Piracy

[Bass_masta992]

I've been thinking about this for a little while now. Piracy is, quite easily, the most popular thing in the game. Majority of the players in this server are, or have unlawfuls, of multiple kinds. Obviously, there are metagamers out the arse recently, pirating for 'profit.' There are some fair players who do it too, but who's gunna pass up 500k for not dieing? you also get a nice conversation about it.

My main issue with this is that there are WAY too many pirates at times, to the point that trading can become far less profitable, and even unprofitable to attempt.

There's been some very heavy talk about 'fairness' in the game, much of which is by Jihad Joe. I completely agree, that the game should be able to be made fun for others, both through combat and means of RP.

My issue is with fairness dealing with Piracy/Policing. Piracy is getting used to make money, and is sapping it from other people unfairly to do so. People are even going OORP to get a few bucks. This pisses me off, badly. I don't want to lose half the money I make in a run just because -you- want a new armor upgrade, or a new gun, I really don't care. The aspect of the game is leeching away from other's work to fulfill themselves.

Many of the trade runs that are actually decent at making money are hoarded by pirates now. The server is an RP server. The fact that you ask for 500k, or 2 million, isn't going to make you more or less of a pirate, and then letting them go for a bit, isn't going to effect much either. In fact, you will probably make more by taking a little from everyone, instead of a lot from a few, since most people just run away from anything more than a million.

Policing, though, is sort of an iffy subject to me. Police intercept a drug smuggler, and, obviously it would be RP to force the drop of cargo and fine them. What if you just made them drop half the cargo and 'Rped' that all of the detected drugs were dropped? Or if a Xeno catches an importer, they -have- to make them drop it all?

The point I'm trying to get across is that you don't need to fully screw someone out of what they are doing, even for RP. Majority of the trader's you'll talk to are only doing what they're doing to supply their other characters, because all of their missiles they just bought got no-engagement-noticed by the Outcast with Gaian guns and a BHG IFF.

We can't get this way by telling people to 'play nice.' The only thing that gets listened to nowadays is force. I'd like to purpose a form of mitigation regarding piracy and policing to make it fair for everyone. Back when the server was smaller, this wasn't so much of a problem, but now there's so many more people, and so many of those aren't willing to play for RP.

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