The Kitty Update

[jammi]

If you do this the wrong way it will spread players out too much, and make piracy extremely boring.

Give people freedom to decide what to ship and where, but still focus them along the same routes to make piracy worthwhile.

Agreed. But I do think Jack's got the right of it here. When people set out to go pirating, they don't hypothetically head to Stuttgart (more likely Omega 3 or 7, but eh) specifically to hit Gold Ore headed to Planet New Berlin. They go to find anything that's heading through that area.

If all ores were (for example) priced at 1,500c/s to each capital system, with perhaps a bonus for routes that run embargoes, then there's still a finite number of pathways that all ore traders can take and downturns in activity for one specific type of ore that was previously dominant would likely be balanced out by newly buffed ores that have suddenly become viable at that destination.

All the existing chokepoints would exist - the only difference being that pirates would probably encounter a greater variety of goods. There's also the bonus that even if traders are killed on one route, they're able to retask to another equally profitable route and provide activity there as well, instead of just logging off or something.

Although for discussion on the standardisation of ore prices, there's already a thread by me and Karst here.

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Also, seeing as I didn't say it before and I don't want to come across exclusively as a wingey mong, cheers for all the updates. Excellent stuff all around. My quibbles aren't with any of the updates, per se, but more minor additions that could've been deployed in tandem with them.