Pirates have tracking beacon on my ship or what?

[Cmdr-Wotherspoon]

Unfortunately this is one of the more idiotic design decisions with the game, assuming it is by design.

I'd raise it as a bug report, but i suspect i'd get the dreaded "working as intended" reply. I'd rather try and live in false hope that its just a bug that FD one day sort it out.

To work around it, when you stop for the day mining, go hand in your cargo then go out again with just limpets in your hold.

It would be nice if there were a persistent flag to allow a session to be re-established with the same number of NPCs there were when you logged out, wouldn't it? Spawning an instance appears to take no account of the state when you logged out. Has the bug been fixed whereby pirates demanded that you drop your tasty limpets because they mistook them for cargo?

 

[Schmack]

It would be nice if there were a persistent flag to allow a session to be re-established with the same number of NPCs there were when you logged out, wouldn't it? Spawning an instance appears to take no account of the state when you logged out. Has the bug been fixed whereby pirates demanded that you drop your tasty limpets because they mistook them for cargo?

Wouldn't work if there are other players who didn't log out.

 

[Jack Schitt]

So annoying that this is still in there. The thing is, even without radical changes you could mask this to some degree with some cheeky code and a bit of lore.

• Player in supercruise
  
  • Have any pirate archetypes spawned yet? If so, flag it.
  • Has the player scanned them? If so, PUSH their names and loadouts.
• Player drops to normal space
  
  • If the pirate flag is set, spawn pirates.
    • Are there names on the stack? If so, POP them for the newly spawning pirates.
  • Broadcast, "Ha! I knew following that wake would be worthwhile!"
  • If the pirate flag is not set, leave the player alone.

OK, so this would break a bit in multiplayer; the player's wingmates remaining in supercruise would see "copies" of the pirate ships. But given the range of instancing and matching bugs already present, I don't think it's a game breaker.

 

[metatheurgist]

It's always annoyed me that you cannot get any real solitude in the game which is what you want when mining.

There's plenty of solitude once you take care of the initial spawn. That's why I like armed miners, the pirates are a fun change of pace if I have to log, then it's back to the treadmill.

Has the bug been fixed whereby pirates demanded that you drop your tasty limpets because they mistook them for cargo?

That was fixed ages ago. Even pirates that interdict will leave you alone if you have no cargo, which is frankly too boring. There used to be a psycho pirate that squawked "Scanners are for the weak!" and would attack regardless; we need him back.