It would be interesting if we could /msg the trade ships in NPC convoys and demand money in exchange for safe passage. Currently, pirates are limited to destroying the voy ships and taking the cargo. All well and good, but that's removing one half of the piracy game.

As a general matter, I think that after a pirate has knocked a trade ship down past, say, ~60-50% armor, their threat to kill the trader absent payment is a credible one. So, a system where you can message NPC convoy trade ships below ~60-50% health and demand payment would be a useful one. At that point, the trader would either agree to pay some random amount based on their cargo value (which the pirate could either accept or refuse if too low), or, if the pirate had a history of killing those who'd already paid up, refuse payment.

Implementation probably requires two things to be developed:

(1) a reputational standing ranking for piracy "honor": when NPCs or PCs pay an agreed upon price pursuant to a to-be-implemented "Pay Ransom" command, destroying them before they've docked with a station or logged off would result in the Pirate losing standing on this new ranking. Standing would only regenerate slowly, over time, and could not be restored any other way. Those with a low standing rank would be unable to extort NPCs and would be shunned by PCs.

The ability for PC players to rank pirates by their frequency of killing paying targets would be a great side effect of this. Key would be that both target and pirate agree on the paid ransom--can't have Trader Joe paying Pirate Pete 1 credit and thus scoring immunity unless Pete is willing to take a reputational standing hit.

(2) Some way to prevent multiple exploits without hampering gameplay: Pirate 1 shoots Moth 1 down to 40% hull and hails, extorting it for 200k credits on a cargo valued at 1.2 million credits. Next WH, Pirate 1's buddy, Pirate 2, shoots Moth 1 down to 20%... should Pirate 2 be able to extort Moth 1, too? For how much?

Maybe the right approach is to make it so that a pirate must personally inflict X% damage in order to extort... let's say 40%. Thus, Pirate 1 inflicts 40% damage and gets to extort Moth 1; Pirate 2 inflicts another 40% damage, taking Moth 1 to 20% hull, and extorts it. Pirate 3 cannot extort Moth 1 again because it will explode before 40% damage is inflicted by Pirate 3.

There remains the problem of Pirates 1-2 working as a team to serially extort Moth 1 before Pirate 3 destroys it for the cargo and splits it with Pirates 1-2, who thus avoid any sort of Reputational hit for killing a paying target... but hey, we want to encourage teamwork!

For RP reasons I already try charging NPC voys and CtC transports for safe passage... but they never pay.

Introducing an element of chance (i.e. making the damaged ship only pay 1 time in 3 or so) depending on the reputation of the pirate would further decrease exploitability of this feature.

As a side feature it may be a good idea to list the reputation on the pirate's target info to help PC players decide to pay.

Sounds good. Killing escorts should yield xp.

VO tends to avoid dice-roll situations like that, Antz. If you do X to your target and you have Y reputational standing, it should do Z (i.e., pay you based on the value of its cargo).

If they only pay 1 out of every 3 or so, that means that 2 out of every 3 or so convoy ships will be getting popped. So it doesn't matter much to us pirates... but VO seems to avoid that sort of thing.

Yes.

I like the idea, but your final comment in your original post currently seems like a deal-breaker. Without some form of deterrent to one pirate getting paid and another killing the moth and splitting the proceeds, this is just a fantastic way to print money. Perhaps if the NPC got killed after paying by a different player the paid pirate would receive a strike, and enough strikes would be the same as killing after paying? When the NPC comes under attack after paying, it could message the paid pirate with the attacking player's name and location, so he at least has some information to deal with the problem (if it is not collusion). Obviously, this would need to not apply to bots (possibly excepting pets, though nobody uses them).

The problem is, diq, that non-concerted action is entirely non-problematic. If a [CLM] catches the 60% moth heavy at the Corvus station that I pirated 3 WHs ago, he should feel free to kill it and take the cargo -- and I should have no reason to care about it. Paying a pirate doesn't mean you should be safe overall.

Because of the inability to extort more than twice, and maybe the second extortion should be lowered, I don't see it as being too much of a way to print money. Often the value of what's in a moth is pretty negligible, so going through the extra trouble of actually killing and collecting wouldn't be worth it. I'd rather extort as many ships as possible, than extort one and then kill it.

I agree that non-concerted action ideally is non-problematic. That's not the issue. The issue is that concerted action IS problematic, and is basically free money. One pirate extorts the moth, the other kills it, they get the free money on top of the cargo value. This becomes an even bigger problem if the ransom is a percentage of the cargo value, because then you'd have pirates selectively picking off the moths that pay the best and killing them in tandem. It'd be a fantastic way to make a lot of money without any more effort. You have been among the vociferous opponents of free money in the game, if I recall correctly, and this is as exploitable an opportunity as many that have been opposed in the past.

My suggestion to mitigate this effect would actually take your possibility into account. As soon as the CLM starts shooting your already-pirated moth, you get notified. Maybe you can't do anything about it for that particular moth, but that's why the penalties don't start right away. You'll be able to warn the other pirates, who are generally friendly with each other, apparently (that's what all the pirates have been saying in the past few months, at least), and they won't shoot the moths that are flying unmolested below 60% or whatever the cutoff is.

This is not about paying a pirate and thinking that means you should be safe overall. This is about paying a pirate and then having a high probability of dying from another pirate's hands immediately thereafter. The corporations can do the math, and they wouldn't fork over the cash if they thought there was a good chance the cargo wouldn't make it anyway.

One possible result of this is that griefers would start specifically targeting convoy moths below the threshold, but griefers generally aren't the type to sit around waiting for convoys to come through and hoping some of them will be ransomed, and if they do they are a problem that can be addressed separately (kill or distract the griefer, save the voy).

You don't quite get it: under no circumstances should a pirate become a de facto escort just because a trader paid to keep living. You want to live AND hire me to take a personal interest in your now weakened hull's integrity? Gonna cost more.

I agree there's a problem of free money, but disagree that it's a significant one. Though this would give a good indication of what's in a ship, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

In any event, I think the positives outweigh the free money negatives, and that there's no way (that's not too deeply flawed to implement) to prevent the collusive case. Guess we'll see what the Dev's think.

I get it, Lecter. I'm not saying that you should escort the convoy. The "strike" system would have to be set up so that it screens out a certain number of false positives, and forgets over time. Or maybe it only counts player kills within a certain number of jumps from the payment sector, or something. It's obviously not quite as simple to implement, and would probably take more time to be ready.

I think what it comes down to is that we disagree about how serious the free money problem would be. I often see pirates working in pairs or more. With your plan, there would be nothing stopping them from dropping a convoy full of moths below the threshold, getting ransoms, and then switching to each other's moths and killing for the cargo. Getting paid twice for each moth. They could save time and effort by only killing the ones that pay well, clearing out much larger sums of money than used to be possible by killing convoys (which, as you recently pointed out on another thread, is already quite lucrative). Hell, if you made it so strikes are only counted if the ship dies in the same sector or maybe one jump away, that would work fine as well. Greatly reduce the number of false positives, and eliminate the easiest ways for this to be a free payout.

By the way, they're not hiring you "to take a personal interest in your now weakened hull's integrity." They're paying you to live, and that's all they're getting, and they realize that. But they're also not stupid enough to keep on paying you to live if they notice a marked tendency of dying after paying you to live. The risk-reward ratio starts to be a bit high, and they decide that it's more economical to lose the ship without paying than pay and lose the ship anyway. They don't really care that you might not have caused all the deaths even indirectly. They just care that the numbers say that you're not a good bet, and so they're going to stop betting on you.

I agree with diqrtvpe's objections, although the original idea appeals to me, especially since the streams of traders will become important if and when production dependencies are put in place.

I'll second toshiro's words.

This wouldn't be any more of a 'free money' exploit that escort missions are currently, but that is too much anyway. I have actually mulled over an idea similar to this for a while but have not been able to reconcile the fact that a pirate could just kill a voy after extorting it.

Hell, if you made it so strikes are only counted if the ship dies in the same sector or maybe one jump away, that would work fine as well.

I would be happy with that solution if the "one jump away" part is removed.

It would be acceptable to me if the voys paid a set ransom. Something like 120k per moth would be fine, and considering that a moth heavy is presumably more expensive than the player-purchasable moth variants, that is less than the cost of an empty ship. Smaller ships could be set to pay a similar percentage of the empty ship cost rather than an amount based on cargo. If this helps to reduce the exploit potential (I'm not sure that it will, necessarily) I would be in favor of it.

For RP reasons I already try charging NPC voys and CtC transports for safe passage... but they never pay.
Hah! Me too. You'd think they would learn, the ninnies...

Perhaps when you extort a voy, they just give you part of their cargo instead of money? That way extorting and then killing them would not get you anywhere, because they would have less cargo after giving some to you?

If I have to haul cargo, I may as well pop the trader and haul all of it.

However, I think Restay has hit on a good way to solve the concerted action problem: extoring a trader for X credits lowers the cargo in the hold by Y units, with X and Y being roughly proportional. That keeps it a zero sum game.

I'm not sure why I didn't think of that. Good idea.

However, I think Restay has hit on a good way to solve the concerted action problem: extoring a trader for X credits lowers the cargo in the hold by Y units, with X and Y being roughly proportional. That keeps it a zero sum game.

Yes, it does, but it also makes absolutely no sense. Where does the cargo go?

Eh, where does it come from in the first place?

I know it makes no sense, and I don't think it matters a bit.

There's a difference between giving up a little bit of realism to fit gameplay mechanics, and casting mystic spells on your cargo to make it disappear once you've paid a pirate. As it happens, there is a completely realistic way to, as you put it, "solve the concerted action problem." You count strikes if the ship is killed in the same sector as it paid (I'm definitely agreeable to keeping it to one sector, ladron, that seems reasonable enough).

I actually can't believe you would even consider the solution you proposed, and I'm kind of convinced that you're just trolling. If so, bravo, you've done an absolutely fantastic job. If not, there is clearly no point in continuing to argue with you because you will freely invent the most ludicrous possible scenarios to counter reasonable suggestions.

Same sector is reasonable enough.