The Problem With Piracy

[Lemon]

So, let me get this:
> When there were active pirates on the server and people were getting pirated, the Discords were in flames with pings to log and kill the bastard (me) and the forum was active with bounties. Players were not happy being pirated, cause "Profit tears"; "Silent Power Trading Tears" and "AFK F2 Tears".
> Now that I've had it with being ganked by 2-5 people each time I Log in my pirate ships; the devs are not happy cause there are no pirates.
Make up your mind already!
I wasn't doing it for profit, I was doing it for the principle of pirating and the fun of it. I learned fast that the interactions were "Stall and ping Discord" or none.
I agree with:

If I ever do piracy it's not for the money but it's for the interactions, and maybe it's just unlucky me but the vast majority of traders I caught were uninteractive pricks ignoring you in every way possible and dashing for virtual cash like headless chicken.
Maybe work on mitigating that first.

Well pointed @Nika

Yeah so what's the point of making high money demands, I never got that because you get to make money other ways much better, there's no need to try to hurt the trader by going after his objective (min max profit), make RP demands instead, ask for couple cargo units or make them take your drugs, propaganda etc. give choice of RP or Money, play along with RP and even let them go sometimes, make it fun and people stop using the player list.


Ask @St.Denis and his GMS boys how I've pirated - always fun for both sides


The late @Connor taught me this mindset when I first started in the game, and I wish more people would have this privilege - promoting piracy for sport as RP opportunity enjoyable by both sides is what staff should be doing

[The_Godslayer]

I haven't even seen that much, though I'm stuck in American hours. Generally, you log a pirate, you find a trader, the trader immediately cruises, you disrupt them, the trader silently starts shooting while on impulse to whatever their goto target was. Get cussed out in either Russian or a select assortment of more niche Eastern European languages, get your pirate ship and possibly every ship that people know is yours added to the enemy list, where you get hunted by 4+ people coming to "punish" you any time you log on.

The best, longest lasting fix to this is to hunt out and remove the individuals who perpetrate this mindset and behavior, but a good second is ensuring that Frigates statcheck Transports every time, and ensuring that every single unlawful has access to frigates and decent fence points for the routes that go by them. I simply have not had a bad time pirating as a Junker once I started bringing my Salvager to everything so that I can actually haul off the cargo that drops when they inevitably silent engage and I have to kill them. Bomber piracy is fairly dead, as I've experienced. Traders absolutely will refuse to pay more than 10-20K because bombers can't haul more than that, so the pirate loses every time if you refuse to pay.

The other option is always having a transport with you, and only engage in group piracy, which is impossible at 10PM where I live. There simply aren't that many people on.

When I do piracy, it's for the fun of piracy. Traders don't roleplay, and the money isn't better than trading. Eurotruck Simulator in space is horribly boring, though, so often times, despite being a bad way to make money, when I have a need of money, I'll turn to piracy anyway.

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I'll do something about my superiority complex when I cease to be superior.

"Whatever happened to catchin' a good old-fashioned passionate ass-whoopin and gettin' your shoes, coat, and your hat tooken?"

[A Magpie]

I demand rpordie and people will trick me into typing out roleplay and then they make their break for it as I'm typing. The problem has always been that trading is by its definition anti-RP. I am mechanically incentivized to just shoot the trader because I just got the @here ping they put out calling for backup, or on the trader's side, simply F1 if I know someone's coming to "pirate" (the demand is almost always "die" in this situation, I am mechanically incentivized to completely avoid the "interaction") me. The powertrader mentality of "they are out to get me" is very easily proven right when one can see the players in question log on and either beeline towards you or set up in your path.

I am as a pirate mechanically encouraged to just belt out my demand and/or kill them as quickly as possible to "win" the encounter, which considering travel times, can amount to borderline griefing. As a powertrader, I am straight-up losing credits/sec even if the pirate is just demanding rpordie. I am being inconvenienced along my powertrading route. I have personally seen people fly to the O-Theta Hole in S-17 and F1 rather than be pirated by @Grga Pitik (who will just pirate peeps once a day) who they knew by playerlist was on the other side. This has been an issue for probably the entire lifespan of Discovery.

The "2milordai" meme is eternal because it is mechanically the best way to play pirate: you've stated your demands so when the trader runs, you can open fire immediately. It's as anti-roleplay as it sounds.

[Lemon]

I haven't even seen that much, though I'm stuck in American hours. Generally, you log a pirate, you find a trader, the trader immediately cruises, you disrupt them, the trader silently starts shooting while on impulse to whatever their goto target was. Get cussed out in either Russian or a select assortment of more niche Eastern European languages, get your pirate ship and possibly every ship that people know is yours added to the enemy list, where you get hunted by 4+ people coming to "punish" you any time you log on.

The best, longest lasting fix to this is to hunt out and remove the individuals who perpetrate this mindset and behavior, but a good second is ensuring that Frigates statcheck Transports every time, and ensuring that every single unlawful has access to frigates and decent fence points for the routes that go by them. I simply have not had a bad time pirating as a Junker once I started bringing my Salvager to everything so that I can actually haul off the cargo that drops when they inevitably silent engage and I have to kill them. Bomber piracy is fairly dead, as I've experienced. Traders absolutely will refuse to pay more than 10-20K because bombers can't haul more than that, so the pirate loses every time if you refuse to pay.

The other option is always having a transport with you, and only engage in group piracy, which is impossible at 10PM where I live. There simply aren't that many people on.

When I do piracy, it's for the fun of piracy. Traders don't roleplay, and the money isn't better than trading. Eurotruck Simulator in space is horribly boring, though, so often times, despite being a bad way to make money, when I have a need of money, I'll turn to piracy anyway.

This was such a letdown for me when they changed the ore mechanics - mining points with a liner or frigate were super fun - you force them to fill you or else, and then you get to take the pirated ore on a trip.

Now pirating ore is useless, was a big hit to easy piracy encounters. You are right that cargo piracy is a way better mechanic to work on than money as you don't need the other side to cooperate and you still profit when you shoot them - normalizing and rewarding RP and promoting cargo piracy, and giving less incentive for credits piracy is the way to go I'd say

[Fish]

My most favourite pirate encounters (which were always @The Lane Hackers and if I remember correctly @JorgeRyan) changed my views of piracy as a game mechanic from being a guaranteed way to get people to dislike you, to being a great way to roleplay with someone with conflict(but not necessarily combat) inherently part of the encounter. We would spent minutes just talking, going beyond "2mil or die" while maintaining their factional hostility, etc. At that point I began seeing why piracy was allowed and what it was actually meant to be.
You get pirates that don't rp, only ask for money or they shoot, which is fine as long as they follow the bare minimum, but it is a bit lacking and doesn't really benefit the game or the server itself in the way that roleplay between friends or strangers might make them go "wow, i hope i get to do that again tomorrow." This is unfortunately not a new thing in disco.
It's a difficult thing to address directly without affecting the bigger picture. You can't force them to have deeper rp before being allowed to engage, because forced rp is shit rp and would make people never play pirates again. There's not much more micromanagement that can be done to the allowed amounts and ships and IDs and such that are allowed to pirate that follows the same logic as you have been following for decades. And introducing a brand new system now would probably be more detrimental than constructive in the long run.
Locking piracy to official factions only could solve the problem somewhat, with internal regulation on the acceptable level of roleplay that faction leaders expect from members, but locking ANYTHING behind that wall has always resulted in a big negative response, and it would also hugely reduce the number of people who play pirates.
idk it's a difficult problem to solve

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[IahimD]

Escorts are not financially viable. The escort is better off trading himself rather than getting paid less to escort someone else. It has always been this way. Also, 5ks have far too low of TTK so escorts are useless for them. Which will (hopefully) be fixed by the transport rework. The best "escort" currently is a scout that flies in front of the trader, tells the trader when he finds a pirate, and the trader either has to pick to go around (Which is very hard to do now with these awful chokepoints everywhere and 80 systems being deleted) or they just log off. Which is not fun gameplay. So there's that.

I agree with this. There's not much point in escorting. Plus there's not really enough people for the traders (+ escorts) -> pirates -> lawfuls loop. Maybe you can find enough players at peak hours, but surely not during 75% of the day. And not everyone can play during the peak hours.

As a trader during European mornings (that's when I was able to play for more than 5 minutes), I see the pirates' issue and I tried to interact to the best of my abilities. I vaguely remember something about traders not being allowed anymore to simply embrace death as it does not make much sense inRP? Maybe we should explore that path? But then again, what can a trader do when he's pirated by someone in a cruiser? Just blindly submit? That comes with it's own can of worms

[Sally]

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.

Do you guys think Alex will keep this server alive in the next ten years?

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"I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there's a sucker born every minute." - RMS

[Fish]

Escorts are not financially viable. The escort is better off trading himself rather than getting paid less to escort someone else. It has always been this way. Also, 5ks have far too low of TTK so escorts are useless for them. Which will (hopefully) be fixed by the transport rework. The best "escort" currently is a scout that flies in front of the trader, tells the trader when he finds a pirate, and the trader either has to pick to go around (Which is very hard to do now with these awful chokepoints everywhere and 80 systems being deleted) or they just log off. Which is not fun gameplay. So there's that.

I agree with this. There's not much point in escorting. Plus there's not really enough people for the traders (+ escorts) -> pirates -> lawfuls loop. Maybe you can find enough players at peak hours, but surely not during 75% of the day. And not everyone can play during the peak hours.

As a trader during European mornings (that's when I was able to play for more than 5 minutes), I see the pirates' issue and I tried to interact to the best of my abilities. I vaguely remember something about traders not being allowed anymore to simply embrace death as it does not make much sense inRP? Maybe we should explore that path? But then again, what can a trader do when he's pirated by someone in a cruiser? Just blindly submit? That comes with it's own can of worms

True if you think about it in terms of money alone. And fair because even though this is a RP server you can do nothing without money. This is why an almost "passive" income method is needed, like powertrading. At least, this is passive in the way that they don't interact with roleplayers. They almost don't exist in the world.
A fighter squadron will always be in danger of encountering hostiles that want to fight. The powertrading version of that is piracy, the difference being the fighters may actually want that encounter but the trader obviously does not.
Money ruins things irl and in games, damn ;-;

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[Lemon]

My most favourite pirate encounters (which were always @The Lane Hackers and if I remember correctly @JorgeRyan) changed my views of piracy as a game mechanic from being a guaranteed way to get people to dislike you, to being a great way to roleplay with someone with conflict(but not necessarily combat) inherently part of the encounter. We would spent minutes just talking, going beyond "2mil or die" while maintaining their factional hostility, etc. At that point I began seeing why piracy was allowed and what it was actually meant to be.
You get pirates that don't rp, only ask for money or they shoot, which is fine as long as they follow the bare minimum, but it is a bit lacking and doesn't really benefit the game or the server itself in the way that roleplay between friends or strangers might make them go "wow, i hope i get to do that again tomorrow." This is unfortunately not a new thing in disco.
It's a difficult thing to address directly without affecting the bigger picture. You can't force them to have deeper rp before being allowed to engage, because forced rp is shit rp and would make people never play pirates again. There's not much more micromanagement that can be done to the allowed amounts and ships and IDs and such that are allowed to pirate that follows the same logic as you have been following for decades. And introducing a brand new system now would probably be more detrimental than constructive in the long run.
Locking piracy to official factions only could solve the problem somewhat, with internal regulation on the acceptable level of roleplay that faction leaders expect from members, but locking ANYTHING behind that wall has always resulted in a big negative response, and it would also hugely reduce the number of people who play pirates.
idk it's a difficult problem to solve

You can, easy, have a permanent "event" thread where traders can submit logs of piracy encounters they enjoyed, and hand out unique rewards every week/month/quarter etc. Whatever staff find capacity for. Can be the other way too - pirates submitting exceptional trader RP.

[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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