Profit... 5000 c/cu after the leveling-out or at maximum?

I'd say ranging from 2,500 floor to a max of 5,000--but the Devs would know best how to implement the profit band. The key parts are small volume, very high inital investment per cu (maybe at the 2500-5000 profit margin, 50,000 per cu to buy is better), and a high enough profit margin at a single destination that people will take on the risky route.

It would also help if there were more escort missions between nations.

I think what you're going to see in future is a deliberate partitioning of resources so that the current distribution of minerals all over the Vendetta universe changes, such that certain essential minerals are only found in greyspace.

That will ensure that pirates have something to guard, and that they occasionally get annihilated when a major trade guild decides to come to town to mine that particular mineral.

Along with this, I'd like to see more major sinks for credits, such as capital ships which cannot be bought but can only be hired by the hour (and which get cold feet and demand recompense for heavy fighting), and Grey stations of negotiable allegience such that they ally to whichever guild has most members in them, or whichever guild slips the Station Master the biggest bribe; I have always thought that the Grey (and especially Corvus) stations should be a lot more corrupt and venal, and prone to looking the other way in the presence of large amounts of hard cash.

New (more profitable) traderoutes make greyspace more intresting but not more dangerous.

There are not enough pirates!

Getting a pirate on your ass always results in a surge of adrenalin. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.
Dying and loosing your favorit ship and money is no fun (i know).
But its soooooo great if you got away.

Therefor i dont want to blame the pirategriefers for what they do. Because they got good reasons!
But their actions made pirates a dying breed.

Pirates have no place to hide and the "good" players keep invading greyspace to get their fun. "New" pirates die alot and give up real fast.

Everyone that knows me knows that im not a bad person.
I always help people if they honestly ASK me for help and i try to give everyone a chance to get away if i got them.

On the opposite i put a lot afford in making (grey)space dangerous but that is neither easy nor appreciated.
Older players (alpha / beta) told me (years after i left) that it was always fun, even if there was someone crying. I wish they had told me back then .. :(

I remember itani players that cryed for hours! And that is no overstatement! Whistler / Incarnate can surly remember... :-/

Greyspace is already intresting - but not dangerous :(

AgY

Time to bring back the pirate bots. But please, this time give them a smart, pirate oriented load out (Hog II/Hornet II, f/c battery, megaposi, flares). What they had before was pretty weak.

I dunno, the ganking by multiple AGT+sunflare-wielding TD Hogs pretty much kicked my ass. Pretty hard to fight off 4 or 5 of those at once.

On a side note to the dynamics of pirates and traders, I think most valuable trade goods should probably be made considerably heavier. Itll have the effect of where running away is considerably harder unless you do jettison at least some of your cargo. The current situation seems to be that any ship besides a moth can easily ditch out even with a hold full of cargo.

I have never understood why the equivalent of a semi-truck can easily outpace its (insert fast car of your choice) counterpart.

I'm making an assumption here, but I'm pretty confident the majority of nationalist players have pirate/viper/UIT alts as well exactly for the reasons you mentioned. Pirate/anti-pirate activity definitely drives the conflict in grey now that CtC is a relic. That and IMHO with the current state of vendetta it's just a lot more fun.

As for the itani/serco war, yeah it's kind of pointless right now. OOC the only reason I picked blue over red is because my playstyle has always fit much better with smaller/faster things rather than larger/slower. I also think the nationalists are necessary though because, let's face it, as fun as pirate conflicts are, if there were no serco/itani conflict, the game would become pretty one dimensional.

In conclusion, I'm not exactly sure what the point of my post is. I will strongly consider deleting it later. Adieu.

"... a semi-truck can easily outpace its (insert fast car of your choice) counterpart."

Can you provide an example of the above, please?

True but go ahead and try to pirate a semi on the open road and you will end up a smear on the highway...

In truth the moth really should have more like 50k armor....

If the moth had 50 k armor it'd weigh even more and be slower. I'd actually be fine with this, because, well they are still a bit on the fast side compared to the fighters. The real solution would be to undo the 220 uber nerf on the combat rigs, this might also un-bork the WTD. And I agree that there needs to be more to draw traders to Grey, sadly by the time that comes about all the pirates will have gotten bored and left. My opinion on the matter is the turrets should be temporarily removed until the content to draw players to Grey is ready. Currently it seems the dev team just releases whatever is ready whenever it's ready, regardless of balances being months down the line, the impact of this has been (this time) to make piracy boring.

I posted this in actice thread also but there needs to be a cargo scanner and an easier way to catch running traders

An improvement on the flares would be well also, as well as a better handiness on the valk
Powaaaaaa Banzaiiii

Signing:Tertior the phantom of the space of vendetta

How about we wait till New Faction System is in place?
There wont be a lot of pirates that would be able to fly valkyries (standing/nation key rule).
Corvus (pirate) ships variants will have to be revamped or upgraded with new models in order for pirates to get a decent chasing/pirating ship.

There wont be a lot of pirates that would be able to fly valkyries (standing/nation key rule).

First, I've yet to see anything indicating adoption of your suggestion re: "nation keys" for pre-existing ships. Too bad, so sad.

Second, once the new faction system is in place, more pirates will fly valks: they'll be able to kill fellow Itani in Gray--consequence free--without having first tanked their Itani standing because friendly fire will once again be unfriendly.

Your guess is as good as mine Lecter.
Lets just wait and see what actually happens.

Quoting Inc:

Fri, Jan 23, 2009 incarnate
Just a heads-up, I don't want to give the wrong impression about exact faction standings that will or won't be possible as a member of another nation. For one thing, I'm not sure yet what they will be. As another, it was my intention to keep the best of the faction-specific equipment limited only to those who are native to the faction. I'm not sure what the "Best" will be exactly, but it would probably include the SkyCommand Prom not being available to Serco-friendly Itani.

That all being said, we will work something out to smooth the transition for existing people. Either changing character nations entirely, or.. some such.

I am aware that some people are going to stockpile ships, and blah blah. That's part of why I created station inventory limits, to at least cap such things to a limited extent during the period of transition. Still, this isn't really a big concern to me, I imagine there'll eventually be some black-market means of acquiring ships occasionally and such. What's most important is simply to get the whole system functioning properly, both for us and for new people. Transitional problems (and mild exploits) we will sort out as we go along. My focus remains on simply trying to make shit Work Right.

It has been suggested that valuable cargo be made heavy so interceptors can be more effective. This is certainly a problem. I suggest instead that moths get a lower top speed limit. Perhaps buff the cargo capacity on all moths also. Shrewd traders will carry more stuff resulting in slower acceleration. I dislike making cargo heavier across the board because the performance penalty to all ships is obnoxious. After all, pirates will want to recover said valuable cargo too.

Yeah, 160 m/s is way too fast.

A better, more efficient option is for traders to plot a route as usual and then automatically send 500,000 credits to the first pirate detected along that route. Saves time and reduces frustration for both the trader and pirate!

How's about a Corvus-only Overdrive battery, which will make a Corvus ship accelerate much better than a normal battery and maintain the high cruise speed for a couple of minutes or so, at the expense of burning out the turbo function once the overdrive is used for a set period.

In other words, a one-shot deal that lets a pirate catch almost anything once per fitting but which costs money to fit and replace after a run so is only of use on seriously rich traders.