Crime & Punishment

I've been wandering around losec over the last day and haven't seen much piracy going on.

Back in the day, I remember being able to get pirated fairly easy, I also remember being able to pirate - then faction warfare happened.

Even so, I recall finding pirates eager to rob me of my hull without too much trouble before I took a break earlier this year - is this still the case or has the old style of piracy continued to dwindle?

Depends on how you define piracy, I guess.

Plenty of people ganking unsuspecting sods where I live.

I suppose it's not technically piracy then, cause CONCORD doesn't give a **** about wormhole boat violencing. Best it could fall in under is the "plunderer" category.

You'd be surprised. We've had CVA set us red for committing "piracy" on miners too stupid to D-Scan.

I assume you're talking about people looking to make money and not farm killmails. Not a lot of those in lowsec either, but it's not like pirates are gone from EVE, they simple have taken new forms and appear in different areas. When a prey species migrates out of one area and into another, the predators inevitably follow them.

In EVE's case, the PvE has migrated out of lowsec besides a handful of cases and therefore most of the piracy has followed them to high, wh and null space where making money is more lucrative and less risky. What's left is an empire PvP arena for people with -10 status and alts feeding them isk (typially from the safety of the Carebearlands that they so vocally despise).

Personally, I was more impressed with Skunkworks' Incursion operations netting billions of isk in kills and even stealing some faction ships from PvE'ers than I was with Heretic Army turning Amamake into an instant death trap for killmail farming. All anyone has to do with the latter is set Amamake to their avoid list, but the former actually forced CCP to make aggro changes, which proves they CAN do something about neutral logis/boosters popping in and out of stations like prairie dogs but haven't because it's not a big enough issue yet.

No problem at all, although I don't think you get much of either with a BC rank like yours

Thanks to everyone else for your detailed thought out responses. I appreciate your input. I guess I am just lamenting a perceived loss of roaming pirates that I seemed to run into all the time back in the "good old days" and was wondering if any were still present.

Activity depends a lot on TZ, and sometimes you just don't get lucky. Went 49 jumps yesterday in a BC through popular lowsec, no pew. Jumped into two decent camps, neither both made any attempts to aggress as I burned off, or when I came back and shot them. Waiting in FW plexes and belts was similarly unproductive. Engaging a t3 on station made it dock up.

Other days I've had four unaffiliated small gangs all end up in a belt with me for gudfites. Finding PvP in EVE has always been chancy, but on further thought I'd actually agree that the population of general lowsec roamers/random people in belts has decreased somewhat.

MINERS KNOW NO FEAR.

Actually, you raise a really good point. I've long said the best way to get something patched is to force the issue, which is what we did with the incursions. The question is, how do we force the issue with neutral logi?

As for piracy, I agree with Monk: lowsec is a great place to gank random people and occasionally got a good honest fight out of other PVPers, but real piracy is only viable these days in high sec where you can disrupt activities enough that people will pay you to go away. There's just no compelling reason for people to go into lowsec for anything other than PVP or going to nullsec, so it's hard to find anything worth paying ransom for.

Rookie.