Cant do that, its impossible.

Teams can decide who they Do and Dont want on their team.

What I'm talking about are STRUCTURAL changes that the admins can make to the game to INFLUENCE player actions and decisions. Not dictate, influence.

It should be totally possible for all the teams in the game to blacklist a known pirate, but it shouldn't be possible for them to shutdown their access to core game content.

Once repair costs increase, I think a clever pirate could make a decent living. If you just take care to leave large aggressive teams alone, you can stay small-time enough to avoid their ire while still preying on the rest of the player base. EF only squashed iWin because of their aggro base in Protean; if they hadn't taken griefing to the next level in that way, they would likely have stayed under the radar.

For players on established teams who still want some PvP fun, we need a different outlet. Some mix of ERMAN and biggee's ideas would do well.

IMO, a way to request credits would be nice too. A GUI set up for that would work, so you tell someone either pay up in the next 5 seconds, or get shot up.

How's this:

Each player can enter a bribe price for themselves. When you make an aggressive action against another player, they automatically receive a dialog (on the side, none of the graying-out stuff like when tossing stuff) allowing them to accept the given bribe price. You are similarly notified if your victim pays the bribe.

There is absolutely no requirement that the pirate respect the bribe. However, word will soon get out as to which pirates take advantage of the system. Smart pirates will set a good price that most victims will prefer to pay rather than spending 5 minutes in stasis, and respect the bribe for a sufficient period of time so that their victims keep on paying.

The glory system could be improved to become desired, and then you could tie getting killed with a bounty to = -glory. Some way of stopping bounty farming.

Another thing that could be awesome, is to add a new "trade skill" to the current CA, MFM, StM and EE options. The "Pirate" trade skill could get +combat stats, +dropped credits? and -base stats. So players trade the base-related income for pirate-related income.

Could have some unique items, like ability to use a "Transponder Scrambling Device" which hides character name and randomises level for 'x' minutes with 'y' cooldown. Maybe equipping it could make PWI-type items unequippable for balance.

To keep pirating stable, they could be forced to follow the "Pirate's Code" (taken from Pirates of the Caribbean, where despite being notorious pirates they meet death for disrespecting "the code".) -such as killing people more than once (without them fighting back) within a time period adds a debuff aura, or killing too many lower levels in a time period adds a debuff aura.

1. Bounty System is extremely hard to balance, if it could. It should be scrapped. Look at it, if you put a big enough bounty on someone, he and his buddy splits the reward. If you make it so that Local and Powerful Galaxy Owning AI Teams went aggro on the person, a large team can make anyone unable to play when 99% of the AI's(including ai bases) start to shoot said person.

It's borked, period. Move on.


2. Glory isn't worthwhile. The server cannot distinguish well between combat and travel ships. Ships with weapons as combat? My Ward has 3 T20 sleek weapons. Guess the 3 hera ward is now a combat ship. Exactly.

Glory passed between High level players when they kill each other? Guess who gets killed for overall Glory Increase. Yep, the real low level people. Farm 50 Glory off Aero, return to fighting DM with 50 more Glory.

Another system that should be scrapped. SP returned for anyone with the skill.


3. Skill Progression should never be able to be blockaded. Ever. Should be multiple ways to obtain all core skills. You should never be able to put a single(or group) player or bases in front of any known location of skills, like Handel's Cove or XYZ. Therefore, each skill level needs to have multiple galaxies to obtain each skill and multiple items needed for each level.

Ex.
Rumble 2 provides P up to 16, but The Dark at the second base provides P up to 16 as well, if the player has X items that required the player to kill stuff. Also, for a mention per level, the Serengeti Lab in Lyceum also provides piloting to 16.


4. Item creation should not be limited to bases. Besides being able to trump the progression of skills, if a pirate cannot upgrade, why go the distance to pirate? Another team will just cap any production base your team has, or prevent exit from it. Sure, maybe a pirate team the size of Aero maybe able to hold a heavily defended gal, but not a single person like AcidFlame. A team like Aidelon could just cap any base AF props up. So why should AF pirate?


5. The political web is even worse than any Space Poli...I mean Strawberry Pancakes "defending" the universe. Players should be restricted to friends within their own team, but we know that'd be hard to fix. The problem is that if a team like Zero Gravity has pirate problems, then Aero and No Bull could be asked for help, and that pirate team now has a 3v1 to worry about. Even worse if DM decides that this pirate is annoying, and it becomes a 5v1. Pirate team quits and plays eve.

In other words, people need to get off their asses and worry only about their own team. But no, people won't. Then it becomes the admins' turn to make things right.


6. Mobility is key to pirate success. If a player, or his team, feels the need to move, whether this is because an attack already going on, or that will happen Soontm, or maybe the prey/resources is now poor in the area. Players must be able to realistically move their ships on a moment's notice, able to pack up their combat ships in one big move, or two big moves.


7. Kills must be physically assuring. It's more fun to kill someone and their entire ship blows up, than knowing 5 minutes later they'll get back in their ship and go on their way, with their team. Of course, the counter for this means builds should be fast and quite cheap. And obviously multiple locations must exist to obtain the material for said build.

Why? 1. It provides an ever hungry market for built items. A pirate blows your ship up, you'll need another. Therefore everything will always have a value, and means builders will be needed on both sides. 2. What they can do to you, you can do right back. It'd be an incentive to kill people, whether you(or your team) is new at it, or are old veterans. Sure, a powerful team could build ship after ship to replace their losses, but two smaller teams can make the other side surrender easier.

On the smaller teams. Now, a smaller team like Aero can just sit in their gals and defend the walls as Aidelon waste money repairing their items. Aidelon and Aero are separated from bvbing each other(which Aero would have won) by LCs gals. Neither side is going to attempt to bvb through LC to kill the other. But if you could reduce the enemy to a point in where they cannot sustain the fight, then they will surrender? It'd be spirits defending T16 bases vs UZ ships attacking the same bases. One way or another, the better pvpers will be able to force the enemy to surrender.

Good time to train by attacking nearby teams, right?

With the new system, piracy will be more profitable than ever before. Before, you would get a GG or maybe 2. With the new system, if you kill someone with lots of expensive gear, you will get up to 300-500m worth of parts drops.

Don't forget that a pirate can now fly a ship with very low repair cost and still effectively take on some players with nice T21 gear. That leads to even greater savings.

Until pirate gets there. I once found a small group of pirates in t16/t17 ships. None of them made it to T20. Someone turned around and asked a bigger team to put a T20 base in their gal. They all quit.

Here's a new thought. We keep talking about ways to make piracy profitable, but in the end the deciding factor will be how it compares to alternative sources of income. For high level players, that's colonies and DGing. For lower level players, however, it's mostly DGing and capping Inferno/Basil/SBG. So if you want to see pirates of level X, figure out what kind of money a player can reasonably make at that level first.

From my own experience, I'd say that a level 250 player can maybe make 250 million credits per hour capping infernos. An active pirate at that level would probably encounter 5-10 viable victims in that time, meaning that each one must give a profit of around 25-50 million credits, not including the cost of death.

Meanwhile, an endgame player can probably make 1 billion credits per hour of good DGing. Even if we discount colonies on the grounds that some players do fine without them, and assuming again 5-10 victims per hour, that's 100-200 million profit per kill, not including cost of death.

These are the numbers we should be shooting for.

Make Piracy a trade skill, preventing them from getting builder specialisations (EE,StM,CA,MFM) and make Piracy give small combat boost, and +credits dropped when they pop someone.

I don't see anything wrong with this.

Very much agreed. How do we enable a person to lose that amount of money without totally screwing them over? Honestly I feel that Churchill's suggestion about an automatic bribe is a step in the right direction, as well as normalizing the price of ships and gear/while simultaneously allowing that ship and that gear to be lost forever should they die.

Maybe this only happens in PvP? I have no idea how to go about implementing this idea, nor the ramifications of such a thing.

Would anyone like to give any positive or negative opinions on the idea?

Bounty > Player A sets bounty on Player B. Player C kills Player B, scoops the bounty box. Player C takes the Bounty Box to Player A, who can open the box and view the location of kill, and who got the kill, then decide whether or not to pay the bounty if the kill is legit. Simple.

Glory > Needs a look. I disagree with Churchill, if you kill lower you gain Infamy, limiting your maximum Glory level. Needs to be more prominant imo.

Politics > Full out pirate team attacking everyone? That's your choice, and if you do that, expect the consequences of everyone killing you back. But making secret deals, establishing supply lines and attacking selected teams only? That's the way to do it.

Ships blowing up > Not going to happen. If it does, I'll be back off to EvE, who does a "realistic" space world much better. I play SS for a reason, and having to deal with constantly purchasing a new ship is NOT one of those reasons.

Pirate as trade skill > For the third time, someone RESPOND. Piracy should be added as a TRADE SKILL, IN THE SAME CATEGORY AS Colonial Administrator, Merchant Fleet Master, Extraction Expert and Station Mastery. You sacrifice BASE-BUILDING BONUSES(extraction,colonies,slaves, defences), in order to recieve PIRATE BONUSES(pvp bonuses, +credits dropped on death) . Someone tell me what is wrong with this??

Nothings wrong with it, multiple people posted that they agreed with the idea.