Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hi,

I am a Pirate. I have tried everything in the game, but I am a Pirate and a Pirate is free.

My account runs out in a few days. I will not be renewing my subscription. (i resubbed because of special offer, and hardly played when I was subbed, before that I hadnt played for about 4 months or so). Reason I will not be renewing? Because I want to be a Pirate and nothing else. That is my Profession.

I do not want to run two accounts, I do not want to be killing rats in my spare time (or raise my spec status), I do not want to take part in Faction War. I want to Pillage, **** and get Booty.

So, what is the main problem with being a pirate?

Its Self Sufficienty (how the **** do you spell that?).

How could you make a pirate more self sufficient without making him/her do the things they hate? EASY!

Make people with a sec status -7.5 or lower get more SALVAGE when SALVAGING from PvP Wrecks. (would be a skill book, wouldnt effect you if you raised your sec)

A few tweaks would be needed so it wouldnt be abused, I can think of a few:

-Only wrecks you took part in killing can get the additional lootage.
-Salvage will never exceed the cost of the ship

Probably more things, but easily fixed.

Actualy kinda fits with the lore too, as pirates just take anything they can use. Pirates and Salvagers are basically the same thing in most science fiction (think Firefly)

Make it happen, and I will resub.

Sorry I derped, forgot to say it was extra SALVAGE. Not LOOT (aka mods etc)

FIXED

I think Dolph Lundgren said it best in The Expendables: "Its good to hang pirates". Then Jason Statham makes a comment like "Imagine that, a greedy pirate" after a pirate wants more money than bargained for.

Piracy is a playstyle, and if you really want to be a pirate full time, go try http://videogames.lego.com/en-us/LEGOPiratesOfTheCaribbeanTheVideoGame/AboutTheGame/Screenshots/Default.aspx

I know pirates who make money just of piracy.

Granted most of them feel they need more then that but its possible to earn your keep just from killing and salvaging. Being a pirate is being a fisherman though.. You spend days catching small fish..

Then one day you catch the big one and you're set for a month. (Faction fitted **** and so forth)

Found it: GD discussion on piracy

Also, my thread on devaluing local intel, which would equate to a considerable buff to solo low sec piracy (while not effecting null sec too much).

A real boost to Piracy would be to make bounty payouts a physical item that must be transported to a station/outpost to be transformed into ISK. That, and moving all good PvE outside of the protection of CONCORD. Otherwise Piracy is pretty much always going to be one of the worst ways of trying to make ISK.

You sound mad.

But hey, guess what, piracy is a profession too. And it's a pretty terrible profession at that.

If you're hoping to make money off blowing people up, you're dreaming. That's never been a practical method of piracy IRL, and it's unlikely to ever work well in EVE either.

Firstly, PvP in-and-of-itself basically needs to be a negative-sum game; that is, for any money you make someone else has lost more. Anything else is almost certainly going to do Bad Things to the game economy. This means that while the best PvPers can sustain themselves from fighting other PvPers, that's only by (essentially) taking money out of the pockets of the not-so-good PvPers.

Therefore, you need to be catching people who aren't intending to PvP. This means PvEers or industry players. These people aren't in low-sec for fights, by definition. They're there to make money. (Well, arguably they're NOT there at all at the moment, but let's gloss over that for now) You, in turn, are hoping to rob them of some of their profits. The key is making sure that you don't take so much off them that they leave and don't come back.

If you blow them up, then you can loot roughly half of the value of their cargo and fit and almost none of the value of their ship. If they're in an industrial ship, you may not even have the cargo space to carry that much. (This part is the big reason why killing PvPers is unprofitable unless you're one of the top few). In doing so, you've just turned their entire trip into a net loss. Not only have they lost any loot they picked up, but they also lost their ship and fit as well. This puts them in a position where they need to make multiple profitable runs just to recoup the loss. That's before you consider the question of how unpleasant it is to be on the losing end of an unfair fight - particularly for someone who didn't want to fight in the first place. (And it has to be an unfair fight, because you can't afford to lose anywhere near half of them. Negative-sum game, remember?) Unless there's a small number of pirates preying on a large number of non-pirates, the non-pirates will quickly decide that there are more fun and profitable things to do elsewhere.

On the other hand, if you tackle and ransom their ship, no value gets destroyed. You can make four or five times as much ISK for the same amount of loss on their part, not to mention that people are likely to find being ransomed less painful than being blown up. Unless you're taking quite small ransoms you'll likely still need to only catch them on a fraction of their trips in order to not convince them to just go do something else in high-sec, but at least this way you have a decent chance.

If you really want to make money as a pirate you need to do two things. First, turn low-sec into a place care-bears can go to earn ISK more effectively than in high-sec - either by getting CCP to change things, or by changing things yourselves. Second, make sure that when they DO come to low-sec, you don't drive them off - which means either pirates have to be rare, or you're going to have to get used to showing some self-restraint.

tl;dr: The reason real-life pirates don't go out trying to sink ships is because it's a really bad way to make money.

But it isn't an unfair fight, PvE players are given at every opportunity methods to avoid combat. Their task is not to win in a fight against pirates, but not to get into a fight against pirates.

CCP have given us jump freighters, tech 2 transports, T3s, gated rated sites and on top of that half of low sec is empty so you can literally PvE to your heart's content with no one in local. Still, few players come. The reasoning is not to do with a lack of rewards in low sec, nor is it to do with over-zealous piracy.

I touch on why people do not bother to PvE in low sec here, I will link the post and quote the relevant section to save myself retyping it:


As for your claim that it has to be an "unfair fight", I beg to differ.

Most pirates will regularly engage 1v1 with whatever ship they happen to have at hand (in that case, not a lot), and it is in fact more profitable that way. As you increase your share of profits (to 100% for solo players, woop), and also lessen the cost of lost ships.

The issue with gate campers and the like is that they are simply KB humpers. They are not there to make any ISK, compete for resources or drive off competition. Plus, somewhat ironically since they are the same people complaining about lack of targets, they are often the ones with high sec alts for grinding out replacement battle cruisers.


Ransoms are usually pretty pointless in all honesty, the game now is more or less designed to discourage them. Ships are so worthless many players will hit self destruct the moment you tackle, for others you are fighting against the time it takes for their ECM drones to jam you or you are trying to kill them before they make it to gate.

In the vast majority of situations, for a wide range of reasons, ransoming simply doesn't work. I do occasionally ransom ships, but only the highly valued ones when I am in a position where I know they don't have time to self destruct, don't have help coming etc.

I used to try and ransom every single one, but the vast majority of players that you find in low sec will either start self destruct and hope you don't notice, outright refuse to pay or try and stall you while backup comes. Now I will only ransom T3s and above, although it still rarely works out.

I more-or-less agree with you here, TBH. Low-sec is somewhat more profitable than high-sec, but not enough so to make up for the hassle. There are plenty of empty systems out there, but you still have to be watching local and get through the more heavily travelled entry/exit systems. It's more profitable, sure, but the (possible) presence of pirates just make it less fun.

I will point out that in the 'pirates chase, PvEers dodge' game there's no way for the PvE player to ever actually win. The challenge can be fun - I've had a great time dodging pirates in a hauler on occasion - but an endless fight to 'not lose' with no way you can ever actually come out ahead starts to get old soon. I actually think this is the real issue with low-sec - it adds a not-fun layer to the PvE side of things without enough to make up for that.


That's an excellent kill, but frig-vs-BC can be unfair in it's own way. Also, I defy you to claim you can repeat that often enough to make a living off it.

As for 'has to be unfair', what I mean is that to reliably make a profit you need to be taking fights you think you have a good chance of winning. I don't deny that many pirates will take a fight without necessarily having that advantage, but we've already established that most pirates don't make a profit either.


That's a fair point, although I'd imagine that a lot of players would be more likely to pay up if they were confident that the ransom was reasonable and would be honoured - or maybe not, given that they can get insurance for a destroyed ship. Either way, I'll take your word for ransoms not being effective ATM.

OP was asking for a boost to piracy income though, and if we're discussing ways that EVE can make piracy self-sustaining I'd argue that the extortion-racket model is always going to be far superior to the 'burn stuff and sift through the ashes' model. How to do that, I'm not sure, but it's probably secondary to the issue of giving people a reason to go to low in the first place.