Normal pirate gameplay =\= sitting on the lane at some bottleneck location with cruiser and desrupting lane from time to time. But even that pirating is broken. The whole point of pirating was that you can easily defeat a transport if you catch one. The trader had to avoid being caught by any means necessary. That was attracting people to both sides the pirates and the traders. Even on bad day trader was making positive cash income anyway no matter if he was pirated few times. I, myself, played a lot of roles in this game including pirates, mercs, freelancers, convoy escorts, secret services, police, navy, terrorist, miner, trader etc. And I have an understanding on how the things going on opposing sides. Many players who played pirate in before has left the server or went into Navy since being pirate become too stressful - you're not even have to find a trader and catch him, you also need to defeat him in a battle no matter he's flying transport full of stuff and you'r on a military grade vessel. Then you have to pack your shit very fast and run since there is a god damn fleet of capital ships rushing after you so if you're on a fighter you're not killing transport but have a chance to escape the capspam that comes, if you're on GB or so then you have a chance to take transport down while taking damage yourself and you have much less chance to escape anything.
The cornerstone for good gameplay stays - transports must be really easy to kill.