The Problem With Piracy

[Lord Caedus]

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.

Amba has pretty much nailed the issue on the first go. I don't have a lot to add here, except that making cargo piracy more viable by having fences that actually pay an appreciable amount of credits for stolen goods would help a lot. There isn't much point in pirating a trader for cargo when I have to fly to the same end destination as them to do it (or to somewhere vey close). If that's the case, I might as well just go run the same trade route myself.

This might require a sort of permanent bit of FLHook wizardry that specifically gives a credit bonus to pirates that sell their cargo to one of the various fences scattered around the map. Having a lesser version of what we saw with the initial 5.3 patch release might also be an option, where we see goods only being sold to players with a certain rep level, though obviously not at the overly high level we saw recently. By limiting who can normally buy a good, we can also make it so that good sells well at a base that could never actually be docked on by the initial buyer. This would require a rather significant rework of the game's economy, and seeing as our current Econ Dev staff is effectively non-existant, I don't see it happening any time soon.

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