tech and Industrial, Tourism and some Agricultural. Trading man-made goods between Safe Systems nets you only a small margin of profit.
C) You can find all faction-legal commodities in these systems, and they sell all types of ships and modules. Since these systems have a large infrastructure in place already they can (and have) enforced the strict laws of their faction, making the black market a rather big presence here. These systems demand metal and minerals from Unsafe systems, and supply man-made goods to Unsafe systems.
D) Because these systems have been colonized for so long their asteroid belts have been mined out of their most precious minerals and metals long ago. The result is they have a high demand on all types of metals except for the most common and cheapest ones.
Unsafe Systems
A) Mediocre to low strength and speed of response by law enforcements due to being outlying systems. NPC pirates are running fairly wild here making NPC-bounty hunting a good way for combat-oriented players to make money. Player Pirates can do their thing here without being too worried about NPC Police. Because of this, traders are vulnerable.
B) These systems features smaller to medium outposts and stations. Most stations/economies are Extraction, Refinery, Terraforming and some Agricultural. Trading minerals and metals between Unsafe Systems net you only a small margin of profit. These stations only sell some of the ships; mostly the lower rated ones (Asp and below maybe?)
C) Man-made commodities are more scarce than in Safe Systems, but they sell all the different types of metals and minerals. These systems demand man-made commodities and supply metals and minerals. Because of the small presence of law enforcement, all laws are not followed and as a result, not all commodities that are illegal in Safe systems are illegal in Unsafe systems, which gives the black market a smaller presence (and gives smugglers somethings to transport to Safe Systems).
D) These systems have not been exploited as much as Safe systems. They have a lot of good resources in their asteroids (meaning many good RES-points for NPC-bounty hunting). NPC pirates prowl these belts looking for miners.
Trading between Safe and Unsafe systems net you the highest profit margins. Staying in only Safe systems gives you a low margin of profits. In short: Peoples desire to get rich will get them to go to the Unsafe systems.
Okay, I can accept that;your reasons are logical and you have obviously put some thought into this. However, with that being said the reason I am pointing out trading in the light I am placing it, is simply because it would seem there are players out there who come to every post about piracy and go on for days about how bad all the innocent traders got it and suddenly a post about piracy and trading becomes a post about pk'ing. You yourself pointed out how low your ratio of interdiction by human versus ai was.
I still cannot say that I feel the shooting or fun actually gives a rating to income. I used to trade and bounty hunt on pc, since I have been walking the illicit side of elite of Xbox I make way less money. Like nowhere near what a trader makes. And I'm not saying I should. But as it stands, if a trader trades goods, a bounty hunter hunts res, and a pirate robs npc traders the BH and the trader will come out on top financially.
So why do I do piracy and smuggling? It's not because it's so much fun in more that I actually have to think to accomplish it. I need to drop shields, get the goods and if I don't want a heavy bounty try to pick up as much stuff as I can while dumb ai continually shoots at me and the police arrive. After all that, if I'm lucky in the right kind of system maby I'll walk away with 150k. That is nothing. I am making this example on pve piracy not only to avoid all the drama about pvp piracy but that as it stands, if piracy were nerfed on the basis it is fun, then it will not be worth doing at all. If you look at piracy in the elite wiki, it states it is supposed to be high risk, high reward. Now I know that that wiki is not a peer-to-peer reviewed academic journal, but that is what I started doing it for and it is not that at all. Just give it a try sometime and see what I mean.
By the way, I appreciate the time you took to pose a logical argument on professions rather than personal beliefs.
Thanks for the reply!
I think I should have been more clear; by changing the careers I would also want to balance the profits each career could potentially make. So when I say that bounty hunting and pirating should be the least profitable, I do not mean that they should be as low as they are today in relation to the other professions and to the ship/module economy. I believe that the profit gap between the careers are hugely imbalanced today.
In my previous post I used
smuggling and
trading interchangeably: I am currently smuggling goods to one station and bringing back legal goods back. I am doing this until I have decent funds to get into PVP-pirating. So I just want to be clear that I am trying to be as objective as possible when stating my idea; I'm not trying to nerf piracy and smuggling, just trying to balance all the professions.
One example is to make profits to increase in scale as you advance through the game. Take trading (or smuggling) for instance. The profits/h you can make depends on how big your cargo hold is. So the bigger the ship, the bigger the profit. This kind of profit scaling can be applied to other professions.
This is how I would scale profits for pirates attacking NPC traders (keep in mind my idea about changing how stations and faction space, see my previous wall of text a few pages back):
- Ship Type determines defensive cababilites (the bigger the ship, the more defences it has)
- NPC Rank determines the traders quality of good (higher rank means more valuable goods).
- Guaranteed to have 50-80% full cargo (unless they have just off loaded)
A Type-9 trader with the rank of Merchant would be fully armed and have medium value goods, but an Adder trader with the rank of Elite would have high value goods. As a pirate advances through the game and gets bigger and better ships or weapons, the pirate can take on bigger ships and thus get more cargo.
As for the Risk vs Fun vs Reward: I have a little hard time explaining this thoroughly since english isn't my native language. But (very basically) my reasoning is "Is this fun? Would I rather do stuff A for 1 million Cr/h than doing stuff B for 2 million Cr/h?" If the answer is yes, then the profit is already balanced in relation to how fun stuff A is. The problems we face today however is the imbalance between the profits each career can make.
With all this said, I do not have all the answers, but I do appreciate the feedback you are giving!
