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[Joshua Foiritain]

Piracy died years ago. With that i mean ransoming pilots in low sec for money and letting them go. Back in the early days eve was mostly empty, you could hop through 20 low sec systems and not see a single person. Gatecamping was impossible because poorly skilled cruisers with meta 2 gear dont tank sentries very well.

Level 4 missions existed i think but their payout was shit, missions in general werent worth the time. So people mined ore and with the old mineral prices mining in low sec was actually quite a lot better then high sec.

Both of these things meant carebears often went into low sec to mine since it was fairly safe as low sec was mostly empty. This was great for pirates because people had less money in general so paying a ransom was a much better option then having to buy a new ship.

Eventually the player base grew and the pirate/carebear ratio skewed towards pirates, competition grew, the mentality of eve in general shifted and people started outfitting their ships with more expensive gear. People paying ransoms became less common because they 'hated' pirates would rather buy a new ship. This resulted in reduced income for pirates.

Then pirates started noticing that people who did pay ransoms often had expensive stuff fitted; worth more then your ransom. So pirates started ransoming people and then killing them anyway which resulted in eve less people paying ransoms and thus reduced income. People often asked CCP to add in a ransom mechanic to the game so that pirates that did still ransom could offer then victims some sort of guarantee that they would get away with their ship but CCP always refused.

I did some piracy when we reformed Coreli last summer but found low sec is mostly devoid of carebears, the only place you find them is on the chokepoint gates to high sec but none seemed interested in paying ransoms so after a while we just stopped asking.

Low sec is mostly pirates shooting other pirates, FW folks or roaming null-sec gangs.

[Arnulf Ogunkoya]

Well, if you really want weird space pirates. This is from a blog entry by Charlie Stross, talking about his Eschaton universe books. The full entry is at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/09/books-i-will-not-write-4-escha.html.

So here's the technical mechanism I was going to deploy in the never-to-be-written novel on which I pinned the working title "Space Pirates of KPMG" (or, for Brits, "The Crimson Permanent Assurance in Space") — note that a working title is just a temporary one that will be changed before publication; the working title for "Iron Sunrise" was "Space Nazis Must Die":

Starships are expensive, intricate pieces of machinery. They are difficult to build and maintain, and have to be continuously in motion, transporting cargo and passengers, in order to cover their running costs.

There are space pirates. They, too, have to pay huge amounts of money to keep their starships running, and they can't afford to be stupid about it.

The space pirates' business model is this: they identify a likely target merchant ship, match courses with it, and board.

They do not, however, rape, pillage, and murder the passengers and crew. That would leave them having to transport a lot of bulk merchandise and find somewhere to fence it, taking an inevitable hit in the commodity's resale value. It would also set everyone's hand against them. Not good for life expectancy ...

Instead, they audit the cargo. Then they search out for any secret items the ship is transporting, stuff that is of high value but not publicly announced. Many times they don't find any. But sometimes they stumble across a passenger liner with a safe full of quantum computing chips, or a bulk liquid carrier with much less freight volume in its cargo holds than expected and something extremely massive tucked away — a lump of stabilized neutronium, for example.

They do not steal the secret cargo. Instead, they notify their accomplices by means of their private causal channel to buy commodity options based on their insider knowledge of the secret cargo's impending arrival. Then they give the hijacked ship an armed escort (under communications silence) all the way to its destination, to ensure it arrives on time.

Thus: your typical space pirate in the Eschaton universe metaphorically wears a grey pin-striped suit, swarms aboard a merchant vessel with a spreadsheet between his clenched teeth, and has retirement plans involving a senior partnership in a firm of accountants. (Captain Jack Sparrow he ain't.)

Apparently he's used a modified version of this idea in the book Neptune's Brood.

[Merdaneth]

Ah Piracy...

My character calls many players pirate, but most are simple people trying to increase their range of targets. PvP is a leisure activity, not a work activity, hence people are prepared to pay to PvP (both in real isk, sec status loss and opportunity cost). Running a profitable business while doing a leisure activity is difficult at best.

Piracy (for profit) in low-sec is an idiots career. There are much better ways to make isk. Additionally, the EVE equivalent of richly laden convoys exist only in high-sec, not in low-sec. High-sec ganking and is indeed the closest analog to piracy EVE has: a number of people doing it are actually trying to turn a profit.

As for doing nothing for the 'piracy career', the biggest problem of would-be pirates in low-sec was a lack of targets. FW and a few other low-sec changes have brought more people to low-sec than ever before. Security status loss is actually one of the few in-game mechanisms that helps the role of pirate, by at least giving a visible and meaningful in-game difference between different types of PvPers. A -10.0 status is a 'flag' many people bear with pride.

Piracy (as multi-target PvP in low-sec) does not need any encouragement from CCP. There are more than enough people willing to try their hand at it. If you want piracy to mean something else, well, what would that be?

[Silas Vitalia]

I'd like an in-game metric that takes into account how much isk damage you are doing to other players that could be used to reflect 'piracy' or 'dangerous pilot.'

"Watch out for this guy (or gal)! He's got an AAA rating for having murdered 10 billion isk worth of high sec status pods and ships! "

"Don't watch out for this guy! He's -10 concord, but that's only for killing freighters in blobs, not a pvp threat. "

A little more 'fidelity' in the concord ratings would be good.  Is that -10 from high sec killing? Low sec killing of high sec status people?  From killing combat ships or mining ships?

[lallara zhuul]

Something like there was in Elite?

[Hamish Grayson]

Have you guys considered high-sec war decs?   Research your targets, insert spies and awoxers, charge a ransom to drop the war.     I've been out of the loop a bit but I seem to remember that the Goons are easy to infiltrate, terrible at small gang PvP and often fit faction mods on every damn thing.    The same can be said for CVA's pets and all the various renter alliances popping up.

Oh and wormholers.   Those guys are rich, usually up a good fight and pretty vulnerable once you have a path to their hidden treasure trove.   Eve-who> locator agent > follow one home from Jita.   Hell you don't even have to do that, just probe down a hole until you find a corp then leave probing alt in there, insert a couple spies and start kicking their sand castle until they pay your ransom.     


If you want to be an apex predator in modern eve you have to think a little more devious than popping noobie badgers in Rancer and crying because CCP does not force them into your waiting arms.   It's not CCP fault you can't adapt at the same rate as your prey.

[Silas Vitalia]

I'm not a fan of griefing high sec corps with wardecs and ransoms.  Tried it for a bit but it got old very very fast.  I did get a few billion out of a chinese gold farmer corp though, that was a good one : 0

They rarely fight back, the money isn't really worth it, and you spend 90% of your time in text chat dealing with whining people instead of out flying around.

[Ghost Hunter]

Have you guys considered high-sec war decs?   Research your targets, insert spies and awoxers, charge a ransom to drop the war.     I've been out of the loop a bit but I seem to remember that the Goons are easy to infiltrate, terrible at small gang PvP and often fit faction mods on every damn thing.    The same can be said for CVA's pets and all the various renter alliances popping up.

Oh and wormholers.   Those guys are rich, usually up a good fight and pretty vulnerable once you have a path to their hidden treasure trove.   Eve-who> locator agent > follow one home from Jita.   Hell you don't even have to do that, just probe down a hole until you find a corp then leave probing alt in there, insert a couple spies and start kicking their sand castle until they pay your ransom.     


If you want to be an apex predator in modern eve you have to think a little more devious than popping noobie badgers in Rancer and crying because CCP does not force them into your waiting arms.   It's not CCP fault you can't adapt at the same rate as your prey.

I would argue high sec dwelling and war declarations is more befitting of the Mercenary occupation than true Piracy. That is largely a legally allowed field of activity, rather than a criminal one with game-mechanics consequences. The same is essentially said of the wormhole / nullsec idea, as well. At the end of the day, you can go back to 'lawful' territories with no consequences or criminal history that isn't strictly in the domain of players.

The root issue of my topic is that there is little-to-no content for Piracy, in terms of game mechanics or otherwise. It is not a matter of lawful players outsmarting the criminal ones; it's a matter of how the game gives the two no strong reason to intersect. Again, the whole 'if I must leave highsec, might as well go to nullsec and get mad bank for the same risk'.

You can go elsewhere with the whole 'adaptation' argument, it is not relevant.

[Anslol]

Market piracy. Ruin profits for everyone else by major undercutting.

Or, find the person undercutting you, research their corp, threaten dec. Profit. If they do it again, bring in merc corp and offender into chat. Demand they remove themselves from the market. If they do, great. If not, engage war dec and remove POS's they may have or ships they have. Research MUST find their alts/mains, or this is useless. Must also have proven loss record.

For instance, someone kept undercutting me in X market. I said to stop unless they want to loose another POS, one of which is located[here]. Gave the exact location to prove I knew where it was.

I wasn't undercut again.

[Creep]

Have you guys considered high-sec war decs?   Research your targets, insert spies and awoxers, charge a ransom to drop the war.     I've been out of the loop a bit but I seem to remember that the Goons are easy to infiltrate, terrible at small gang PvP and often fit faction mods on every damn thing.    The same can be said for CVA's pets and all the various renter alliances popping up.

Oh and wormholers.   Those guys are rich, usually up a good fight and pretty vulnerable once you have a path to their hidden treasure trove.   Eve-who> locator agent > follow one home from Jita.   Hell you don't even have to do that, just probe down a hole until you find a corp then leave probing alt in there, insert a couple spies and start kicking their sand castle until they pay your ransom.     


If you want to be an apex predator in modern eve you have to think a little more devious than popping noobie badgers in Rancer and crying because CCP does not force them into your waiting arms.   It's not CCP fault you can't adapt at the same rate as your prey.

I do this on alts.

Wardeccing is not piracy, it's extortion. For one, it's legal, for two, you don't even have to ever violence any boats in order to 'ransom' the money from the wardecc'd corp. A lot of them will simply pay you to drop the dec or go away upon receiving the notification. For three: it's highsec. Nobody fucking fights in hisec. Dockup and wait it out. You want 'adaptable prey'? That's some adaptation right there, except nobody had to adapt and people have done it from the very start so I'm fairly surprised you are not familiar with it.

Wormhole corps are indeed fun to infiltrate. And if you can't actually remove anything from the hole due to camps, it's entertaining to change the password so they can't come in, kick out their stuff, and blow it all while talking to them in local.
You can fight them too, but the vast majority are mighty chickenshit and refuse to undock without triage carriers, so it's a total crapshoot in terms of finding people to blow up. And ransoming their stations via structure shooting with bs/t3s is the most boring way to blow a few hours I've ever heard besides mining.

As for goons/CFC etc, yes to awoxing, yes to ganking. Ask any of Mordu's Angels about griefing VFK, particularly in blops. They don't really fit faction mods on that much, tbh.



However, as Ghost said: This is not at all what the topic of this thread is about. It's not that we cannot find fights (we generally blow each other up), it's that CCP has never lifted a finger to help one of the most advertised and (often temporarily) popular careers in the game. Which seems a bit strange, considering that they've gone out of their way to help out the miners.

[Saikoyu]

Out of curiousity, what about the new sec status gain mechanic?  It sounds like it was a quick and easy way out of -10 status?  So, it sounds like it wasn't want most people here might have wanted for "pirates" but it is something.

But beyond that, personally I think its a shame that CCP never expanded the lvl 3 pirate mission out in low/null sec.  Those were completely awesome, and I really wish they had been added to. 

On the PvP side, what if there was a mechanic where the player could choose to dump their insurance to a ransoming pirate?  Just thinking out loud mostly.