The Problem With Piracy

[Fish]

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

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