Piracy

[Athenian]

I don't think people have quite grasped the point here. It's not that there's anything wrong with piracy - it's just that how it is done influences development of the game, in tandem with a whole load of other aspects of the game.

So long as the making of credits remains an unimaginative grind, an ordeal to be undergone in order to get at the bigger ships (because somewhere along the way it was decided that they should cost more - although they can be disappointing) people will treat trading with the disdain it deserves. They will do silly stuff to avoid piracy, because there is always the feeling with trading that it is merely a stepping-stone to something more fun. Few people do it for a reason other than to earn money. Conversely, so long as people use piracy as a convenient and more fun way to earn money, then piracy will be treated by many (not all) players as a kind of "powertrading with extortion". It's a kind of vicious cycle - to make big creds you need a big ship. To effectively stop a big ship, you need something big and/or dangerous. As a result, the beautiful new line of smaller ships get forgotten about.

Sure they are fun to fly, but if you want to do anything else in Discovery you need heaps of money. Enter your "trader character". Buy low at A, sell high at B. The turnover in players is large enough to make any interaction in piracy a short, sharp shock - usually unpleasant for the trader. So why not be the pirate?

Telling people to shut up because they don't like something about the game isn't entirely fair. There's always room to improve and develop the game. Freelancer always had a trading system that was far less developed than most other sci-fi games. If the game is to develop, we need a little imagination. Trade and piracy could be developed - in fact I think they have to be.

What about a completely dynamic pirate economy? Link seized goods with prices for smuggled commodities? Alternatively, with goods available at lawful bases fetching huge prices on unlawful bases (and vice versa) and making the huge transports linked to faction ID's you could do some extremely lucrative smuggling (trading between lawful and unlawful bases) in those smaller freighters and have cargo theft an altogether more attractive possibility for hardened members of the organised criminal groups.

On top of that, maybe special pirate-only disruptors, mounted on massive cargo ships with plenty of firepower but only used by pirates. The kind that makes sure traders can't run and outlaw the demanding of credits (which has never struck me as a rp reality anyway - I mean who carries that much money?)

Alternatively put a cargo hold of 2000 on a bomber.

Not all of these suggestions are serious, obviously.

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Former member of "the most paranoid group of people in the community"
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