(10-13-2025, 09:45 AM)Sally Wrote: A decade ago we had an average of 200 players of which most were traders and miners printing money and none of these issues were a big deal because there was always someone out there more than willing to replace whiny powertraders, or maybe there were so many of them it wasn't a big deal because you found plenty of victims anyway even if a bunch avoided you. The point is we didn't need to fix this back then, it wasn't a problem and still isn't, the low player count is the elephant in the room, the player retention sucks and there's many factors to blame, but mostly it narrows down to the fact the game is ancient and a chore to install on Winblows 11, the culture of this community is comically toxic and minors which are the ones that could fill this gap the best because they have plenty of free time would rather play gameslop like Fortnite, Rocket League, Minecraft, Helldivers, CoD... You get the point.
This. When 5.0 was first released, I actually made a pretty good racket pirating traders in the Omicron Theta - Delta corridor, just because there were so many traders passing through. That was about the only time I found piracy to be a viable way of making money, however - when there was a consistent stream of players to pirate, which is just not realistic with the current player population.
The Piracy Problem™ is the result of a long list of other issues - (pointed out by many others in this thread) - not something that can be individually fixed on its own. The biggest one I see, though, is what Sally said - there just isn't enough players on the server to allow for a lot of gameplay aspects, especially piracy, to reach its intended function.
But in the current state of discovery, I don't see any reasonable way to make piracy viable again. If you want to fix the piracy gameplay loop, you'll have to first address the many other issues of the game which caused the problem in the first place. It can't be solved by a blanket fix of changing one rule, or modifying the player list, etc
