Piracy in Disco

[MrCynical]

I've got a gripe with some of the pirates in the Disco community. My problem isn't piracy, I enjoy being pirated. My problem is the situational awareness of the pirates.
This breaks down into three groups.

*g1*
The first group are the base pirates. These pirates sit at a base, usually with an ID hostile to the faction of the base. This isn't nessessarily a bad thing, but often times these pirates won't be hostile to the base they are sitting at. An example of this would be an Outcast sitting 300m from Gas Miner Naha and not be getting shot. NPCs hostile to the base do not demand cargo from any player passing through this area, they are too busy raiding it. Those friendly to the bases sometimes do, but I suspect this is due to the restrictions of the system. This is proven by the lore surrounding freeports. You don't fight at freeports for a reason. Sure it is easy to ignore NPC guns, but at least pretend you have respect for them, or get them firing on you. Piracy around bases is not the way to go, and trade lane piracy is just as easy. Trade lanes go down easily to both guns and cruise missiles. Finally, For the love of goodness, DON'T TAUNT THE PLAYERS WHO DOCK AT THE BASE TO GET AWAY FROM YOU! Seriously, if you are using this "technique" to pirate, don't even think of trying to give another player grief for doing the logical thing and taking cover in the base you aren't hostile to.
*g2*
The second group are Jumpgate pirates. I HATE you guys. Sitting at a jumpgate if you are hostile to any of the traders passing through breaks the gate. Try it sometime with your friends. NPC escorts will lock the gate down for you. This is pure laziness. If you must pirate at a jumpgate, please move 2k out from the gate. If you don't want to give your targets a chance to escape, then kill a tradelane instead, don't abuse faulty game mechanics to do it. I personally don't ever pay pirates that do this, or even Roleplay with such people. This is not the right way to pirate. Don't do it.

(...)

Just so you know, my reactions to the three "groups" of problem pirates are thus:
g1) 1st time, a Roleplay Warning, 2nd time, a OOC warning, third time, screenshots but no action. Fourth time, more screenshots and a sanction report. (If they are hostile to the base, I generally leave it alone and RP the same as if it were deep space every time. It still annoys me, but as long as they are being shot at, not as much.)
g2) These pirates do not get paid by me. They do not get RP from me. If they catch me, I wait a few seconds, Jettison my cargo, and then destroy it to prevent them from making anything off me. Sometimes I will tell them what my problem is with them, but often I will just be silent to them. If they complain in any way, shape, or form about my silence to them or my refusal to talk to them, they get added to my ignore list.

If only the opposite of g1 - traders who dock on the pirate's own base to escape because they never bothered to set up a proper trader repboard - resulted in a 30 day stay in Bastille. I agree that pirates who aren't hostile to the right bases are behaving badly to say the least. Even if you don't have time to appropriately repfarm every faction on the server (kinda hard to kill GMG light fighters in a Praetorian:P), it takes nothing to fire a CD at the station and make it mad.

As for g2 - as soon as you say that your response to something you don't like is to not RP, to ignore other players, and to powergame, then you lose all claim to the moral high ground.

I know how hard it is to pirate. I have done such myself. One of my characters is a corsair, and I've pirated quite heavily on other servers. I'll give you a hint of something that helps.
/setmsg 0 This is a mugging. Hand over all your valuables along with 2 million credits, and nobody will get hurt.
**OK**
/l0
**NAME: This is a mugging. Hand over all your valuables along with 2 million credits, and nobody will get hurt.**
And blamo. It takes pressing three keys to give a "2milordai"
That is exactly 1/3rd the amount of keys it takes to type out "2milordai", and is in RP

IIRC the /l can be put inside the setmsg. You can also tell it to use the person's name using some sort of syntax which might be /t. Assuming it is, you could use:

Code:

/setmsg 1 /l /t, please halt and pay 2 million credits for passage senor

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No longer active online due to a dwindling amount of non-PvP (trading, pirating, mining, etc.) fun in the new version.