What's wrong with smuggling and piracy today?
1. It's abysmally low-income compared to other gameplay loops.
2. PVE Piracy is somewhat non-existant. LTD\valuable cargo ships are very scarce, hence barely anyone is interested in this kind of gameplay. Private courier vessels do carry rare commodities, but it simply doesn't pay enough, considering the 'gameplay' you have to participate in (described below). And you always get your cargo stolen, which is even less credits (which makes sense, but with current amount of ships carrying cargo, it's too dull)... Piracy is pretty much out of the picture (in terms of fun\credits ratio), and it's not hard to see why.
3. PVE Piracy gameplay is ridiculous for multiple reasons:
5. Smuggling is... well, it's part of piracy. It's just there... you get lower income for stolen goods, and you have to avoid scanning. That's it... Well, great. It's irrelevant beyond irrelevant, because it's not profitable.
@DemiserofD said it better than me:
Here's my proposition, which is two-fold:
Concerning the gameplay, which is clearly negligible and far from engaging (cant stress this enough, there is little to no difference between trying to stop your target (killing drives) or just using a hatchbreaker - 90% of the time you are dealing with cargo spilling all over the instance, causing frustration. It's not a matter of skill, it's poor gameplay mechanics):
@ethelred
@DemiserofD
@Screemonster spills the truth here
@Rubbernuke does a wonderful job of showing many ways to improve both PP and Piracy/Smuggling here:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...ing-mechanics-to-allow-power-collapse.586689/
@J. J. Musclethorpe made an in-depth post about this issue 2 years ago... seems to have gone nowhere:
forums.frontier.co.uk
1. It's abysmally low-income compared to other gameplay loops.
2. PVE Piracy is somewhat non-existant. LTD\valuable cargo ships are very scarce, hence barely anyone is interested in this kind of gameplay. Private courier vessels do carry rare commodities, but it simply doesn't pay enough, considering the 'gameplay' you have to participate in (described below). And you always get your cargo stolen, which is even less credits (which makes sense, but with current amount of ships carrying cargo, it's too dull)... Piracy is pretty much out of the picture (in terms of fun\credits ratio), and it's not hard to see why.
3. PVE Piracy gameplay is ridiculous for multiple reasons:
- While NPC Pirates make demands, players can't. This could have allowed players to avoid brute force and get what they want by just scaring your target (just like in PVP Piracy)
- Hatch Breaker limpets are useless if you can't effectively stop ships. If you disable the drives, ships keep drifting away, making it almost impossible to scoop the loot. Players end up having to ram the target ship to stop it from drifting (doesn't it sound ridiculous?).
- If that's not enough pain, you can only effectively pirate ships that are below novice, because high-rank NPCs can reboot their ship, rendering all of your attempts to safely hatchbreak the cargo futile.
5. Smuggling is... well, it's part of piracy. It's just there... you get lower income for stolen goods, and you have to avoid scanning. That's it... Well, great. It's irrelevant beyond irrelevant, because it's not profitable.
@DemiserofD said it better than me:
Here's my proposition, which is two-fold:
Concerning the gameplay, which is clearly negligible and far from engaging (cant stress this enough, there is little to no difference between trying to stop your target (killing drives) or just using a hatchbreaker - 90% of the time you are dealing with cargo spilling all over the instance, causing frustration. It's not a matter of skill, it's poor gameplay mechanics):
- Add ability to negotiate with NPC targets and to threaten them. Piracy should be about talking first, and exchanging fire only if you're dealing with a non-compliant vessel
- Add some kind of tool to stop target vessel if their drives are offline. Harpoon, gravity gun? There's enough room for imagination
- It might be a good idea to unify limpet controllers. It's very strange how you have to have multiple controller devices for different limpet types. Can't it be just one module capable of programming limpets for different tasks?
- Make rare goods more profitable, allowing small\medium ships to make profit from low quantities of cargo by stealing it
- Remove this weird dependancy on mining commodities prices. Piracy is strangely tied up to mining - if mining is not profitable, then piracy isn't too, that's the reality. We need core commodities (with decent prices) that would make piracy worth doing
- Increase the number of NPC ships with valuable cargo. Current Private Courier Vessel ships carry commodities that could only make you laugh.
- Black market overhaul. Maybe as suggested by @Ruurka :
Here are some other propositions from other CMDRs (all somewhat related to piracy and smuggling issues):
@ethelred
Piracy gameplay should fall into one if the following categories:-
1. Heist. We've got a tip off that valuable cargo X is travelling through Y at time Z. We may or may not have someone on the inside who will disable the ship once we've gotten rid of the escort/reduced module er, W, to 0%. Cargo X is either stolen to order or high value (not only in credits but rep or engineering mats) to make it worthwhile. Ideally in gameplay a CMDR can be a pirate, the cargo ship or the cargo ship escort.
2. Carribbean 17th century. This area is rife with high value goods, with very poor policing and loads of competing factions. I might even have a letter of marque from one of them and I've been given an arbitrary time period to gain as many goods as I can on that time. We operate out of a lawless system where a sophisticated trade network turns stolen goods into aforementioned high value mats.
Pirates need disabling weapons and a system of notoriety/reputation so their victims can negotiate in good faith on a percentage of cargo to give away.
Traders need insurance that kicks in once they have at least tried to escape.
Fame (in terms of online leaderboards) is a strong incentive - though out of game - to a CMDR who can show they've stolen X amount of cargo with no pirated vessel "kills" either PvE or PvP.
1. Heist. We've got a tip off that valuable cargo X is travelling through Y at time Z. We may or may not have someone on the inside who will disable the ship once we've gotten rid of the escort/reduced module er, W, to 0%. Cargo X is either stolen to order or high value (not only in credits but rep or engineering mats) to make it worthwhile. Ideally in gameplay a CMDR can be a pirate, the cargo ship or the cargo ship escort.
2. Carribbean 17th century. This area is rife with high value goods, with very poor policing and loads of competing factions. I might even have a letter of marque from one of them and I've been given an arbitrary time period to gain as many goods as I can on that time. We operate out of a lawless system where a sophisticated trade network turns stolen goods into aforementioned high value mats.
Pirates need disabling weapons and a system of notoriety/reputation so their victims can negotiate in good faith on a percentage of cargo to give away.
Traders need insurance that kicks in once they have at least tried to escape.
Fame (in terms of online leaderboards) is a strong incentive - though out of game - to a CMDR who can show they've stolen X amount of cargo with no pirated vessel "kills" either PvE or PvP.
Expanding No-Fire zones could be a good way of accomplishing that. Stations can be 7ls from the star or 700000ls from the star, so why can't the no-fire zone vary in size, as well?
Vary it based on system security level. Anarchy stations have no no-fire zone. Low-sec has the current 7.5km no-fire zone, medium-sec has a 10km no-fire zone, and high-sec has a 15km no-fire zone. Players drop in just beyond the no-fire zone, giving cops a much longer window to scan you and making docking more dangerous with larger, slower ships.
You might allow friends of the faction to bypass the security restrictions and drop in at the normal distance, as an indication of good faith. But if a friend gets caught smuggling, they should take a BIG hit to their reputation.
Vary it based on system security level. Anarchy stations have no no-fire zone. Low-sec has the current 7.5km no-fire zone, medium-sec has a 10km no-fire zone, and high-sec has a 15km no-fire zone. Players drop in just beyond the no-fire zone, giving cops a much longer window to scan you and making docking more dangerous with larger, slower ships.
You might allow friends of the faction to bypass the security restrictions and drop in at the normal distance, as an indication of good faith. But if a friend gets caught smuggling, they should take a BIG hit to their reputation.
A good start would be making Rare Goods and piracy goods much more valuable.
A big problem with Piracy atm is you basically just want to find a single T9 with 300 LTDs on it and pirate them all, which requires disabling and stopping the target, all of which is pretty boring. Who really WANTS to sit there for 15 minutes slowly stealing 300 LTDs? Sure it's fun at first, but only because of the dopamine from the profit, the actual gameplay is negligible.
But there are ships that carry 5-20 rare goods like antiquities/rare gems/antique jewelry. That's a small enough number they could be stolen without disabling them. So just buff the value of these goods approximately 10x, to 1.0-1.5m each, and pow, you've made piracy more fun and more profitable in a single move.
The same goes for Rares. They're just nowhere near profitable enough to be worth stealing atm.
[...]
Unfortunately, the current meta for trading is moving 794t of Agronomic Treatment back and forth to stations with zero demand but high prices anyway. It's pointless for a pirate to steal that, because the entire business model is based on being able to acquire it instantly and move 6-10 loads per hour, while it takes the pirate probably an hour just to steal a single load worth.
Reworking rares to actually be worth trading again could have a profound impact on piracy as well as trade.
A big problem with Piracy atm is you basically just want to find a single T9 with 300 LTDs on it and pirate them all, which requires disabling and stopping the target, all of which is pretty boring. Who really WANTS to sit there for 15 minutes slowly stealing 300 LTDs? Sure it's fun at first, but only because of the dopamine from the profit, the actual gameplay is negligible.
But there are ships that carry 5-20 rare goods like antiquities/rare gems/antique jewelry. That's a small enough number they could be stolen without disabling them. So just buff the value of these goods approximately 10x, to 1.0-1.5m each, and pow, you've made piracy more fun and more profitable in a single move.
The same goes for Rares. They're just nowhere near profitable enough to be worth stealing atm.
[...]
Unfortunately, the current meta for trading is moving 794t of Agronomic Treatment back and forth to stations with zero demand but high prices anyway. It's pointless for a pirate to steal that, because the entire business model is based on being able to acquire it instantly and move 6-10 loads per hour, while it takes the pirate probably an hour just to steal a single load worth.
Reworking rares to actually be worth trading again could have a profound impact on piracy as well as trade.
@Screemonster spills the truth here
The biggest problem with piracy in terms of earning is simply that the highest value thing you can obtain from piracy is something that you can obtain faster and more reliably by mining, and unlike mining there's a massive dropoff in value to the next most valuable thing. If you go platinum mining and probe a rock and see painite, that's not a wasted rock because painite is still pretty valuable, same with osmium and a few other minerals. If you manifest-scan an NPC then as far as value is concerned, it either has LTDs or it doesn't. Even if it does, the time you need to spend siphoning it (and fighting off NPC pirates or system sec, depending on where you found it) is insane compared to the time it takes to fill your hold mining.
The easiest fix to piracy would, oddly enough, be similar to the fix that made mining go from "okay" to "the best activity in the game for credits" - prior to hotspots and cores, it was impossible to target any particular material beyond "go to the right ring type, preferably pristine". Hotspots made it possible to locate particular places to go for materials, and cores added never-before-seen extremely-high-value commodities.
Adding the core commodities to mining ships (in limited amounts) would make targeting those ships worth it. Adding unique stealable commodities to signal sources and scenarios would make going after convoys actually worth it. One of my favourite scenarios to play out is that one with half a dozen T7s where a bunch of pirates jump in and you can either defend the convoy or join the heist - the pirates are only after something like superconductors or insulating membrane, but the T7s have other cargo as well that's a little bonus cherry on top if you're there with some collectors - usually it's some dross like consumer technology, but imagine if it was something actually worth stealing?
Anyway, convoy dispersal patterns should carry stuff that's actually worth your time to hatchbreak, even if it's "lob a hatchbreaker, grab the 10t or so of stuff that drops, and run" without needing to disable them and strip them of everything in their hold thanks for coming to my TED talk
The easiest fix to piracy would, oddly enough, be similar to the fix that made mining go from "okay" to "the best activity in the game for credits" - prior to hotspots and cores, it was impossible to target any particular material beyond "go to the right ring type, preferably pristine". Hotspots made it possible to locate particular places to go for materials, and cores added never-before-seen extremely-high-value commodities.
Adding the core commodities to mining ships (in limited amounts) would make targeting those ships worth it. Adding unique stealable commodities to signal sources and scenarios would make going after convoys actually worth it. One of my favourite scenarios to play out is that one with half a dozen T7s where a bunch of pirates jump in and you can either defend the convoy or join the heist - the pirates are only after something like superconductors or insulating membrane, but the T7s have other cargo as well that's a little bonus cherry on top if you're there with some collectors - usually it's some dross like consumer technology, but imagine if it was something actually worth stealing?
Anyway, convoy dispersal patterns should carry stuff that's actually worth your time to hatchbreak, even if it's "lob a hatchbreaker, grab the 10t or so of stuff that drops, and run" without needing to disable them and strip them of everything in their hold thanks for coming to my TED talk
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...ing-mechanics-to-allow-power-collapse.586689/
@J. J. Musclethorpe made an in-depth post about this issue 2 years ago... seems to have gone nowhere:
It's time for a hard look at piracy.
To Whom It May Concern, I truly appreciate the consideration that was given to my suggestion when it came to crime & punishment as it was posted here in this very forum some years ago. (https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/284607-Murder-and-Consequence?p=4427268#post4427268) I have...
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