i don't think im too wide of the mark when i blame introduction of jumpdrives and cloaks.
in the past, pirates could hunt down traders.
now, they can jump-trade, and if solo, they can cloak and run. if you're quick you can fire cd's at them and just trail them until they run out of cloak fuel, but you might run out of cd's too.
im not sure if the dev's anticipated this when they introduced cloaks and jumping - igiss certainly did, as he once said 'no cloaks ever'. it has certainly messed up the balance of the game.
to restore it, and keep the shiny new toys, i'd restrict jumping to combat ships - they have the armour to withstand the stresses of phase space, or something, similarly cloaks too - cargo ships are too big to have a cloak; caps can manage it as they have a much larger powercore, and fighters are nice and small, so they can create a pinch field around their snub utilising the feldman effect (apologies for rubbish pseudoscience made up on the spot).
to restore activity, restore piracy, in the centre of the mod - Moka, Im looking at you - cos extreme piracy in liberty will drive out the traders into the other houses, and then the pirates will follow them there.
too many toys have been given to us to make our lives easier. when there was grinding, you had to rp at the same time. Now it takes me exactly 5 mins to set up a ship, as opposed to the 45 minutes before.
