What about pirates in Star Citizen?

What about them? All right, go on, Tony. Tell them about pirates.

Pirates are going to wind up being one of the more interesting, I wouldn't say character classes since we don't really have, as I mentioned at one of the panels earlier, the formal concept of a character class. You can be anything you want just depending upon what your skill set is, how you've outfitted your character and your ship. One of the most interesting aspects about pirates is basically they're constantly engaged in theft and smuggling. And so there are a lot of game mechanics that we're going to wind up having that are tilted towards allowing them to surreptitiously sneak cargo past the authorities. There are ways that they will be able to jam the distress beacons, I mentioned, that ships can send out. And so for a lot of pirates, they'll have to adopt different tactics depending upon where the cargo that they're actually assaulting is. Inside of a very secure zone, a UEE zone, they're probably going to wind up needing to jam the distress beacon of a ship before they actually assault it. They're going to potentially employ stealth tactics so that they could possibly board a ship before the captain actually knows what's happening. In some cases, they could actually wind up boarding a ship, ejecting the cargo, and by the time the captain actually figures out what's going on and sends out a message to the authorities, and there's a lag time before the UEE forces would actually arrive to provide assistance, or other mercenaries for that fact, the pirate ship would have already tractor beamed in a good chunk of the more valuable pieces of that cargo and basically high-tailed it out of there.

And so one of the conversations that Chris and I were having earlier was just how far we wanted to go with all of the different means by which pirates could basically be dissuaded by players from daring to attack their ship. And one of the ways is obviously it depends upon the cargo that you're planning to carry. If you're carrying information, if you're carrying an individual politician or something that's particularly small, then the best way to get through heavily infested areas of pirate-controlled space might be to just adopt the fastest ship possible so that you can just outrun them. On the other hand, if you're transporting large quantities of some type of ore, then you're going to want to utilize a ship that's got a good set of armor, very strong shields, probably some weaponry. You're probably going to want to hire some very capable NPCs to man your turrets to help fend them off. Because even if you're able to get a call out to the authorities to provide assistance, there's going to be a lag time. It's going to take a minute, two minutes, three minutes, and so you're going to need to basically be able to take a few punches before help can get there. On the other hand, depending upon the cargo you're carrying and how lucrative the mission is, you may want to go on over to the TDD and wind up basically hiring a number of escort ships to go with you through these pirate-infested areas such that you've essentially got your own little battle convoy. And in such cases, as the pirates come in and are basically trying to assault your ship, take it out, all of the guys that are protecting you would automatically swarm in to anyone that's actually targeted your ship and basically try to take them out.

Yeah, I mean, I think the other thing as far as the pirates goes, we talked about what you do if pirates are attacking you. But pirates themselves have a bunch of tools. On the outer edge of the galaxy, there's no law and order. You don't care so much. But the idea is that you still could essentially go and perform a heist. So for instance, if you got intel that there was this shipment of gold bullion going from planet A to planet B, that's probably a fairly high value target. So at that point, you and some friends, maybe you go pay for a variant of the Avenger that's a Warlock that has a whole EM jamming system. But you basically have a ship that can jam all the communications, and you in concert with two or three of your pirate buddies will be able to take out the ship. Now, that probably wouldn't make a lot of sense to go to all that effort to attack some new player that just started in an Aurora. It definitely would make it worth your time to go after someone that's literally got some valuable shipment. So you'll be able to do that. You'll be able to have fake ship ID codes, jam stuff, take stuff to basically a fence or a chop shop in the outer worlds.

Some ships will have special cargo holds that are less detectable by authorities. You'll be able to mask the signatures. Cargo is much easier to smuggle in and out as opposed to ships. If you're in a very secure area and you're flying through in a ship that you picked off of some guy, you're going to just draw constant attention from the authorities. If, on the other hand, you've pilfered some cargo, as long as you maintain a sufficient level of distance from any military ships in your area, then you can probably navigate through a given system without too much trouble. We talked earlier, too, about how much more difficult it is to actually unload those goods. Stealing cargo, stealing ships, et cetera, it's really just half the battle for a pirate. The other side, of course, is where are you going to sell it? And there are some systems like Nyx that we mentioned earlier that are much more willing to allow you to sell these pilfered goods, as opposed to a Terra Prime or ArcCorp, where you will not be able to go anywhere near them. You will not be able to sell anything at those types of places. What this means also is that for the goods that you'll wind up selling, you're not going to get nearly as good a price as you would if they were actually legitimate. There is a cost to stealing a Hornet, you're not going to get the full retail transaction price. And so these all just become other metrics by which pirates need to determine whether or not the missions that they're undertaking are worth it: the amount of damage they're going to take to their ship, the ammo they're going to expend, the cost to basically hire their own NPC crew members, or possibly a player to actually do a fantastic job of manning that distress signal disruptor so that the captain can't get a signal out to request help from authorities or from any mercenaries that are in the area that are willing to provide assistance.