Believe it or not, this was intended to enhance piracy - by facilitating an easier ransom/surrender of ships. I thought making more ISK (PLEX) and capturing actual intact ships might be appealing, but I guess I was wrong…
Let’s chalk this up to an interesting idea - but problematic implementing.
But you can actually do that. Your suggestion isn’t enhancing it, it’s limiting my choices. I have done it, several times. You just stop shooting and convo the guy, then offering him to let him go if he sends you xyz ISK. If he also stops shooting, you can negotiate for the price a bit until you come to an agreement. And if he pays, you decide if you want to honor that agreement (building yourself a reputation) or if you want to betray him (also building yourself a reputation). It’s part of yours and his gaming experience, content and progression “as a player”.
And tbh, piracy - at least outside of HS - isn’t about making ISK with it. Its about the hunt, the fight, the thrill, the kill. It’s content, it’s fun. Getting a “free ship” instead of a shiny killmail? Heck, no. And if I wanted, I could always offer him to eject and save the pod.
Actually, it wasn’t (or at least it wasn’t intended that way). You could reverse it around, ie: the attackers offer up the surrender/ransom - but I’m not sure it would make a lot of difference.
As long as there aren’t any timers or restrictions involved, nothing speaks against a clear “‘I surrender!’ or ‘Do you surrender?’” signal, just in case one side has blocked convos, doesn’t read local or ignores mails. But this message should of course also be blockable in the options and should not obstruct combat or prevent/delay the attacker from doing anything he wishes to do.
And everything else is up to the parties negotiating.
The idea behind the timer(s) was to enforce the parlay. If that doesn’t appeal to you, I can certainly appreciate that.
of course it doesn’t. Who should enforce that? And how? Magic? In the midst of nowhere deep in outer space?
It would totally break immersion and violate lore. Why should a pirate be unable to pull a trigger even after accepting money? How should that work (lore wise)? Why should a ship become suddenly invulnerable after making a deal with a pirate, but can’t get invulnerable in an emergency situation shortly before blowing up? If that machinery that would create this invulnerability field would somehow exist on the ship, why not using it during combat?
Sorry, but it simply makes no sense, creates artificial limitations the game doesn’t need, essentially making the game a worse experience. The whole topic looks to me as if you aren’t a pirate, have never done such things and simply don’t know how things work out there as a small piracy group doing piracy stuff… maybe test it and we talk again after you are a -10 permaflashy pirate with somethousand kills? So we both know what the actual thing is that you are trying to change?
I could see a point in the proposed change, but I’d drop the invulnerability completely.
Classically, pirates can warp their (in)famous bomber, dessie, battlecruiser or whatever they like swarm onto a sieged highsec crab, tackle and engage it, and contact the crab offering it to ransom itself out. The pirates can prepare this part, i.e. open the private chat page or prepare an ingame mail, where they state their terms, before starting the engagement. However, the crab will get a potential ingame mail receival notification only among a dozen “kill permit received” notifications, potentially not noticing the the mail, while private conversation requests tend to appear in the background of other windows (this needs to be fixed nevertheless). Nevertheless, the victim has to notice the pirate fleet’s attempt to contact him, read their terms and “process” their demands in very little time, before the pirates can stop their aggression. In highsec, CONCORD is more or less forcing the pirates to make sure there is little time to accept it.
Even if the victim was to accept the demands of the pirates, the situation where some members of the pirate fleet have their client crash or lose internet connection, in which case their ships continue the last action they were doing while their client was healthy, and continue shooting the victim despite it having payed the ransom, has to be mitigated. Right now, the pirate fleet commander can pay back the ransom or even the ransom as well as compensation for the ship, but as @Syzygium has pointed out, the incident still dishonors him and his corporation.
I’d rather see a built in interface to streamline the ransoming process. Accepting a ransom offer should spin down all aggressive modules on all aggressed capsuleers, and, to all fleet members, disallow spinning them up (again) for 10 seconds. Automatically Spinning down the modules addresses the disconnected client issue. The 10 second timer is in order to mitigate some BLOPS fleet or dessie gang that has it’s usually present multiboxers alt tabbing through their alts in the moment the fleet commander accepts the ransom spin down his mods on the first x alts but just aggress on the x+1 th alt in the interval beween the FC accepts the ransom and the multiboxer realizes it was accepted. If the pirates feel like dishonoring their FC’s ransom deal, they can drop fleet and re-aggress, or bring some out-of-fleet members in the first place, that will not be distinguishable to the victim, so it pays a bribe and gets wrecked nevertheless.
In case the gankers don’t ask for ransom as they start aggressing, a victim might want to offer some instead. However, the local chat has been broken for longer then it has worked in the last 4 years, so it can’t be reliably used for communication (this needs to be fixed nevertheless), while starting a private chat might not be straightforwardly possible in the event the victim doesn’t know who of the pirates to direct the offer to. In that case, using the streamlined ransom interface should automatically redirect the offer to the FC.
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