And a suggestion to address abuse of game mechanics whilst fulfilling a sci-fi trope. I have been pursuing piracy gameplay rigorously since 3.0. I have a channel full of videos showing it in play. Not this theory crafting BS that people like to do, actual gameplay, against actual players. I am now at the point with piracy gameplay where I am seldom surprised with the plethora of end results that piracy encounters can end in. And the following is my prediction on how piracy encounters will evolve: Combat (bed) logging amongst cargo haulers will increase exponentially. Then destroying ships on sight will increase to deal with the combat logging cargo haulers. Then Self destruct will increase to combat pirates destroying cargo haulers. For 3.17, the two most common outcomes are now either an Alt+F4 or a Bed log. Alt+F4ing is not a viable method anymore with the majority of ships persisting for long enough to stop and board Bed logging is still viable for cheesing out of an encounter, but that won't be the case forever and isn't the focus of my thread. CIG is working on combat logging, so I will comment on it when they reveal what they have when they're ready to. Ideally CIG drops a solution to this in 3.18 since the evolution of player pirate behaviors will probably still happen due to bed logging allowing players to cheese their way out of gameplay I have pirated hundreds of players and the amount of players who are willing to cheese their way out of the consequences for their lack of preparation is shameful and concerning. At the time of writing this post, there are a significant number of players who are not only advocating for cheesing their way out of gameplay through the abuse of current self destruct mechanics, but also demanding that CIG enable their behavior by making current mechanics more punishing to those who engage in intended gameplay. The main demand being that: destroying ships should not result in any cargo surviving And I agree with them to a certain point. In my opinion, pirates should be focusing on boarding ships. That should be their main motivation for earning credits. Max risk, Max profit. Destroying a ship and scooping the remains should be plan B. Shoot and scoop, shouldn't be something for pirate players to aspire to. That's not the same as not being allowed, I consider shoot and scoop to be the lowest tier of piracy gameplay, but pirates have to start somewhere. I know that the current iteration of ship destruction through damage will change in the future with physicalised damage, so I am not going to bother talking about that until we get physicalised damage into our hands. However, self destruct does need a proper look at it because in it's current iteration it is prime for abuse. You can already see the Spectrum posts and replies now with players stating that they will happily destroy their own ship to spite the pirates. Whilst Spectrum is a small section of the SC community and the players advocating against pirates getting anything are slightly smaller, my own personal experience playing as a pirate in SC informs me that the chain of events is inevitable and will be a lot wider spread than most people understand. It's obvious that these players want to be able to give the final "F you" to pirates, denying them any potential profit and that doesn't bother me. If you want to "cut your own nose off to spite your own face", you do you. However with the current Self Destruct mechanic, the counter to this behavior is for pirates to go for the jugular from the get go, torp the target, scoop the remains and move on since ship boardings take so long to do and self destruct is so short. And that is boring! What I would like to see from CIG is that they iterate on the current self destruct mechanic to try to encourage pirates to go for the boarding action first, whilst also providing cargo haulers the opportunity to call for reinforcements and if they get none, the ability to try to give the big "F you". The Sci-Fi trope of Self Destruct Regardless if it's a hostile life form taking over or the ship contains sensitive equipment or information, the ship cannot be allowed to survive. This is a common sci-fi trope and I don't think it should be any different in Star Citizen. However we have an issue, the current mechanic of self destruct doesn't fulfill the movie experience. It's too short and doesn't feel impactful. Small ships take 10 seconds to explode Medium Ships 30-45 seconds (depending on the ship) Large Ships 60 seconds And that is all off of one button press... Disabling, stopping and boarding a ship takes significantly more time and effort than it does to self destruct your ship. And the motivation to conduct ship boardings is being diminished greatly by leaving the self destruct mechanic as it currently functions. My suggestions For 3.18 make destruction of the target either through self destruct or high explosive ordnance (ie: torpedoes), wipe out most of the cargo (< 25%) increase the time it takes for self destruct to go off to encourage ship boardings and repelling boarders Future iterations CIG actually decides on how self destruct works in their game. The video below has a section on Self Destruct and it didn't sound like they had it locked down then and nothing has been said about it since then either. Time stamp for the video below is 25:55 if it doesn't start from there. Or make Self Destruct a state that you can put the Power plant into. Ship state switching to an "emergency mode", lights, sirens and APB to nearby ships informing them that Self destruct has been initiated Player assigned SD timer with the amount of time set resulting in a specific level of destruction. Max time = maximum destruction Hackable component that requires a code to override the self destruct Add a point of no return threshold so that the crew defending the ship don't have to go down with it every time and the only way to defeat it, is by removing the components going critical and getting them as far away from everything as possible It is purely coincidence that the video below is almost 2 years old to the day... tldr: For 3.18, deliberate destruction should wipe out nearly all of the cargo on a cargo hauler. Self destruct timers should be increased to be long enough that a pirate crew can disable and board the target ship to disable the self destruct and seize it's cargo. Discourage shoot and scoop piracy from becoming the only viable method of making credits as a pirate.