all right who did it? who buffed the hell out of the escorts and tanked what the voys carry? I'm working 3 times as hard to steal silicate ore and aquean or if your lucky, synthetic hydrocarbons. the scrap metal is worth about as much for crying out loud. What happened to the voys moving weaponry or cargo worth its weight in garbage? if you want to have the voys have 2td's 4 vults and 2 cents as gaurds, they damn well better be atleast 5 moths carrying something worth hauling back to base.

I don't care about content/reward/prey value, as long as someone beefs up the STANDINGS reward. One miserable point per escort is just too little, when you need to recover from -999. Especially without unrats.

i agree completely with Look...
it used to be at least a little bit profitable to sit and hunt convoys. and when there's like 14 players online, most of which being bots and AFK miners, sometimes convoys are the only thing a pirate has to shoot at. now i can take a valk with an ultracharge, one AAP, dual suns and barely escape with my life after engaging a moth full of crap.
laaaaaaame.
actually DOING the convoy missions are not really a possibility for me either, if you're going to try to tell me to do that. with faction standings n' all that, i'd have to spend all my time up on smurf space, which is not productive for a pirate. na'mean?

Nice, regular voy:

Axia moths through Itani space, heading for Eo.

2 Heavies, a vult, and a TD.

120 cu of Lux Goods per Heavy.

Enjoy!

Pierats = ninnies.

"Ah, I don't have a target to fire on."

"Ah, they have AGTs. And they fire on me."

"Ah, they don't carry mothloads of sunflares anymore."

WHINERS!

syylk, im not asking for them to carry mothloads of sunflares, im asking for them to carry something WORTH MORE THAN THE SCRAP METAL THEY LEAVE BEHIND

hey. i'm used to getting shot at. but if i'm not mistaken, the cargo that convoys carried was buffed so pirates can have something to do in the game aside from pick our asses when there was no one else online. especially after the removal of Tridents that provided hours of grey space fun to hunt down and kill.

in fact. leave the convoys as they are, only add a couple voys of tridents with a couple WTDs escorting it every now and again! :P

New voys are MUCH harder to kill and I do mean a lot. I now find myself getting killed a majority of the time in assaults on convoys, behmoth heavies seem to have more armor and the TDs are downright vicious. Even in success the prize is all too often not worth picking up.

Purified water and inert chemicals are NOT worthy of a TD strike force as escort, not even worthy of having the armed behemoth heavies to ride in.

I have no idea what you guys are talking about! What exactly is supposed to have changed and when?

mom go grab any non dev rig with godmode off and try and take down a voy, you will usually fail and when you succeed you'll get water or silicate or something not worth much, that is if the voy carries anything

Not a very helpful reply dude. I see no difference, and more importantly, know of no changes that should have made a significant difference since release.

The thread, not just your post, makes it seem that it somehow became more difficult and less profitable recently! Did the dropped items somehow change without my changing them? What they carry is random and can be *anything* except uber-stuff; there should be no empty traders, though the stuff has a probability of destruction in the explosion. The frequency of each type of thing should be roughly uniform right now, and that hasn't changed since the new convoys/escort-missions were released (what, 2-3 months ago?). Also, as far as I know, nothing has been done to the bot configuration that would make them any tougher.

I remeber being able to take down a behemoth heavy with 3 shots from a dual set of swarm launchers (48 little missles) back when the convoy moths carried something like 2x the cargo a normal moth would. Now it seems to take all 80 missles.

The pirates can't make easy millions off convoy kills anymore. This is a problem??? Please tell me how. As I see it this means the economy will be balanced much better, all we need now is to make it harder for the traders to make money too. If you're telling me ALL the voys carry silicate crap then you only shot one or you're a lier!!! But that's besides the point since it's in the nature of piracy to lie so I will not judge you for it.

As for the voys being harder to shoot down, I think this has to do with the new convoy swarming behavior (how they group well and fly together). It's alot harder to shoot down a moth that's actually flying in a group, with 2-4 moth AGT's shooting at you at once, and vults/hogs flying up behind you.

I for one think that the new convoys are a smashing success, and the fact that they are harder to kill proves it!! Just cause you don't have your unrat friends to kill them for you while you steal the loot doesn't mean convoys should be crippled in any way; your NPC rat friends will return soon(tm), and they'll be smarter too so everything will balance out.

On a side note, if you were to do anything to re-balance in favor of the pirates, please increase the top-speed of combat vessels, so they can catch up to the new and faster voys, or decrease the top-speed of trade vessels =9

Sorry momerath, I'm not trying to be rude.

Perhaps if the cargo is random then you should remove certain things from what they do carry, lets say anything costing less than 200k per mothload?

I think recent back end upgrades have made the convoy guards fight MUCH better, thats probably why you don't know of any changes made to the guards. Even after I swarm both Wtd's the convoy is often quite well defended, more than enough to fend off amateurs.

edit:

Drazed, just because I railed you down in the 100th Deneb run doesn't mean you get to call me a lier. I never said ALL the voys are carrying silicate, of the past coupel days heres what I've found killing moths:
1 moth full of silicate
1 mothload of aquean ore
1 mothload of water
1 mothload of synthetic hydrocarbons
3 maybe 4 empty moths
and one mothload of synthetic diamonds, at least thats worth 1500

when you have to fight tooth and nail for that kind of crap it gets a little frustrating

Edit 2
Oh if they cut the speed down on the convoy moths to say 140, that might make a difference, not sure but it'd be an easy thing to try.

drazed. as far as i have been informed, you are not a pirate, and have never been one. and likely never tried to make money off convoys. therefore you have no idea what you're talking about. it's never been "easy" to make multi millions in an hour from them. if you're using swarms, your chances are better. but you can't make more than 3 mill in an hour doing it, which is way less than trading or now convoy missions, too. if you think being a pirate is "easy", be my guest and try it. ^_^
momerath: ya think it's in the cards to get tridents back into convoys now that kourier is handling them now? that would at least be fun to hunt down in a pack. not a solo thing, but still. when i first made TBF and joined CLM, i sat complacently for hours chasing them down with splash and a few others. it was great. long chases across g-space would be UBER, and rewarding :o

Taking down a voy that has a long course to fly is anything but hard. I find that stabbing the convoy guards in the back whilst they jump works wonders. After that, the moths aren't that tricky.

everybody hates pirates, yay!

I've played a pirate alt. And it was ridiculously easy to make money off of NPC convoys before. Now, if it is a bit harder or less profitable (and mommerath says the code hasn't changed to that effect), then all that means is your gold mine has dried up. Get used to it and quit whining, sheesh. Pirates, always with the whining...

I'd not be bothered by the extra effort if they simply kept the convoys from carrying junk, it shoudl be a simple matter of adding crap like water, silicate, ferric, prescious metals, etc to the list of things they dont carry like avalons and such.