(10-13-2025, 07:01 AM)Grga Pitik Wrote: So, let me get this:
> When there were active pirates on the server and people were getting pirated, the Discords were in flames with pings to log and kill the bastard (me) and the forum was active with bounties. Players were not happy being pirated, cause "Profit tears"; "Silent Power Trading Tears" and "AFK F2 Tears".
> Now that I've had it with being ganked by 2-5 people each time I Log in my pirate ships; the devs are not happy cause there are no pirates.
Make up your mind already!
I wasn't doing it for profit, I was doing it for the principle of pirating and the fun of it. I learned fast that the interactions were "Stall and ping Discord" or none.
I agree with:

Quote:If I ever do piracy it's not for the money but it's for the interactions, and maybe it's just unlucky me but the vast majority of traders I caught were uninteractive pricks ignoring you in every way possible and dashing for virtual cash like headless chicken.
Maybe work on mitigating that first.

Well pointed @Nika

(10-13-2025, 08:59 AM)The_Godslayer Wrote: I haven't even seen that much, though I'm stuck in American hours. Generally, you log a pirate, you find a trader, the trader immediately cruises, you disrupt them, the trader silently starts shooting while on impulse to whatever their goto target was. Get cussed out in either Russian or a select assortment of more niche Eastern European languages, get your pirate ship and possibly every ship that people know is yours added to the enemy list, where you get hunted by 4+ people coming to "punish" you any time you log on.

The best, longest lasting fix to this is to hunt out and remove the individuals who perpetrate this mindset and behavior, but a good second is ensuring that Frigates statcheck Transports every time, and ensuring that every single unlawful has access to frigates and decent fence points for the routes that go by them. I simply have not had a bad time pirating as a Junker once I started bringing my Salvager to everything so that I can actually haul off the cargo that drops when they inevitably silent engage and I have to kill them. Bomber piracy is fairly dead, as I've experienced. Traders absolutely will refuse to pay more than 10-20K because bombers can't haul more than that, so the pirate loses every time if you refuse to pay.

The other option is always having a transport with you, and only engage in group piracy, which is impossible at 10PM where I live. There simply aren't that many people on.

When I do piracy, it's for the fun of piracy. Traders don't roleplay, and the money isn't better than trading. Eurotruck Simulator in space is horribly boring, though, so often times, despite being a bad way to make money, when I have a need of money, I'll turn to piracy anyway.

(10-13-2025, 07:09 AM)Culbrelai Wrote: Escorts are not financially viable. The escort is better off trading himself rather than getting paid less to escort someone else. It has always been this way. Also, 5ks have far too low of TTK so escorts are useless for them. Which will (hopefully) be fixed by the transport rework. The best "escort" currently is a scout that flies in front of the trader, tells the trader when he finds a pirate, and the trader either has to pick to go around (Which is very hard to do now with these awful chokepoints everywhere and 80 systems being deleted) or they just log off. Which is not fun gameplay. So there's that.

(10-13-2025, 09:41 AM)IahimD Wrote:

(10-13-2025, 07:09 AM)Culbrelai Wrote: Escorts are not financially viable. The escort is better off trading himself rather than getting paid less to escort someone else. It has always been this way. Also, 5ks have far too low of TTK so escorts are useless for them. Which will (hopefully) be fixed by the transport rework. The best "escort" currently is a scout that flies in front of the trader, tells the trader when he finds a pirate, and the trader either has to pick to go around (Which is very hard to do now with these awful chokepoints everywhere and 80 systems being deleted) or they just log off. Which is not fun gameplay. So there's that.

I agree with this. There's not much point in escorting. Plus there's not really enough people for the traders (+ escorts) -> pirates -> lawfuls loop. Maybe you can find enough players at peak hours, but surely not during 75% of the day. And not everyone can play during the peak hours.

As a trader during European mornings (that's when I was able to play for more than 5 minutes), I see the pirates' issue and I tried to interact to the best of my abilities. I vaguely remember something about traders not being allowed anymore to simply embrace death as it does not make much sense inRP? Maybe we should explore that path? But then again, what can a trader do when he's pirated by someone in a cruiser? Just blindly submit? That comes with it's own can of worms

(10-13-2025, 09:39 AM)Fish Wrote: My most favourite pirate encounters (which were always @The Lane Hackers and if I remember correctly @JorgeRyan) changed my views of piracy as a game mechanic from being a guaranteed way to get people to dislike you, to being a great way to roleplay with someone with conflict(but not necessarily combat) inherently part of the encounter. We would spent minutes just talking, going beyond "2mil or die" while maintaining their factional hostility, etc. At that point I began seeing why piracy was allowed and what it was actually meant to be.
You get pirates that don't rp, only ask for money or they shoot, which is fine as long as they follow the bare minimum, but it is a bit lacking and doesn't really benefit the game or the server itself in the way that roleplay between friends or strangers might make them go "wow, i hope i get to do that again tomorrow." This is unfortunately not a new thing in disco.
It's a difficult thing to address directly without affecting the bigger picture. You can't force them to have deeper rp before being allowed to engage, because forced rp is shit rp and would make people never play pirates again. There's not much more micromanagement that can be done to the allowed amounts and ships and IDs and such that are allowed to pirate that follows the same logic as you have been following for decades. And introducing a brand new system now would probably be more detrimental than constructive in the long run.
Locking piracy to official factions only could solve the problem somewhat, with internal regulation on the acceptable level of roleplay that faction leaders expect from members, but locking ANYTHING behind that wall has always resulted in a big negative response, and it would also hugely reduce the number of people who play pirates.
idk it's a difficult problem to solve

(10-13-2025, 04:50 AM)Amba Wrote: Damn, you're getting hits every 10 mins? Lucky.

Joking aside you describe the problem with piracy fairly accurately. Above all it's just really boring to just sit there and wait for hits. NPC piracy could fill the gap there but bounties are too low, the loot tables are too trash and too random and the opportunity cost for potentially missing a mark cause you're moving a full load of Liberty Ale or whatever somewhere it barely sells for 30c per unit just isn't worth it.

Ideally traders should be easier to find and intercept for pirates but harder to actually pirate. With current server pop pirates need something that's actually worth doing between interactions, cause the profitability of the act will never match trading by itself. No trader is ever gonna let themselves be pirated for more than their profit or full cargo, they'll just let themselves be killed. At least until there's actual costs associated with dying.