(08-29-2014, 10:49 PM)Danny-boy Wrote: It's kind of sad, but at the same time it's true.
One of their members told me that they have become a base supplying robot for the past two years looking after their six or seven POB's.
Anyway, it's probably due to the fact that they have no real enemy which makes power trading on a junker quite easy + recently P-scrap.
Who is that? As a congressman, I don't know of anyone in the faction that autopilots. Maybe he meant "robot" as a figure of speech because he feels like it's repetitive?
We do have enemies, and we do get pirated. Additionally, factions like the Hogosha and Xenos (which are actually becoming more active lately) can and do attack us on sight. I've been hit by Hogosha all the way in liberty and bretonia lately.
(08-29-2014, 10:44 PM)Zen_Mechanics Wrote: Because Junkers have plenty of Player bases, that amounts to fifty percent of their activity. The rest.. vary.
Sure, but we did have to build all of those bases in the first place; it's not like our faction simply got them as an immediate advantage.
(08-29-2014, 08:43 PM)Snak3 Wrote: Because Congress AFKs and AFK-trades.
You really shouldn't make unfounded accusations like that. I log on all the time to see other congressman, and I immediately join their group and start talking with them. If they're always AFK-trading, as you claim, they must have a really good speechbot.
(08-29-2014, 08:41 PM)Thunderer Wrote: That's not very fun, hauling without almost any risk. The Junkers rarely smuggle and pirates don't attack them because they need their bases. Somewhat of an isolated society.
You know what? I am going to make a pirate that will pirate the Junkers. Of course, I won't use your bases, except for target practice.
Actually, our bases have been attacked many times in the past, and we are very frequently pirated. We're not allied with everyone; we're just neutral with most of them. Neutrality doesn't stop anyone from pirating us. We're only slightly less likely to be pirated by unlawfuls than a corporate hauler, except that we have the added chance of also being pirated by lawfuls (arrested). Also, we smuggle all the time, we're just careful not to get caught.
When I first joined the Junker Congress, years ago, scrap and p-scrap were both nearly worthless. At the same time, ore was extraordinarily profitable back then. We also had some of the worst ships (aside from our salvager, which was better back then when basic gb turrets were actually good). Our entire snubline was awful, and we didn't have the Wrecker gunboat until now. We also weren't allowed to fly heavy transports; we were limited to 3.6k cargo aside from the pirate train.
Even back then, when profit was low and ships were bad, we were still the most active faction.
It has nothing to do with any perceived "advantages". The answer is really quite simple.
The reason we're the most active faction is that it's fun. There's so many things we can do. It doesn't mean we make any more money than anyone else; there are other factions that can do each of the things we do better than we do, but the fun thing about being a Junker is being able to do all of those things with the same ship.
Plus, with Junkers generally being less profitable than other factions and not really having many people we can engage (although pretty much anyone can engage us if they actually want to), there aren't really any metagaming advantages to flying as a Junker, which means all the lolwuts have to do something else. This makes the remaining Junkers people who are very fun to fly with.
In the end, here's the difference (Wall of Text):
If you're not a Junker, you probably play a lot of different factions. Even if you are a Junker, you still might. Anyway, let's say you want to mine. You get on your corporate miner and get to work. Then let's say you feel like doing some trading. You get on your Universal Shipping and get to work. Then maybe you want to do some pirating. You get on your Liberty Rogue and get to work. Now you want to smuggle. You get on your freelancer ID'd transport and get to work.
However, as a Junker: You want to mine. You get on your junker salvager, fly to a scrap field, and you get to work. You want to trade. You get on your junker salvager, fly to some base, and you get to work. You want to do some pirating. You get on your junker salvager, fly to kusari or the taus, and you get to work. You want to do some smuggling. You get on your junker salvager, fly out to the omicrons to pick up some artifacts from the corsairs or cardamine from the outcasts, and you get to work.
ALG can mine scrap with the Golem, which has 50% more cargo. Corporates can trade with 5k trains. Pirates can pirate wherever they want, and pirating factions like the rogues even have cruisers. Freelancer smugglers have no tag, and thus nobody looking for them via chat. There's always a faction with advantages over the Junkers at the same task. The only reason you see more Junkers is that when you see a Junker, you're not just seeing people who are doing one particular thing, you're seeing an entire community that enjoys doing all of these different things together.
