Make Pirating Profitable. Add a location people have to go to on a regular basis.

[TheSavage0ne]

I have noticed that if you want to be a pirate on a server, it is incredibly useless. Your chances of running into another person are so small it is quite useless. You can't wait around a shop, because they are so abundant.

I don't know the best way to add this, but I have seen a few other suggestions that could do this.

-I know aspects of these were already suggested-

One would be the "limited resources/fuel" suggestion. Limited resources, like needing to mine something would end in huge amounts of grief, and the starting system would be entirely devoid of resources.

The Fuel sounds reasonable, I saw it mentioned that they could refuel at stars. Your ship would be able to hold quite a bit of fuel though, enough to go a few hundred sectors at the least, but then there is the problem of "what if you run out of fuel?" well shops could sell fuel, but then that would get rid of the stars being required. So shops could sell "emergency fuel cells" that let your ship have 20%-50% thrust capacity, so that you can still get to a star, but you wouldn't want to simply rely on the emergency fuel as a source of propulsion. The Emergency Fuel Cells should also cost quite a bit of credits, further making it so you would want to go to a star instead of using the Fuel Cells. "what about shuttles and ships only used at base?" I think that a large ship should be able to give ships that are docked to it some of their power, so you could use a large ship as a battery that takes power to your base. There should also be something similar to power tanks, that stores solar energy. This way your large ship can last quite a while and supply power for many small ships that use its energy. Without this one small ship would dock on the larger one, and take all of its energy which is unreasonable.

This is just one way to do it, but the main think I'm asking for is a place that people need to go to (not incredibly often, but often enough) that has replenishable resources.

If any of you can think of a better/different way to make pirating profitable, and make it so that players have to go to a certain area (less common) that people need to go to please post it!

 

[Dark-life]

This topic has been beaten to death.

 

[boxcartenant]

I think feasable pirating could be implemented via the following:

--implement regular (fixed) spawning of stars in \"sectors\" (or some spacial block)
--give the player a detailed star map
--include in the game a (very expensive) improved radar, giving detailed locations of other players by coordinate and velocity unit vector in a wide range (perhaps showing everyone in the same \"star\" sector as you)
--include different ship engines with different top-speeds
--if they don\'t already, make players hand over a portion of their credits and inventory on death.

--also, possibly make the spawn area (2,2) and some other specific, well known areas hubs for some special kind of shop. like you said.

 

[Cirdanoth]

Add gates. With gates, you get gate-camping strategies and often travelled routes.

Piracy will only really become viable, when the economy is viable. Right now, piracy is obviously the much more difficult option, which offers great risk, but lil\' reward.

Energy is already like fuel. Power generation is now truly soft-capped on ships to 1 mill e/s. Docked batteries no longer work. Ships with large storage will need to refuel at outposts specifically build for this purpose, once it becomes necessary to move resources around/ resources need to be gathered from specific locations, less spread out all over the universe.

 

[der_scheme]

It is a possibility that this will be resolved with the upcoming quest system. From the Q&A notes:


An automatic & customisable quest system will be introduced to give players and factions game generated & player made missions.


I guess it\'s fair to assume this would introduce locations and routes players would travel more often.



Explicitly regarding pirating: I think a \"white flag\" mechanism would be nice. If you\'re attacked, you can fly the space equivalent of a white flag. The attacker then could accept a random selection from your (and the ship\'s) inventory, or a portion of your credits as payment for leaving you alone. That would also be nice for beginners who wouldn\'t be killed by Isanths.

A ship with a white flag would have a special marker on the HUD, accepting the payment would work by pressing a key on the keyboard.

 

[HJK148]

Well gates worked in EVE, but they were the only way to travel between systems other than jump drives, which required someone to place a beacon at your destination, but the person with the beacon would have to use a gate to get to the system in the first place.

Sometimes players grab a couple of friends and gate-camp in lowsec or nullsec systems*, destroying ships that come through and looting the shipwreaks. I\'ve only played for a couple of months and haven\'t got caught in a gatecamp yet, so I haven\'t actually seen one before, but I\'ve seen someone leave a cargo container warning people that there was one on the other side of the gate. I tend to stay in highsec, and will probably stay there until I learn how to play the game or join a corp.

If there was a trade center on the other side of the gate it would be a lot better for pirates, since people would actually have a reason to use them. Since we have shops all over the place there\'s no real reason to do this other than if you wanted to build your own space station.

*Sec is short for security, the security number determines how long it will take for CONCORD (The space police) to get to you if you kill another player. 1 means they\'ll get to you near instantaneously, and 0 or below is unprotected. 1.0 to 0.5 is classed as highsec, 0.1 to 0.4 is classed as lowsec and 0 is nullsec.

 

[HJK148]

There should be something to stop people destroying those ships anyway, like putting an automatic bounty on someone if they destroyed a ship with a white flag, or having any NPCs attack them for a certain amount of time. If you spare a ship with a white flag you\'d just gain a fraction of what you could get if you\'d destroyed them, so why spare them in the first place?

This is slightly unrelated, but it would also be nice to have distress beacons, which would give a marker to anyone in nearby systems. Not only would it be good if your ship was destroyed or trapped in the gravity of a planet, it would be good for pirates to be able to lure people into traps.

 

[Angus and Alexis]

Err...mate.
Pirating IS profitable already.

How?

Step one: Find random trader ship that has recently been looting a planet.
Stop two: Kill it.
Step three: ???
Step four: profit.

 

[TheSavage0ne]

There are hundreds of thousands of planets, and I counted 15 in a single star system. You wouldn\'t be able to tell if people were looting a planet from 3 sectors away, so how would you be able to tell from being in the star-system?

I like the idea of a radar, that sounds like it would work to me.

Jump Gates, I think that would also work. They could be used to get from void/star systems to more void/star systems. There are 3375 sectors in a Void/star system, so its not like you\'d have to go through them too often so it would be a burden on players, but I think it would be enough to make pirating profitable at least near the spawn system, which wouldn\'t be so close that your just taking out beginners.

White flag would be cool, but it should be something like a percentage of credits. Right now you get no money if you kill someone, so you would get something. I think when you kill players you should get randomly dropped loot or something, like when you kill NPC\'s but it would be more. That way you get more profit from killing people so it wouldn\'t be better to just find NPC pirates.

Thought this thread was going to be dead after I was told its been beaten to death, and I felt bad for possibly making a dupe thread. thanks for posting guys! Well and Girls

 

[Angus and Alexis]

Look mate.

If you cant find anyone, it is YOUR fault.
Don\'t try to add shiny features that add nothing more than bad behaviours ingame.

You can look at faction home systems via faction tab, you can use this to ambush people.
You can stay at spawn and attack traders, new or not.

If you want massive loot via pirating, YOU need to work hard, not get the game to be easier.

 

[CyberTao]

There is no real way to Track people.
Yes you can camp their homebase, but how do you know they are even returning there (plus base defenses).

The game does make it a take hard for Player Piracy :/ since there are no points of interest until you stalk a homebase or Spawncamp some noobs?

 

[MrNature72]

One of the biggest things about piracy is stealing. Stealing. But right now everything is protected out the asshole.

Now, while I\'m okay with protected Homeworlds, as they are necessary to create a kind of safe-haven, I\'m not okay with how amazingly protected faction-ships are. So here\'s my concept:

Breaching Charges: add a special block that can be placed on any part of the ship, nomatter if you\'re factioned to it or not, and it OPENS plexdoor blocks ONLY. This would allow pirates to enter ships and navigate through them.

Capture Beacons: Place them on a ships core. The moment this happen, AI ships of the faction who own\'s the ship you are capturing will home in on your position from 10x the range. The faction can also have set a small set of fighters that will spawn in whenever a Capture Beacon is set, alongside \"Galactic Police\" AI, if you are within 10 sectors of a homeworld. The Capture Beacon takes varying time to capture, starting from 1 minute to 10 minutes, depending on size. The size and time also depicts how many enemies spawn.

Safety: You cannot breach or capture ships within the same sector as the homeworld, or docked to a factioned (not factioned home, just factioned) space station.

Anchors: Once a ships core is overheating, the Anchor beam could be used. It could be placed on a turret. As long as a ship is anchored (the anchored ship has to way less than the ship who is doing the anchoring) it will not move, as if it is docked. More than one ship can Anchor another ship, and their masses combine, allowing a swarm of smaller ships to anchor a larger one. This is necessary to accurately move around a ship. Ships within planet\'s atmospheres or docked to unfactioned stations can also be breached and captured, without anchoring.

 

[Angus and Alexis]

Again mate.

YOU want to track people? Then YOU should put in the effort.

Do you think pirates these days (and the old days) had magic tracking machines? No.

Want to track?

Isolate trading areas, and yes, the BEST way to track, is to CAMP until you find someone.

Its not the games fault that piracy is hard, its idiots who want the game to have a massive \"prey is here\" sign.

 

[NeonSturm]

There is no real way to Track people.


You can look into the logs.

Sometimes some players leave an error message with their coordinates there just for you :p

 

[NeonSturm]

Bad thought out.



I would just place plant-blocks (non-physical walkthough) in front of my doors to disallow building such a block close to them.

Then I would make a tunnel for 1 open plex-door (to (de)activate the group). Once you place your hack-block there, you can\'t access it anymore.



If this block auto-opens plex doors, I would build gravity lifts inside home planet gravity.



I would make a giant hangar with snow or sand and use a docked door-plate as ground to make the planet not start gravity for ships which are about to dock, but also seal this area off.

Are 900^3 m enough?



That is not every possible exploit, but a few things which came into my mind while posting.

 

[Mosshadow]

Just wondering, in the first place how do you even find people to attack? I can barely find another ship in the entire Rebel Alliance area.

 

[TheSavage0ne]

basically I see your point, but feel it is invalid.

You should have to work to find people, pirating shouldn\'t be a walk in the park. Time and effort should have to be put into it, with my idea about fuel people would only have to go there like every hour, not every 10 min. So a lot of waiting would be involved. The main thing I want in pirating is its fun for the combat, and throws in a lot of excitement and thrill to the game for everyone. Right now there is no point in pirating, faction wars are fun but don\'t effect everyone. Once you have enough money there is no point to play other than building, this adds more of a purpose to keep coming back and playing. Lets face it, SP is used for building, testing bugs, and for people who just started playing the game. Other than that its to the servers as far as I can tell.

Prey Is Here Sign! I would love to have that added! (sarcasm) I feel that you called me an Idiot, and would prefer if there was constructive criticism instead of insults being thrown around.

In the old days they didn\'t know where people would be and had to wait, very true. But the pirates of the olden days DID have an idea of where people would be. Trade routes, coasts, ports, ect. All areas people would go to regularly, which is all I was asking for. So to me it seems to be reasonable. Also we are in space, we have ships that can go from star to star, why couldn\'t we have sensors and things that could detect other ships from longer distances?

Mossadow is right, you just about never run into other people by chance.

Faction home bases/spawn: You can go to a faction home base, but everything their is almost always anchored down, and if it isn\'t when you get there, once everyone finds out there are pirates on the server every ship on every faction base would get docked making attacking useless. Camping is pretty cheap... I\'m not going to kill someone who just joined the game, which currently due to it being on steam a ton of the new players to servers are noobs, would even make the game look bad. Camping a faction base would work to an extent though, but they have invincible defenses, and if those are done right they can shoot you from over a sector away, outside of nav distance.

I love the anchor idea, looks great to me. That way you could take a ship back to your base, or pull it away and tear it apart. Maybe you could only use it on an overheating core, but then once you hit it with the anchor it freezes the overheat timer?

 

[Angus and Alexis]

-1

 

[Winterhome]

I think Angus just doesn\'t like the idea of being attacked out of the blue.

This should resolve itself if we get a real economy set up. Large faction trading posts and whatnot.

 

[SuicidalKid]

You sir, just got a downvote. -1





+1 to the actual thread though.