I dunno. I guess it is some sort of power trip fantasy making others dance after your tune? Doesn't appeal to me in ED. I like to teabag in exclusively PvP games, but not in this game. Tho the TW: Warhammer 2 expansion with the vampire pirates looks interesting. Is role-play - and in my opinion role-play is better used without forcing it on others who don't consent.
Why anyone want to be a pirate in Elite universe?
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you make a good point here. back in the very early dev diary days there was a shot of an anaconda which was still deemed to be flyable. it had its guts ripped apart with the cargo hold exposed. This kind of thing didnt make it into the game but i think it could be fun if it did. rather than just hatch limpets on the cargo hatch if you could blow a hole in the side of the ship and a section of the cargo bay spill out it could be very cool for piracy.
How cute, this feels like 2015 again.
But to answer the OP, there is no reason anybody would want to be a pirate as the pay is ridiculous compared to the effort involved. I wont even talk about risk, because piracy is about as risky as any other activity in the game (that is, not very).
Piracy was not particularly enticing back in 2015 before the big meltdown of the economy, but now that you can be paid millions to carry biowaste a few LYs away, it has become a hobby at best.
It doesn't require less skill or investment than any other activity in the game, but it does pay peanuts and usually takes more effort than average: you have to fly what is essentially a souped up trade ship and engage in combat with targets you can't afford to destroy and must try and disable despite the bugs allowing NPCs to ignore FSD cooldowns and powerplant damage... and at the end, if you are lucky you can fill your cargo with a few tons of gold and make less money than data courriers.
That is before you even get into PvP piracy. On that, the one good thing is, us pirates can cheat too and combat log if anybody is interested in our bounty. The sad thing is, why should anybody care about the few thousands cr (at best) on our head?
But to answer the OP, there is no reason anybody would want to be a pirate as the pay is ridiculous compared to the effort involved. I wont even talk about risk, because piracy is about as risky as any other activity in the game (that is, not very).
Piracy was not particularly enticing back in 2015 before the big meltdown of the economy, but now that you can be paid millions to carry biowaste a few LYs away, it has become a hobby at best.
It doesn't require less skill or investment than any other activity in the game, but it does pay peanuts and usually takes more effort than average: you have to fly what is essentially a souped up trade ship and engage in combat with targets you can't afford to destroy and must try and disable despite the bugs allowing NPCs to ignore FSD cooldowns and powerplant damage... and at the end, if you are lucky you can fill your cargo with a few tons of gold and make less money than data courriers.
That is before you even get into PvP piracy. On that, the one good thing is, us pirates can cheat too and combat log if anybody is interested in our bounty. The sad thing is, why should anybody care about the few thousands cr (at best) on our head?
Yes, potentially.
At the moment, though, there are so many different jurisdictions that you could have stolen your way to an entire fleet and not got out of the 'A's. And the factions generally don't like it each other much, so if you steal mission cargo from faction AAA then sell it to AAB ... then steal mission cargo from AAB to sell to AAC ... no individual faction is likely to consider you unreliable for their missions until it's too late.
You'd need to massively compress the number of jurisdictions - e.g. make all Independent Democracy factions branches of "the Independent Democrats", or reboot the game with a Colonia-sized bubble - before you could have meaningful consequences on that level.
As with all the other changes needed to balance professions against each other, it would at the very least need a radically different "Elite V" and some of the changes would probably mean you might as well go for "Some Other Space Game I" and set expectations properly.
Indeed! Some of my best moments in the game!
Since you are quite experienced, how much where you making from LTD's? I only do it for fun, make an ok amount, nothing like bulk haulage in a big freighter, many claim to make huge though. Am thinking with the new USS system it should be a lot easier.
Yep, actually enjoyed being hunted, and (mostly failing) at hunting other cmdrs. Stopped being fun ( for me) when the player base grew and it was just about a Pirate typing obscenities at you.
I want to live the life of a pirate. I look at sci-fi shows like Firefly and WANT to live that. On the fringes of civilization running from a law I don't agree with. But that fantasy is immediately dashed when I realize that the operating costs are more than the gains the vast majority of the time. Why spend hours tracking and hunting for a couple hundred thousand credits when I can hop in my cutter and get 3 million+ in a 10-min trade loop?
I'd have to want the lifestyle more than the riches... Which defeats the point of becoming a pirate in the first place.
I'd have to want the lifestyle more than the riches... Which defeats the point of becoming a pirate in the first place.
FWIW, for me at least, Elite over the last few years has become quite good at producing the Firefly life. The Firefly crew weren't EliteDangerous-style pirates (the Serenity was unarmed) so Elite's weakness there doesn't really come up for me. They scratched out a living wherever they could doing whatever non-combat "missions" were available, scavenging illegal salvage, etc. The Train Job episode was a kind of piracy but it seems more similar to stealthy hatch-breaker limpet piracy against an NPC convey, which is a delicate and profitable thing if you're early game and still in small ships, or for end-game players when you want cargo that is nearly impossible to get any other way, such as when the Federation was transporting unknown/thargoid probes via military convoy, prior to the invasion. So it feels like that's in there, to me. (Though hatch breakers on an actual train on a surface... that would be cool - I hope it happens!) And of course Elite is second to none at producing that edge-of-seat Reavers scene where you spot a truly dangerous hollow-square ship on the scanner before it has spotted you, and it's sweaty-palms all-eyes-on-that-ship as you try to figure out if it's hungry, and if so, what are you going to do? Similar with Han Solo - he doesn't do Elite-style piracy, generally he's either outrunning something big, shooting something small, or smuggling goods (or himself) under the radar, and Elite provides all those situations regularly
More workable piracy would be a great asset to the game and I hope we get there, but there aren't a lot of sci-fi shows where it really features strongly; it's always from the perspective of being pirated, which Elite deals out so frequently the OP created this thread )If anything, my reservation is that unlike Firefly and Star Wars, it feels a little too easy to have unending self-sufficiency. When out exploring, I would like a few more difficult choices like needing to top up some supplies/repairs and how long can I get away with that while trying to locate/evaluate a source of materials that I think I can most safely access.
The elephant in the room I suppose is that Mal Renalds, Han Solo etc had to work their asses off struggling just to stay in business, while in Elite you can't even look over your shoulder without accidentally having a bunch of credits thrown at you; you're locked on a one-way road to riches, but ... I'm ok with that
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