Discovery Gaming Community

Well piracy is basically dead. It's really news to any of us, it's been pretty stale for quite some time.
Therefore, how can we solve this game play crippling problem?

Lets look at the problems with the way things currently work in Discovery:

• Pirates aren't pirates anymore. A lot of unlawful characters tend to be roaming around for quick pews with lawfuls.
  
• Silent traders, power traders and those traders who go "shoot me, it's cheaper if I die" ruin the immersion in a pirate-trader encounter
  
• Piracy is generally harder. They have less places to pirate, scanners have ridiculous ranges, traders are fiercely armed and lawfuls are much more tenacious. The average lone pirate can't cope.
  

The causes of these problems can be broken down into these:

• Lack of traders for pirates to pirate, so they prefer to pew lawfuls
  
• Unless they're carrying high value cargo, Traders mostly have zero risk with pirates. As shown by Spazzy some traders even go out of their way to not give any RP to pirates
  
• Increased scanner ranges make detecting pirates far too easy. Being able to detect traders yields little benefit for pirates in comparison to traders being able to detect them
  
• Traders are far too strong against pirates. It's so very easy to just charge straight at a pirate as a trader and easily kill him whilst keeping your hull intact.
  
• Places such as jump gates, which would be guaranteed places to net traders, became heavily defended and destroyed all piracy at gates
  
• Lawfuls fiercely hunt down unlawfuls, allowing them little time to actually do any piracy
  

So those are the problems above. Disco is plagued by these, and until we can solve them things aren't going to get better.

I cooked up a few suggestions as to how we could fix these troubling issues:
Double the buy and sell prices of all commodities
Traders have no risk when trading with some of the cheaper commodities. This prompts them to have the choice of simply 'accepting' giving the pirate a blue and resuming peaceful trading for themselves, where they can then completely avoid the interaction next time. This makes for easy trading for traders and boring/unfair piracy for pirates. It's unbalanced. Therefore, if we double the buy and sell prices of all commodities, traders will think twice before simply accepting death and giving the pirate a blue, or trying to silently cruise off without RPing back because if they do they'll burn a significant hole in their pocket.

Revert Scanners back to how they were in 4.86
Seriously, what was even wrong with Scanners back then? Since .87 we've engaged in constant Scanner re-balancing, in order to make them unique. However, we didn't need to fix what wasn't broken, and what we have now is absurd. How on Earth are pirates meant to get piracy targets when they can be seen from 17K away?. 4.86 had balanced Scanner ranges for everything. Sometimes simplicity is simply excellence.

Nerf the combat effectiveness of larger trading vessels
Ships with equal to or more than 4,200 cargo space are far too effective at self defense. Higher cargo trade ships should focus on armour over guns. A traders intention in an encounter with a pirate shouldn't be to kill the pirate, but to run and get to the nearest base as soon as possible.

Remove guns from Jump Gates
It was a silly decision to add them initially. Doing so simply killed activity, it didn't stimulate any more activity. It only caused harm to gameplay. You can look back to the older updates and the evidence is there: Jump Gate piracy was a good thing.

Buff Bomber cruise speed to 375m/s (same speed as fighters)
Bombers are the typical ships of pirates. However, currently they can be easily chased down by fighters. Furthermore, a fight which is a bomber vs a fighter will 90% of the time end up with the fighter winning. There's little for a bomber to do when engaged by a fighter, other than attempt to desperately try to flee. However, with the recent update this decreases a bombers survivability even more, meaning that it's much easier for a pirate to die and be booted out of a system for 2 hours, which can effectively ruin his piracy run. If we make the cruise speed of bombers and fighters the same, this will actually give pirates more of a chance to focus on piracy, rather than being gunned down extremely easily in combat.

One more thing, don't give me the crap about how pirates should be pirating in groups. Why should they be forced to work with others? Traders can trade alone, Freelancers can hunt alone, Lawfuls can enforce the law alone, Terrorists can commit terrorism alone etc.

These are all the suggestions I have. Any more suggestions are welcome.

Edit: Parts of this thread might not make much sense. I wrote the majority of it when I was pretty tired.

No thanks.

You seem to be well informed for someone, who hasn't played for months.
Take your pirate out for a spin and see how easy it is to pirate right now.



Nothing has changed. Literally nothing.


Shooting the Pirate tut made me realize it. You just need to change your style a bit. If you cannot or do not want to adapt, too bad.




You have a nicely put together list. Sadly most of it is overreaction on your side. Seriously.

Nah, have you not seen Size.Isn't.Everything, terrorizing the New York lanes in a Hyena? That stuff is golden.

Personally, I don't think piracy is that dead. And, I think its simply bombers themselves that have done what damage to piracy has been done. Its way too easy to pirate in a bomber. That is where the '3milordie' pirate came from. Because its 3milordie followed by a couple of novas and then bam, yer gone. No wonder traders got sick of that and havn't played along as much.

I pirate in a transport, and to me, its the way piracy is supposed to be. I treat my ship like a sloop, and my pirate encounters are ship to ship, not fighter to ship, so I can RP around my crew and etc, rather than just as a jockey pilot in a cockpit. Most traders I've pirated have played along, with a few exceptions of course. I think bombers should only be allowed for piracy if used under an unlawful faction ID like rogues, hackers, outcasts...etc. It doesn't make that much sense to me that a loner would survive long on his own in just a bomber taking on every lawful ship on their way through the trade lane. Organizations like the rogues would have bomber squads. And even they don't only block lanes with them. No offense, but I don't think Junkers would have bomber pirate squads either.

The ranges only really matter that bad if you are pirating in a bomber/fighter. Again, I pirate in a transport, and being able to get the longest range possible is important, especially since there is no speed buff to help me catch up on other transports. You need to be paying attention to what they're doing, what route they're on, and yes, anticipate their destination. Could it fail? sure, they also might have the range to see you, as long as yours is, or you might incorrectly guess their route and they go to another system altogether.

Sorry but with these suggestions, and the many I've seen by you and Snak3 in the past, you think piracy is dead because you're still sitting along a trade lane or trying to gate camp with bombers. Bombers should not be for piracy in most cases anymore, and the last thing they need is to be even more favored against transports. Its so easy to kill a big transport with a bomber, if the biggest problem is now that you can't catch them in the first place, then try a different ship, and try other tactics of interception. I don't lane pirate at all, its almost always that a transport will be within range of a base for my poor turrets to finish them off first, so i wait in the areas where ships use jumpholes, etc...and get them when they're really vulnerable.

The only thing I really agree with is removing turrets from jumpgates. If pirates of any kind want to block a gate, like old times (to me I think of Rogues and Hackers), then sure. This wasn't totally bad, since it would only go on so long before some lawfuls or navy would show up to bust it up. That would lead to decent pews, and the pirates get away with a couple first. To me, lane piracy is for when you see a ship going from one system to another, and know their probably route, and you know you can get ahead of them, and cut the lane off as they enter the system. Sitting along a lane and waiting, is basically asking to be avoided.

(06-19-2014, 11:59 AM)Lythrilux Wrote: [ -> ]Double the buy and sell prices of all commodities
Traders have no risk when trading with some of the cheaper commodities. This prompts them to have the choice of simply 'accepting' giving the pirate a blue and resuming peaceful trading for themselves, where they can then completely avoid the interaction next time. This makes for easy trading for traders and boring/unfair piracy for pirates. It's unbalanced. Therefore, if we double the buy and sell prices of all commodities, traders will think twice before simply accepting death and giving the pirate a blue, or trying to silently cruise off without RPing back. This won't affect profit margins, so the trader can still trade and make the same profit as he did before. However the difference is that he'll suffer a bigger loss if he dies. Ergo, this will introduce more risk into trading.

(06-19-2014, 11:59 AM)Lythrilux Wrote: [ -> ]Revert Scanners back to how they were in 4.86
Seriously, what was even wrong with Scanners back then? Since .87 we've engaged in constant Scanner re-balancing, in order to make them unique. However, we didn't need to fix what wasn't broken, and what we have now is absurd. How on Earth are pirates meant to get piracy targets when they can be seen from 17K away?. 4.86 had balanced Scanner ranges for everything. Sometimes simplicity is simply excellence.

(06-19-2014, 11:59 AM)Lythrilux Wrote: [ -> ]Nerf the combat effectiveness of larger trading vessels
Ships with equal to or more than 4,200 cargo space are far too effective at self defense. Higher cargo trade ships should focus on armour over guns. A traders intention in an encounter with a pirate shouldn't be to kill the pirate, but to run and get to the nearest base as soon as possible.

(06-19-2014, 11:59 AM)Lythrilux Wrote: [ -> ]Remove guns from Jump Gates
It was a silly decision to add them initially. Doing so simply killed activity, it didn't stimulate any more activity. It only caused harm to gameplay. You can look back to the older updates and the evidence is there: Jump Gate piracy was a good thing.

(06-19-2014, 11:59 AM)Lythrilux Wrote: [ -> ]Buff Bomber cruise speed to 375m/s (same speed as fighters)
Bombers are the typical ships of pirates. However, currently they can be easily chased down by fighters. Furthermore, a fight which is a bomber vs a fighter will 90% of the time end up with the fighter winning. There's little for a bomber to do when engaged by a fighter, other than attempt to desperately try to flee. However, with the recent update this decreases a bombers survivability even more, meaning that it's much easier for a pirate to die and be booted out of a system for 2 hours, which can effectively ruin his piracy run. If we make the cruise speed of bombers and fighters the same, this will actually give pirates more of a chance to focus on piracy, rather than being gunned down extremely easily in combat.

(06-19-2014, 11:59 AM)Lythrilux Wrote: [ -> ]One more thing, don't give me the crap about how pirates should be pirating in groups. Why should they be forced to work with others? Traders can trade alone, Freelancers can hunt alone, Lawfuls can enforce the law alone, Terrorists can commit terrorism alone etc.

These are all the suggestions I have. Any more suggestions are welcome.

(06-19-2014, 12:08 PM)sindroms Wrote: [ -> ]You seem to be well informed for someone, who hasn't played for months.
Take your pirate out for a spin and see how easy it is to pirate right now.



Nothing has changed. Literally nothing.


Shooting the Pirate tut made me realize it. You just need to change your style a bit. If you cannot or do not want to adapt, too bad.




You have a nicely put together list. Sadly most of it is overreaction on your side. Seriously.

(06-19-2014, 12:08 PM)sindroms Wrote: [ -> ]Nothing has changed. Literally nothing.

(06-19-2014, 11:59 AM)Lythrilux Wrote: [ -> ]Double the buy and sell prices of all commodities

(06-19-2014, 11:59 AM)Lythrilux Wrote: [ -> ]This won't affect profit margins, so the trader can still trade and make the same profit as he did before.

(06-19-2014, 11:59 AM)Lythrilux Wrote: [ -> ]Nerf the combat effectiveness of larger trading vessels
Ships with equal to or more than 4,200 cargo space are far too effective at self defense. Higher cargo trade ships should focus on armour over guns. A traders intention in an encounter with a pirate shouldn't be to kill the pirate, but to run and get to the nearest base as soon as possible.

My lone Percheron pirates just fine. Maybe you're just doing it wrong?

The truth is that for some unknown reason our dev team/admins aren't interested in balancing piracy properly, it's being nerfed since .85.

Quote:I'd not be against some rebalancing. Basically what what should be balanced out is the ratio of cargo hold size to survivability through escaping. The smaller it is the more agile should it be to have better chances of escaping an encounter in one piece, the bigger it is the more chance it'll have to buy it's way out anyways. In my opinion anything over 3k cargo hold shouldn't survive after fleeing 10k from a lone bomber on thruster. Want to get rich? Fly a cashcow. Don't want to pay to pirates? Fly a freighter. Either this or that.

Maybe this makes sense from a gameplay balance perspective, but it makes absolutely no sense from an RP perspective. In semi-reality, larger merchant vessels would be MORE heavily armed and armored to make up for the fact that they are slower. As discussed in a different thread, I'd be more in favor of just making larger cargo ships (4ks and above) slower. That would help offset how seemingly "easy" it is to get to a safe haven from a pirating spot.

As for what you're describing, Thyr, the Bretonian shipline is certainly skewed closer in this respect. The largest ship (Shetland) is completely the worst armed (1 turret with a very crappy firing arc), whereas the 4+ker (Shire) is a complete battle transport in every respect. Dunno if the Liberty shipline is the same with between Mastodon and Bison.

I also wouldn't mind if Jump Gate weapons were downgraded a bit, but not done away with altogether.

Quote:One more thing, don't give me the crap about how pirates should be pirating in groups. Why should they be forced to work with others? Traders can trade alone, Freelancers can hunt alone, Lawfuls can enforce the law alone, Terrorists can commit terrorism alone etc.

Nobody said you have to pirate in a group, and several here can certainly attest to the fact that it is doable, but it certainly is a heck of a lot easier. This is the same vein of complaint given by noobs wondering why they are destroyed by a bunch of little bombers when they should apparently be conquering all in their mighty BS.

Group play on a multi-player server > solo play. Always. Besides, I'm completely against balancing all of piracy on the sole experience of the "lone bomber" pirate.