The Problem With Piracy

[Emperor Tekagi]

Sometimes I wonder why everything we try and fix resolves about credit bonuses when half the community can purchase basically all ships there are and still don't go bankrupt. Decent fence points via rewards would be cool regardless, since it stimulates cargo piracy which with ships featuring destructible cargo bays (more to follow soon over the course of the transport rework) is just better for both sides and even can grant reason to escorts and co (when the rework is there, so in 2 years :pensif:).

Piracy sucking right now is inherently a player interaction issue, facilitated by a distinct group of players running Google Sheets and API applications to list every single unlawful (regardless of interaction quality or demands issued, you can demand 10k of them and still end up on that list) and then avoid them by just logging off 1 system ahead or going off-plane. The only realistic solution to this is ultra controversial already, which is making player list show regions only or be disabled altogether. Both approaches have their own problems and imho aren't feasible at all.

Piracy used to work when we had more people because this distinct group was just 1/4th of all traders then, whereas now they're closer to 90%. It is just another case of our community being incapable and unbending on trying to actually mend together and BE a community, not a bunch of separated groups constantly at Discord wars in their echo chambers. Unless the people change their attitude towards the game, devs can throw out as many eco fixes and balance checks as they like and it'll barely fight the symptoms.

[Eternal.Journey]

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.

This. The issue isn't the loop. it's the part which creates the loop in the first place. People complain about piracy being dead but the reason that is, is well. Because the interactions are so shit that people don't want to waste their time on the "Experience"

Pirating for money is long gone. There's little worth in it for the "Money", it simply exists as a "Fun" thing to do. When 90% of those people are silent/afk powertraders who want nothing more than to see you not anywhere near them... yeah.

Werdi also summed this up pretty well too.

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[Mr.Harris]

You log a pirate, and wait at a jumpgate to catch some fish. It's been 20 minutes, and at last, a ship comes in. You demand that it halt, and hand over... 100k. The trader mulls it over, and begins docking with the gate. You engage, follow them through, and cut-off their escape via the lane. In another 5-10 minutes, you blow up the transport which never fires back, but uses all of its regens. You are back to square one, but no more fish come, and you receive a nice message from the trader you killed. In another 20 minutes, you're accosted by a pair of lawfuls, make your exit, and log off.

You log a pirate, wait 10 minutes, and get a fish. You demand 100k a quickly get the transfer. You jump over to a nearby system and harass a few miners for 100k a head. It's been about 25 minutes, and you're up ~400k - a great day. You catch no one else as people avoid your fishing grounds. You consider asking for 200k per head next time, but are afraid of getting sanctioned.

The trader that passed you is up 2mil by finishing the first leg and taking a different route back. They are still pissed at you and add your character's name to a list of enemies using a discord bot.

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How do we close this disparity?
Remove names from the player list? Allow pirates to make unlimited demands? Reduce the time it takes for a single pirate to kill a trader?
All of these have their own issues that have been discusses before, but maybe it's time to revisit them? The transport rework is coming eventually, but in some ways it will make the issue worse.

The idea here is to incetivize pirates, which incentivizes lawfuls and escorts, which themselves incentivize more trading. A nice ecosystem, if the gameplay for all its parts is sutainable.

You want to avoid that players can avoid other players mate?
Change the playerlist that it only shows regions instead of systems
As a trader you need to fear at every exit point of a TL or JG that a pirate is sitting there to catch you, it gives a thrill as trrader and the pirate guy needs to know where his targets are operating, plus he also needs to pit some efforts into his "business" instead of looking into the playerlist and seeing: ohh he is in Texas and i can cut him off in colorado(or whatever)

The next point is:
I knew a few guys who are pirating for fun(not demanding too much)
but then we have some people they are going for maximum credits during pirating.
And the fact that you are using a barge, doesnt mean you can ask for x amount of million credits.

and the fact that someone getting hits every 10 mins makes it more clear that you need to change the playerlist to regions only, cuz it makes zero sense to have a sirius wide scanner on a rp server
AGAIN
RP SERVER
That applies to all sections:
Seiges
Rp between factions
a faction that dislike house faction is rping with a house faction to get a helpful hand against a criminal faction??
what a bullshit( sorry for the words)
You also need to get rid of the trolls etc on your server cuz they are the reason why many people stopped playing here.
But the server has to solve first other problems instead of a stupid piracy problem if you are looking into the playerlist and how many people are online.....
the server is going more and more into competitive mode and going more and more away from the casual play style.
This is not e.sports, i want to have fun after a hard day at work and not sweating my ass off....

enough off topic
here are the solutions:
change the playerlist to regions
change the rule to something similar that (for example: 750k is the max amount, but that cant apply to every commodity, cuz water is less worth than gold)
SO working on the playerlist should be the best try
and the argument that you cant find other players is also bullshit cuz you know exactly where the bigger factions are operating.

[Perfect Gentleman]

A pirate's perspective.

The problem with piracy isn't so much the pirates themselves as their victims. @Emperor Tekagi was right: right now, about 90% of servers prefer farming. Everyone has their preferences, but with such huge numbers, almost every third encounter ends with a completely inappropriate reaction from the victim.

And then it escalates to the point where it's your fault the guy gave up so quickly and stopped playing in your presence.

Dude, you've had 100,000 credits taken. In today's economy, that's 1/100th of your profit. For the next 24 hours, no one will bother you. Don't react to me or others as if all your real-life possessions were taken.

I also didn't care who are whose friend. If I took 100,000 measly credits from your friend, then go flame about me somewhere else. This is an RP server, and the best interaction is the one that is objective.

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Discovery is a server of dreams.
And I'm a big dreamer.

[Barrier]

Consider that when you say "the rp is just shit", there isn't really any proactive fix mechanically. Imo, if we incentivize piracy directly, people will get more used to actually rping as and with pirates, because there'll be a larger encounter volume. Improvement by practice and all that. And this volume will actually let us easily identify the problem players who hardly say anything, because they would be doing it multiple times a week instead of like one time per month like it is now.

And yes, I'm aware that the rules around rp quality can change, but that's basically the nuclear option, so why not try some other stuff first if you were serious about making changes?

Regarding the bots: is it really that big of a problem? I know they exist, but surely a trader can't just keep avoiding a pirate every time, they'd waste time and lose money. Presumably even traders have real lives that they have to go back to, so logging off essentially cuts into your CSU. Another volume issue I suppose. At least there's an easy fix there with removing names, but what would be the consequences?

[Luke.]

For me, the primary fix is greater emphasis on the fact that this is an RP server. Unfortunately the culture, especially as the playerbase has begun to dwindle over the years, has shifted toward a more single-player game with multiplayer elements (mostly PvP) rather than the other way round.

The server would once thrive on interaction and its sandbox-y nature that just isn't really there anymore. Work is going on behind the scenes to give incentives to log more often and start to reverse this years-long issue, alongside said emphasis on the fact that if you play here, you should expect to face hardship by opposing factions and to not be allowed to just powertrade the days away and be upset when your latest profits aren't quite as fruitful thanks to interception...but everything takes time.

I very much agree myself that traders need to understand the idea of risk and reward again and that's something that's sorely lacking. Just recently we saw an incident of a faction being made wholely aware of someone trading Cardamine repeatedly through their home system, and then being accused of metagaming by said smuggler when they began to stop them more often. A good example of the culture shift that's occurred. Upon my inspection, said faction weren't even /1 /2ing them, but rather having a conversation and then being accused in OOC chat. Crazy.

The solution (besides my long-held moniker of "just log in" to have more people around and somewhat revive the scene we all yearn for via a degree of brute force) is just not that easy, but also not that complicated either. Just needs proper implementation and to be pointed at very starkly. Perhaps rule changes too, but when you're stuck between the rock and the hard place of "lose players that just don't get it and therefore lower player retention, or lose vets that are sick of people silently trying to escape all the time", it's a difficult compromise.

and the fact that someone getting hits every 10 mins makes it more clear that you need to change the playerlist to regions only, cuz it makes zero sense to have a sirius wide scanner on a rp server
AGAIN

The problem with this is that the server is quite low-pop at present. While I agree that people using the playerlist religiously might feel like shit, realistically without it your chances of just stumbling upon someone right now is slim. As it stands, it promotes interaction rather than frivolous metagaming. RP can still occur as a result of using it, and if so then I currently don't see the issue. Regardless, this is a vanilla Freelancer feature so I don't know how much it can even be customised. Cloaks change its behaviour at least.

Regardless, I was previously unaware of "lists" and such going around until reading this thread. Reminds me of smear docs being made of people on MMOs who'd then be shoved out of the raid-scene over one singular bad interaction because people that read it can't think for themselves and just believe every word. Extremely cringe behaviour and anyone involved in this practice should be ashamed of themselves and you are perpetuating the very issue that's being complained about. Kindly have a spine, please. I'm sure the obvious retort would be "well enforce the 'reasonable demands' and 'RP' clauses better" and you might have a point but this isn't the answer. Eye for an eye makes the world blind. Everyone, if they tried a bit harder and communicated less confrontationally with each other, could already make a difference. If current rules as they stand are widely felt to be causing problems however, then we (the staff) can of course look into that as well.

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[Lemon]

A pirate's perspective.

The problem with piracy isn't so much the pirates themselves as their victims. @Emperor Tekagi was right: right now, about 90% of servers prefer farming. Everyone has their preferences, but with such huge numbers, almost every third encounter ends with a completely inappropriate reaction from the victim.

And then it escalates to the point where it's your fault the guy gave up so quickly and stopped playing in your presence.

Dude, you've had 100,000 credits taken. In today's economy, that's 1/100th of your profit. For the next 24 hours, no one will bother you. Don't react to me or others as if all your real-life possessions were taken.

I also didn't care who are whose friend. If I took 100,000 measly credits from your friend, then go flame about me somewhere else. This is an RP server, and the best interaction is the one that is objective.

But why do you need to take 100,000 - he trades for the money, you don't pirate for it? Is your goal of piracy to make him go further away from his objective? Why not make RP demands, small cargo shenanigans and/or ask for 1ks if you have to ask for money? (Boring as hell if you ask me) Or - give them the option - RP with me OR pay money...well or die

[Burning]

A thing that could help would be a system that announces the traders start and destination. It's optional and you get a nice credit bonus if you complete it with full cargo.

[Lemon]

Consider that when you say "the rp is just shit", there isn't really any proactive fix mechanically. Imo, if we incentivize piracy directly, people will get more used to actually rping as and with pirates, because there'll be a larger encounter volume. Improvement by practice and all that. And this volume will actually let us easily identify the problem players who hardly say anything, because they would be doing it multiple times a week instead of like one time per month like it is now.

And yes, I'm aware that the rules around rp quality can change, but that's basically the nuclear option, so why not try some other stuff first if you were serious about making changes?

Regarding the bots: is it really that big of a problem? I know they exist, but surely a trader can't just keep avoiding a pirate every time, they'd waste time and lose money. Presumably even traders have real lives that they have to go back to, so logging off essentially cuts into your CSU. Another volume issue I suppose. At least there's an easy fix there with removing names, but what would be the consequences?

Reward exceptional pirate and trader RP, simples - I know it's not an in-game mechanic, but it's a start you can do today, you have the skills

[Perfect Gentleman]

A pirate's perspective.

The problem with piracy isn't so much the pirates themselves as their victims. @Emperor Tekagi was right: right now, about 90% of servers prefer farming. Everyone has their preferences, but with such huge numbers, almost every third encounter ends with a completely inappropriate reaction from the victim.

And then it escalates to the point where it's your fault the guy gave up so quickly and stopped playing in your presence.

Dude, you've had 100,000 credits taken. In today's economy, that's 1/100th of your profit. For the next 24 hours, no one will bother you. Don't react to me or others as if all your real-life possessions were taken.

I also didn't care who are whose friend. If I took 100,000 measly credits from your friend, then go flame about me somewhere else. This is an RP server, and the best interaction is the one that is objective.

But why do you need to take 100,000 - he trades for the money, you don't pirate for it? Is your goal of piracy to make him go further away from his objective? Why not make RP demands, small cargo shenanigans and/or ask for 1ks if you have to ask for money? (Boring as hell if you ask me) Or - give them the option - RP with me OR pay money...well or die

My pirate gameplay rarely involves using information for profit. The last time it happened was here.

But overall, my character pursues only one goal: profit for the sake of survival. I generally charged that amount because the man's cargo was expensive. If he had something cheap, I'd, of course, lower the price. But the reaction was often the same: silence or simply shooting, just because.

There are also angry guys who didn't like the fact that someone got in their way. This is an online server, and everyone can do whatever they want here.

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Discovery is a server of dreams.
And I'm a big dreamer.