New Piratey Idea

While trying to stake out as a pirate a few things became apparent. First, Without a fence your not going to get far. Second, life as a pirate is rough, dangerous and generally not rewarding enough to merit the risk. Now, I might just be unlucky but finding a fence took me an hour to find ONE who would buy raw ore. So with a fence in mind, I headed out hired a hauler and headed to an ore processing plant. Now, I didn't really notice the "lack" of traffic until I was actually looking for someone to rob. After waiting at the plant for about five minutes a small freighter came in with an escort. I scanned the goods and sure enough it was ore. While avoiding the escorts I pounded the freighter until it dropped the pods and ordered mine to pick them up. After leading the escorts on a wild goose chase(of which I got hit pretty hard) I LSDed off with my hauler, pods in tow. However, much to my dismay the fence was long gone. Cursing to myself I started another search that lasted roughly 30 minutes before I gave up. Now I am not sure if fences are supposed to be so rare, but spending an hour and half searching for a fence to offload 10 pods wasn't really that fun.

And so that leads me to my new "idea" which is simply a new type of base, a pirate base. It would typically be well hidden in an asteroid field or a nebula (like lucreticas) and would be a place for pirates to mingle. Depending on the amount of activity in the system it would have pretty heavy traffic (as it would be a hub for pirate activity in that area) The base would buy stolen goods, BUT at a reduced price compared to the fence(but higher than the scrapper) I would think for 1/2 to 3/4 of what the fence would pay. The base would also buy all types of pirated goods and would regularly sell the pods to fences who would launder them. These bases should be pretty rare and hard to find and shouldn't be located in the more secure government sectors. A base like this could have all sorts of things happen to it. From government raids, bounty hunters attacking to smuggling operations, blockades of L-points etc.


Now if you took the time to read all that, I salute you! If not, here is a Simplification:
-Make fences more numerous and easier to find
-Increase traffic (maybe make this a toggle so as to not effect lower end specs)
-A piratey base, which would be a hub of pirate activity
-Missions for the piratey base

"Better to die now with honor, than to live with shame."

Good ideas and glad to see you are testing out the pirating.

Here is how the system works now, and we can talk over some changes.

Once you spot a fence, you "know" them and you can always find them using the "Fence" filter in the Nav Gui.

Fences always live around production stations, so when looking for one, use the Production Station Filter in the Nav Gui.

There are pirate stations. They spawn fences. You can often find a fence recovering from damage at a pirate station. The only way to find a pirate base is to ask a rumor seller. (you find rumor sellers how? Nav Gui rumor seller filter).

Your right, traffic is super thin. We plan to add more once we get the bugs out of what is here.

Changes:

We could make fences visible any time they want to be found. Basically, anytime they are not at a pirate station healing up. Fences do want to be found, that is how they make a living.

I was mainly looking around the mining bases (they produce ore right?) For the fences. I did find a pirate base (thats were I found the fence, and if they are only there to heal up, no wonder he wasn't there when I got back) The base wouldn't buy stolen cargo (although I am not 100% positive I actually tried) As for making fences always be visible on the nav menu, that might be a little to drastic. It might be better to instead allow you to buy a rumor that would reveal the location of the fences in that sector.

"The base would buy stolen goods, BUT at a reduced price compared to the fence(but higher than the scrapper) I would think for 1/2 to 3/4 of what the fence would pay."

It might even be better to reduce the price to 1/4 of what the fence would pay. The idea here is that the pirate base would spawn a small hauler to haul the pods to a fence and sell them to him (they keep the difference in profit) It would also be nice to actually have a tug or maybe a drone carrying pods between the fence and the station.
This would be allowing for the player to choose between convenience of a safe haven to sell his "found" merchandise while still giving him a profit. I would imagine that after pirating for a while that the stations and their defenses would become hostile to the player making it hard for him to get to the fence (although I think I read somewhere they stay out far from the station)

"Better to die now with honor, than to live with shame."

I like the idea of a pirate base buying any pod at a reduced price. It makes an easy solution for players who don't want to get too deep into the game, and leaves open the option of getting higher prices from fences for those who want to get deeper into the strategy. It will appeal to casual and hardcore players.

This would be very similar to our approach with refueling.

It already exists. It is the pod scrapper. Invented for this very purpose. Exists around pirate stations. Perhaps the price needs to be raised.

Another thing we can do is reveal pirate fences if the player has a neutral or better standing. Then if you are attacking pirates, you will need to hunt them down yourself, but if you are looking to sell, you can find one pretty easy. And we can make a pirate player start have a friendly faction standing with a pirate faction.

I think I meant a pirate base that will buy any pod, at a fraction of it's value. Not at a single price as a pod scrapper. So if you pirate some valuable goods, you can sell them at a pirate base for a very low price, but still reflective of their 'value', or you can seek out a fence and get a little better price.