There are a lot of ways to lose money in this game: make a bad investment, misclick when placing an order, forget to supply your expensive production lines with materials/consumables, etc.
But by far the most annoying way to lose money is from pirates: players who pick up shipping contracts with no intention on fulfilling them.
The reason piracy is frustrating is that there is very little that the victim can do to protect themselves. Using contract rating doesn’t fully help you, and the local market block list only helps after you’ve become a victim. Abstaining completely from the local market will protect you, but at the cost of cutting off a fun part of the game.
I know that piracy is not against the rules of the game, and it’s pretty rare. But its rareness makes me wonder if this feature of the game that brings any value? Why do we have it?
So first question for the community: is piracy a value feature of the game that’s worth keeping? Perhaps it adds a bit of drama to an otherwise drama-free game. Or perhaps it adds a bit of risk and uncertainty that people enjoy? Or maybe y’all miss the feeling of getting your ships destroyed after making a jump to an EVE warpgate
I personally would be strongly in favor of some mechanism to claw back shipping packages from a pirates inventory (I don’t mind losing the shipping fees – that’s never the valuable thing anyway)
If the community does think that there are virtues to allowing piracy, then I wonder if there’s modifications that we could make to ease the pain a little bit for those of us who don’t enjoy this aspect of the game. Some ideas to play with:
Maybe after a contract has been in the “breached” status for enough days or weeks, you have the option to terminate the contract and get your materials back. This sort of replaces piracy with an extended period of annoyance of not having access to your goods.
Maybe a new setting to prevent an untrusted player (a potential pirate) from having more than 1 open contract with you. This keeps piracy in the game, but limits its potential for damage/losses.
To borrow the CONCORD idea from EVE (the NPC police force), maybe after you lose your materials to a unfulfilled and terminated shipping contract, your local faction will some time later say that they’ve “found” your materials and sends you a contract to go pick them up.
I agree that it would be nice to have some sort of insurance, but:
But where would you get them back?
“At the location the wares are right now” is problematic as for example they can be on a planet where you don’t have a base, or they even could be in a ship in orbit or in flight somewhere.
“at the pick-up location” is also problematic as when there isn’t enough storage a “pick up wares” contract would need to be made which is exploitable as it means free storage
“at the nearest CX” is very exploitable as most wares get transported towards the CX so it would be a free teleport, especially usable for long range hauling like from the void sectors
same as above
That should already be in the game as a limit of how many contracts someone can have depending on their recent contract history and/or rating.
Imo having a outopaying “breaching penalty” on contract breach that can be set during contract creation would be a solution. So that when someone breaches they will have to pay for the wares they stole. (Maybe devided into 100k/d or per x hours so that big sums can’t just be dodged and the othere side has time to get fund instead of being sucked dry instantly)
Imo high value shipments like afabs or ship parts shouldn’t be made via LMs as they bear the risk of these breaches but some security for bulk shipments which already can land in the size of 100ks or even 1M+ for stuff like C (one WCB load is worth over 1M) while the shipping fees are only a fraction of that (<25k for 1M worth of C)
Other qol things for (LM) shipping contracts would be automated delivery upon arrival and tracking where your shipment currently is.
Probably the most simple rule would be that you get the good back at the place where you provisioned them (the origin). If you no longer have base or warehouse space, you get a faction contract to pick up the goods (similar to the contract you get when you place a CX buy order but don’t have enough warehouse space).
But if we wanted to lean into some fun roleplaying, maybe your faction sends you a contract that says something like “Castillo-Ito Salvage Operations has found your shipment floating in space near the XYZ system. Our teams have recovered your shipment and has hauled it to for pickup. A modest recovery fee will be charged for this service” and then you get a contract to pickup your goods on some random planet between the origin and destination.
Perhaps, but to exploit this you would need a “shipping partner” who is willing to take the reputation penalty, and you would need to be willing to wait however many weeks it takes for the goods to arrive. But I really I think there’s a lot of options that are better than “nearest CX”
I understand where you are coming from. But I worry about pushing people away from the LMs and into out-of-game channels like Discord. I know that there are some very robust and active Discord servers where you can find shipping partners, but it just feels bad if players can’t use in-game mechanisms (like local markets) and instead have to sign up for 3rd party services.
Yes, perhaps, but what happens when a pirate doesn’t have the necessary funds to cover that? Or what if the shipping contract was taken by a new player who then drifts away from the game. They’re not going to have cash on hand to cover an expensive shipment.
Another possibility is some “insurance”. Maybe you can pay something like 1% of the cargo value as insurance and a NPC faction can pay out in the case of a failure to deliver.
but what would be a “modest recovery fee”? To make it work there would need to be a timer on the contract (for example 7d) and the fee would need to be a fair bit higher than a week of WARs (lets say 4 credit per higher value).
So a shipment of C (2250t) would cost like 10k to recover and needs to be picked up within 7d. The moment it breaches the “mystery square” despawns on the shippers side with no possibility for piracy.
Sounds better but could still be exploited under certain circumstances but tbh that risk is something that could be taken care of later if it is being used systematically for that.
The other thing is if the devs want to get piracy effectively removed.
A breach needs 1-3d, travelling from a void sector to the nearest core CX takes around or more than a week.
And to the reputation penalty, I have (accidentally) breached contracts worth millions and my rating didn’t even thought about moving. The current reputation is basicall “A or not A” as A is the standard and there is nothing above it.
I already proposed a change for that which orientates the rating after activity and fulfillment quota:
E: not trustworthy
D: few contracts with minor problems / some contracts with some problems
C: standard, made a few contracts with no problems / some contracts with minor problems
B: some contracts with no problems / many contracts with minor problems
A: many contracts with no problems
So that you could post even important shipments on the LM with rating A (or B) and only trustworthy partners could pick it up.
That would be one step to make LMs more viable. Others would be to fix the shipping deadline (x days after accepting a contract instead of x days after pickup), make LMs more flexible (posting a shipping cont over 1000C and A takes 800, and B the remaining 200) and making increasing their visibility (having one LM per faction which can be filtered and searched, LMs on planets would still be needed to be able to select them as endpoints). Something else that could be edded would be a optional fee that can be activated upon contract extension (fee paid to the contract poster, reduced company rating gains by the contract).
With that conts on LMs would be good to find, easier to post and to accept and relatively save on fulfillment.
I’m not suggesting that you get your materials back immediately upon breach. There could be a long (multi-week) waiting period before you get your goods back, and maybe the recovery fee is on the order of 100k dollars or more. I feel like there are ways to tune these parameters so that your exploit concerns can be addressed. Finding the exact values for these parameters isn’t important in this post. Rather I want to get feedback on the general idea of being able to somehow recover lost goods.
All of your other LM suggestions sound very reasonable to me.
People have been complaining about piracy and offering suggestions to mitigate it for years. The devs have consistently shown no interest in addressing it other than to tweak the rating system.
So while there are many good suggestions I don’t think anything is going to be done. I agree that the rating system needs to be tweaked more. Even the current “A or not A” would be useful if there was some meaningful difference in trustworthiness for players with an A rating but there isn’t.
It seems the rating system also resets pretty frequently. If a player doesn’t have contracts for a certain amount of time, they drop back to “U”-rating. So in theory, someone could be a pirate (x) times per year without a trace beyond word of mouth.
