Drethon
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Posted - 2007.01.19 15:40:00 -
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I think the problem with piracy in over hunting is the nature of piracy in EVE.
In nature, a predator that kills his prey usually satisfies his needs for days or satisfies the needs of many predators for that day.
In piracy of old days, to be attacked by a pirate was fairly rare. Probably only 1 in 100 ships would be attacked. When that ship was attacked, they could often fight back. When a pirate took down a ship, they could probably live for months on the spoils if they didn't blow it all at once.
In eve on the other hand, the pirate is never satisfied. A single pirate can take down a hundred haulers in a single day if given the opportunity.
One option to resolve this issue is to make a single kill more worthwhile. If the salvage items are made a fair percentage of the ships value, pirates will have to take down less ships to make the same amount of money.
On the other hand, this is a game, not the real world. In the real world most pirates are satisfied when they have enough to live off of for a while (obviously there are exceptions). In a game, the value of money is relative so piracy is used to inflate the ego by having a large wallet than someone else (except for the true PvPer who actually is interested in the challenge of combat, these don't over hunt weaker prey). So how do we solve the problem of people have no incentive to stop killing?
One option is NPC bounty hunters and a more integrated bounty system. When a pilot initiates an attack (target not flashy red) in High/Low sec on someone else and kills that ship, Concord adds the value of the target ship's insurance (or perhaps less) to the attacker's bounty.
The problem with this idea is the current bounty system, how to stop the pirate from taking his own bounty. I propose an extension upon an idea I saw elsewhere. When a bounty hunter kills his target, the bounty hunter is payed the value of the pirate ship's insurance and the pirate's bounty lowers by this amount. This is based on a ship kill, not a pod kill. Also add that when a pilot's security status becomes negative, his insurance cost increases until at -10 he can no longer purchase insurance.
A second option is to make prey more difficult to kill. Allow haulers to purchase escorts. This would likely be NPCs as PCs would not likely be available with little delay. The escorts could be purchased in various types, one being gank escorts that destroy pirates attacking your hauler and a second being EM escorts that jam attacking ships in an attempt to help the hauler escape.
The problem with the over hunting analog is EVE will never have a balance of predators to prey and will always have an overabundance of superpredators so alternatives must be applied.
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