The road to a viable piracy career

[Ziggy Stardust]

Avast yee landlubbers and stuff. And that's quite enough roleplaying.

Disclaimer up front, I did try out NPC piracy a couple of months in but that's my only experience with it. At that time it was laughable. Shooting out to cargo hatch was actually rather fun, since you needed to position yourself to be able to hit it. The T-7s deciding to keep fighting me while having 2% hull was a little less fun, since it always meant having to compensate a 6,000 credit bounty with a haul of a couple of cannisters of food.

All this time, pirates have been taking the "least rewarding profession" award (irony!) from us explorers. And it's time to talk about how explorers are going to take this title back. I figured one sure fire way to do this is to write a post on Frontier Forums. That always works.

The main problem I see with piracy is their only targets are players. Since the declaration of piracy can come through comms when pirating players, NPCs are a little less understanding in that regard. So selecting a target in Contacts should bring up the option: "Declare Piracy" as an extra option. Maybe after being cargo scanned?

edit: Lateralus was way ahead of me: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=257956

The NPC AI needs to have procedures that start running when receiving such a declaration. Piracy detected -> fight / flee / submit to piracy

Fight: pew pew pew. Reroll fight / flee / submit periodically and decide depending on how the fight goes.
Flee: When danger reared it ugly head, the AI turned it's tail and fled
Submit: NPC submits and drops a pre-set amount of it's cargo. To keep an already complicated procedure simple, lets forget about NPC negotiations for now.

Something like that.

What will this mean?

Well, first an foremost, a Pirate can make a living without having to depend on running into other players. The player frequency stops being an issue. Sure, player to player interaction is still more enjoyable, but these will be the icing on the pirate cake.

PvE piracy in Solo/Group can become a thing, lifting piracy out of the PvP vs PvE non-debate. Maybe pirate factions will gain members from the PvE community which will lead to zen-like creaminess across modes. (And maybe I've been taking one too many hits to the head with a baseball bat made out of frozen stupid)

No more "please come to open, my 6 children are starving" threads. :dancing banana:

Explorers will be the least earning profession again, earning us reverse bragging right. "Of course, we really have it tough ... ".

And all it takes is a lot of changes to AI behaviour and an introduction of a declare piracy mechanic.

I mean .... how hard can it be?

 

[scorpyon]

From an AI perspective (and as someone who minored in Artificial Intelligence in Uni), there's a lot more involved in trying to get something like this to work than a simple RNG simulation.
The NPCs would effectively need to try and think like humans, but at the same time without becoming predicatable.
So they couldn't just decide to stop fighting at X% hull, for example.

Obviously, this is all doable, but requires quite an in depth implementation for it to be viable and above all else, fun! (Without it just seeming like the NPCs work on a set (or randomised) pattern.

All that said, any idea for a decent implementation of a pirating "career" form of gameplay gets a thumbs up +1 in my book!

 

[Marra Morgan]

I like those ideas

I gave up trying to pirate players a long time ago. Opportunities are too few and far between, there's too much bother and tears involved (really it's embarrasing some of the stuff people come out with) and not enough reward to be worth it. Oh and was rubbish at it, I'm too polite and chatty for my own good!

 

[hunvagy]

I like those ideas

I gave up trying to pirate players a long time ago. Opportunities are too few and far between, there's too much bother and tears involved (really it's embarrasing some of the stuff people come out with) and not enough reward to be worth it. Oh and was rubbish at it, I'm too polite and chatty for my own good!

NPCs drop their load if they have any nowadays btw. Wanted transport ships always spam me with the "target cargo dropped" in nav beacons. The last one had 6t of silver. Maybe they finally bumped what NPCs carry from thousands of tons of biowaste.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

From an AI perspective (and as someone who minored in Artificial Intelligence in Uni), there's a lot more involved in trying to get something like this to work than a simple RNG simulation.
The NPCs would effectively need to try and think like humans, but at the same time without becoming predicatable.
So they couldn't just decide to stop fighting at X% hull, for example.

Obviously, this is all doable, but requires quite an in depth implementation for it to be viable and above all else, fun! (Without it just seeming like the NPCs work on a set (or randomised) pattern.

All that said, any idea for a decent implementation of a pirating "career" form of gameplay gets a thumbs up +1 in my book!

Of course I downplayed the complexity of the AI needed for this to work. That's par for the course when suggesting features isn't it?

I like those ideas

I gave up trying to pirate players a long time ago. Opportunities are too few and far between, there's too much bother and tears involved (really it's embarrassing some of the stuff people come out with) and not enough reward to be worth it. Oh and was rubbish at it, I'm too polite and chatty for my own good!

You'd think polite pirates would mean better cooperation from traders.

Drop your cargo!
No!
Please?
Oh very well.

NPCs drop their load if they have any nowadays btw. Wanted transport ships always spam me with the "target cargo dropped" in nav beacons. The last one had 6t of silver. Maybe they finally bumped what NPCs carry from thousands of tons of biowaste.

Hmm, didn't take notice of change logs lately. But dropping as default doesn't really make the interaction interesting.

 

[Vasious]

Hmm, didn't take notice of change logs lately. But dropping as default doesn't really make the interaction interesting.

Usually you have to damage them.
I found targeting the Cargo hatch seems to result in it more often, even if I am not hitting the cargo hatch to damage it due to the ship rolling the cargo hatch away from me.

I might seeing what isn't there however

 

[hunvagy]

Yeah I forgot the "they are almost dead and hope I leave them be" part of it Not really tried the cargo hatch, but when they only have 10% hull left, and try to highwake out, they usually drop everything and run. Guess they hope we work the same way as they do.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Usually you have to damage them.
I found targeting the Cargo hatch seems to result in it more often, even if I am not hitting the cargo hatch to damage it due to the ship rolling the cargo hatch away from me.

I might seeing what isn't there however

The trouble I had with this was: I'd shoot the cargo hatch, cargo started spilling, but the trader would keep coming at me instead of flee with the remainder of it's cargo.

9 out of 10 times I had to kill the trader, which results in a 6,000 credit bounty, which does eat into the profit.

Yeah I forgot the "they are almost dead and hope I leave them be" part of it

Not really tried the cargo hatch, but when they only have 10% hull left, and try to highwake out, they usually drop everything and run. Guess they hope we work the same way as they do.

Ah, so that has changed. Which is good.

 

[Vasious]

The trouble I had with this was: I'd shoot the cargo hatch, cargo started spilling, but the trader would keep coming at me instead of flee with the remainder of it's cargo.

I do get a lot that flee, however I target only Wanted smuggler, so their destruction is not a consideration.
In fact I encourage them to flee (ie not targeting drives or FSD) now as with the Wake scanner, getting the data from their wakes.

The AI only seems to want to put up a fight if it gets a bead on you. If you keep on their tail they seem to stay in flee mode.

At least that is my experience.

It could come down to ships and rankings as well both Player and NPC

I do wonder, is it that when you target cargo hatches the NPC "know" you are Planning to Pirate them and act accordingly, or am I seeing patterns that are not there.

I only suppose that maybe since you are talking about ways to make the NPCs know intent and I might be mis-remembering based on reading that.

You know how the mind likes to do that

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Mind you, I tried piracy somewhere in Februari 2015. I doubt my experiences are still relevant.

Check out Lateralus' thread which I linked in the OP. He has a neat possible solution to this.

 

[Han Brannigan]

Some sort of communication with NPCs (Pilots and Mission givers) would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Jordan Cobalt]

Pve isn't as bad as it used to be back in February 2015. Ever since the power plant destruction changes (back in October, i think) getting cargo has become a lot easier. Shoot out the PP, they come to a stop, then slowly drain their cargo until you had your fill or the cops show up. The main bottleneck now is finding good systems (preferably anarchy or low security refinery, extraction or high tech systems), and then finding ships with cargo worth taking.

All that said, I 100% agree with your idea. A declare piracy option should have been in from the start, if only to make npcs more realistic. What trader in their right mind would think firing on a python from his type 6 would work? The only firing from a trader in that situation should be coming from his pants.