New Piratey Idea

I can't honestly see why a fence would pay any more or less than a pirate base would, in logical terms. Why not just a 10% markup from pirate bases (i.e., the pirate bases pay you 10/11 of the pods' fence value) for balance and leave it at that? The markup could be tweaked up to around 25% with no loss in realism, but I would balk at anything more than that.

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This is a public service announcement: Please look through all six degrees of freedom before crossing the L-point.

Ooh, actually, I just thought of something else... what happens when a player busts up a pirate den and liberates all of their stolen cargo?

I think the player should be able to "sell" stolen cargo to the police as evidence, which increases the faction standing with the police and provides a very small bounty per pod.

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Surgeon-General's Warning: Early test cases of Torn Stars have resulted in fatalities. The errors in the software should be gone by now. Hopefully.

I will detail the basic pirate concept. We can talk it over. Maybe we don't need fences at all.

Pirates that are easy to find are easy for the Navy to kill. The core idea behind pirates is fast moving. A "pirate base" is mostly just a rock that pirates gather around. Even these pirate bases tend not to survive in areas with strong government control.

A fence is a ship with contacts inside a legitimate station that it can use to launder the stolen cargo it picks up. The fence picks up the goods for a fraction of the real price, runs them through the station, and sells them for new. This is what allows a fence to pay a "high" price for the cargo.

Fences can slip off into deep space if police show up. Or appear as legitimate shipping via those station contacts. Fences can survive in the government systems where pirate raiders and thugs just get killed.

From a meta game perspective, fences are major pirate cash cows as they also siphon funds off of stations via embezzlement. Corporate security is always trying to find and remove them. Some interesting (future) possibilities come up if station masters can be legal or corrupt. Pirates need corrupt ones, and can assassinate the current one to get a new station master promoted.

I think the idea of a pirate base that can buy cargo, like a fence, still works with your pirate concept GrandpaTrout. We could have only pirate bases buying cargo, not pirate coves. Pirate bases could be placed in border systems only, such as the Barrens or Dead Reaches.

I like your concept alot. Makes sense. I am just thinking that an actual 'pirate base', operating not unlike other stations, might be a little bit more intuitive for new players. (Then again, they still have to actually find the Pirate Base, so...)

How about everyone who has tried this system now? How easy is it to figure out where to sell cargo?

I think the root of the issue is the concept of Illegal Cargo itself. We needed it to make life harder on pirates. Now that I have seen the new reputation system at work for a while, I don't think we need Illegal Cargo.

Instead, the player can sell cargo at any station. But, if he is pirating, he will be slowly lowering the number of stations that will purchase cargo. The prices will be going slowly down. Unless he picks his targets with care, he will soon have no buyers.

That makes life easy on the new player, and progressively harder on the better and better players. Which is exactly what you want to happen. Plus it forces a pirate to move on to greener pastures, so to speak, as he gets well known.

It wouldn't hurt to add cargo purchasing to pirate bases. Use a supply category, because it has less impact on the economy calculations. The only drawback here is that the economy has no mechanism for paying the player a fraction of value. The player will get full value for the economy.

Piracy is more dangerous because of the reputation system, and there is less cargo around. So paying full price won't really unbalance things. Not like EoC traffic which was swarming and packed with pods.

[Edit]

Stations could pay a discounted price for stolen cargo. And the total discount could be listed, so the player can see it happening and know why. That should be clear enough to allow it to work, and yet not generate a bunch more questions. And it would make it easier to balance pirating and legal trade.

Well, I imagine pirate bases actually would put a premium on certain basic neccesities, such as fuel, air, food, and so on, but only to a certain limited number of pods per category (only meant for actual use, not resale)... After all, by definition they're far off the beaten track and are quite unlikely to be visited by too many legit freighters ^^, Precious metals and neutronium may pay the bills, but you can't very well eat or breathe 'em, you know? Fuel and any other consumable would be VERY dear too, I'm sure.

This would provide a reasonable excuse for allowing strictly limited quantity but full-price sales of neccessities, whether or not they are stolen. A stolen chicken probably tastes just fine . This also adds an interesting possibility of a "grey-market" type of career, supplying pirate bases with various volatiles/edibles/spare parts/etc. - but only meant for actual station consumption - without trafficking in stolen cargo at all! Such a player would have to know several pirate bases' locations and have a suitable mix of pods, since they could only sell a few to each base.

A pirate cove might actually pay an even higher price for the same items, but at even lower quantities.

By limited quantities, I also mean only a few (or even just one) CATEGORY of these items, and just as limited per category, at any given time. So, perhaps, a pirate cove pays full (or even 110% or more) price for 1 pod of liquid air and 3 pods of fuel from a friendly trader/fellow pirate, but that's IT, bub, now piss off! [|)]

How's that for a compromise?