Frontier provides defined system security states. HIGH SECURITY, MEDIUM SECURITY, LOW SECURITY and ANARCHY. Julias Ceaser et al. notwithstanding These seem entirely "sufficient to depict the setting consistent with Frontier's vision of the game" to me.
Open Play and Crime and Punishment; a Proposed Holistic Approach
- Thread starter CMDR Kai Zen
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I'm actually OK with this concept. But just know that when you come to a party and take a dump in the punch bowl you gotta be ready to reap the whirlwind yourself. So yeah, you wanna throw hands... fine. But be ready to catch them as well. Right?
That's... literally what we do when we play in open right now. Last week I was pirating someone, and some completely unrelated dude that wasn't in his wing decided to jump in when he saw hatchbreakers flying. He had a cutter. I had to disengage instead of scooping the loot.
I came back with a torpedoboat and ended his mining session.
Pfft. What whirlwind? The vast majority of CMDRs couldn't find a hand to throw if it was attached to their arm.
But of course we all know you mean FDEV to take care of you, don't you? Hope you haven't been holding your breath for the past couple years.
I play OPEN ONLY, I'm not waiting on anyone to do anything for me. This proposal is about trying to get more people to come over from Solo. So, yeah tough talk but no point behind it because I'm not waiting for FDEV to protect ME in the slightest. But thanks for playing the "sound tough while not making any sense game"
I play OPEN ONLY, I'm not waiting on anyone to do anything for me. This proposal is about trying to get more people to come over from Solo. So, yeah tough talk but no point behind it because I'm not waiting for FDEV to protect ME in the slightest. But thanks for playing the "sound tough while not making any sense game"
Why are you protecting those who won't lift a hand in their own defense?
Because of the petty bullies who I hear of taking out the noobwinders of brand new players with an hour in the game from their fully engineered FDL's. That doesn't sit right with me. Because I've been in multiple wings that form up to go engage and suddenly those same "brave PVP players" don't feel like playing when its not against a sidey and instead run. That is some coward crap. Are you saying that the Reapers are good with that? I thought better of them... Are you not intrigued by a rolling full PVP everywhere system that could pay you well to get good fights? Would you not like to see more players in OPEN? Would you not like the added ability to loot your kills? I know who you are and unlike troll boy, I actually would be interested in your honest response. Read thru my proposal and really tell me what you think. Would you not enjoy being the hand of God taking out the petty bullies while cashing in hundreds of mil off their heads?
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The Reapers are good with whatever they want to be good with. Doesn't matter to me. Or them. Transparent attempts to shame me based on hoping I fear my friends might not like what I have to say isn't just hilarious, but pathetic.
What I'm intrigued by is the fact you don't understand the difference between can't and won't. The Noobwinder that gets nuked and then embarks on the Journey of Getting Good? That one is worth your time. The others? Sod 'em.
As far as hands of god go... you don't want an interesting game. You want a power fantasy driven by revenge. No thanks!
Wasn't trying to shame you in the slightest and I don't care what your friends think of your opinions I was merely stating that I had a higher opinion of the Reapers that I have known. But hey, opinions can be modified with further data. I was asking for an honest conversation and you seem to only want to bicker. OK, go be sour. I'm gonna go have a beer.
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So far you've shown no evidence that you're interested in reading anything that doesn't agree with your existing preconceptions. Anyone who disagrees with you, you accuse of being trolls.
Like this? He gave you a conversation, one that happened to disagree with you, and you accuse him of being dishonest and declare yourself above the conversation.
And you accuse me of arrogance.
And the fact you are writing wall of text replies says quite a lot about you.
Its an Open letter. I've seen a few. This is definitely one.
What about the point I made about currently being able to play your way out of situations in game currently? Do you disagree?
What is your true opinion of Open? Is it less dangerous than people think or are there large numbers of gankers killing noobs?
Which is it?
I think many people, yourself included, are attributing aspects to system security level that aren't implied by the setting. Indeed, many of the factors that are intended to influence system security level become highly impractical, or rely on that that security level to be applied overtly inconsistently (e.g. largely ignoring crimes against NPCs when those are the ones that should actually matter to the systems in question), in some of the systems proposed.
You are taking aspects of the BGS that are intended to be descriptive, malleable, ways to shape CMDR interaction with the setting, then trying to make them into proscriptive bludgeons.
And, of course, Crossing the Rubicon and a nominally 'high security' system aren't mutually exclusive. Nor are high ranking military commands being held by those guilty of ostensibly treasonous, capital crimes, particularly incongruous. Consequences for failure of analogous and associated acts are lacking, as are the consequences for almost everything in ED.
Wait, hang on. What do you mean by "anarchy states" here?
Killing NPCs in a system will result in the Civil Unrest state (or Lockdown if you really kill a lot of them) which somewhat affects the security level for a system but will generally not push it to Anarchy on its own.
If you mean that these rules shouldn't apply when the controlling faction is in Civil Unrest or Lockdown that's a very different situation (and a much more interesting one!)
Yes, in theory, anyone can work a system to be Anarchy government, but there is a mysterious force [1] which means that systems tend to drift away from Anarchy over time. Give people an actual incentive via this proposal to get rid of the rest, and they would disappear pretty quickly too ... which just leaves uninhabited space, so what, Distant Ganks 2 was fine but the battle at a Fed-Imp competitive CG spilling out of the CZs a little is super-bad and should be condemned?
[1] Not even slightly mysterious. Sorry. Extremely well understood force, really. But still the Club's fault, of course.
How does the game automatically, reliably, without trivial exploits, determine that the other player is "not a combatant"?
This is the key problem, I feel.
The C&P system needs to be "soft" enough that firing on a clean combatant ship is allowed. Otherwise, when a player bounty hunter comes to get the player pirate (and let's strawman and say they're a perfect semi-lawful pirate who only has assault bounties for the hatchbreaking) ... the pirate must instantly high-wake because returning fire is punished severely. That's not actually fun for bounty hunter or pirate.
I put some more examples of firing on clean combatants up-thread: another piracy-related one, and one related to my time as an explorer escort - I'm sure you don't want escorting explorers to be subject to severe penalties, right?
And your proposal doesn't attempt to distinguish "clean ship that is not a combatant" from "clean ship" at all, except for voluntary flagging in - so a player bounty hunter can shoot an assault-wanted pirate and not be a valid target for return fire if the two players aren't also in the PvP league. And, well, in that situation the bounty hunter has a good incentive not to be! (Likewise, in the exploration escort scenario, our disposable gank-Vulture certainly won't be opted in to the league, they're here to gank with impunity, not to be legally shot at by escort pilots)
A noobwinder can be taken out, equally quickly, with an unengineered Vulture or similar.
If the new player doesn't know how to evade, doesn't realise they should run soon enough, etc, it can be taken out by an unengineered Cobra flown by someone also pretty new. (The only time I lost a ship to a hostile player outside of an arranged or planned fight, it was my Noobwinder, and it was a novice player in a Cobra doing the shooting. I got their shields down, though...)
Good for you. Same here, though not for a long time. (Though mine didn't run, they fired back. Maybe we get a better class of ganker out in Colonia. Who knows.)
Under the current C&P rules, I've fired on known gankers who were locally-Clean, because it was pretty obvious what they were hanging around in their battle Cutter to do, and I didn't feel the need to wait for them to kill someone before trying (unsuccessfully, but it was fun anyway) to chase them out of the system.
Under these rules, I would need to wait for them to each kill at least one target, or rely on the gankers being good sports and running crimes-off themselves. This does not seem like an improvement for the cause of law.
(Go and ask SPEAR - who sell themselves as PvP protectors of the weak against gankers - how many locally-Clean player ships they've destroyed this year. It's probably been quite a lot, and they will I'm sure explain to you in great detail why every single one of them was a ganker and had it coming. Can your proposal allow them to continue? Probably not.)
To reverse the situation, if a ganker shows up in Colonia, and a call-to-arms goes out when I've got a bit of spare time, there's a chance I might grab my FDL out of storage and go help out shooting at them. (Not, I have to admit, a very high chance nowadays, but send me a wing invite in game if you see one)
I'm not going to sign up to the PvP league to do that: my normal routine is spent flying around in a Krait II which can run away from PvPers just fine but doesn't have the defences to stick around for a proper fight. I'd show up, shoot the ganker, go back to my normal stuff. So I won't be a "combatant" by the terms of the proposal when I go to help hunt them down ... if I get killed due to being about four years out of practice that's entirely my fault, and them shooting back at me is entirely legitimate.
So again, you can't use "flagged for the PvP league" and "valid combatant" as equivalent.
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My main account is a Reaper, I can solidly back Phisto's reply: The pathetic blowing up of new players is something that only those who do such consider sport (although more often than not it appears to be the only way to entice alleged 'Lawful' groups to engage) but aside from that, it is a dystopian galaxy out there...
I think an excellent interpretation of your proposals has been made quite succinctly:
You know as well as I that those clean ships still have the same human piloting them as the 'filthy criminal scum CMDR' so are just an alias of the perp...
(Which is why my non-reaper accounts were considered 'fair game' despite no bounties from anywhere in the galaxy!)
To add to my above post
One of the big reasons I don't actively do PvP any more is that I was only ever going to do the "lawful" side of it, and it rapidly became clear that the people I would nominally have been protecting [1] had an opinion of what legitimate "rules of engagement" would be that was completely unworkable and would leave me unable - in their eyes - to fire on SDC about half the time.
So, fair enough, I thought. SDC are not valid targets for an anti-gank wing. You heard it from their targets first. And I changed profession to theoretical BGS researcher and left both sides to it.
[1] Not the explorers I escorted back in my Iridium Wing days, those were all great people. But their main threat was the NPCs, the toast rack, forgetting that they'd turned their sensors off six months ago, etc. And they didn't object to me firing on things that wanted them dead.
One of the big reasons I don't actively do PvP any more is that I was only ever going to do the "lawful" side of it, and it rapidly became clear that the people I would nominally have been protecting [1] had an opinion of what legitimate "rules of engagement" would be that was completely unworkable and would leave me unable - in their eyes - to fire on SDC about half the time.
So, fair enough, I thought. SDC are not valid targets for an anti-gank wing. You heard it from their targets first. And I changed profession to theoretical BGS researcher and left both sides to it.
[1] Not the explorers I escorted back in my Iridium Wing days, those were all great people. But their main threat was the NPCs, the toast rack, forgetting that they'd turned their sensors off six months ago, etc. And they didn't object to me firing on things that wanted them dead.
That's true, but there's more to it than that: it needs to be "soft" because it's literally impossible to commit murder in the game.
There is NO death, our CMDR's can never die. The worst thing that can happen if someone makes your pixel spaceship go boom is just a minor annoyance. You get rescued 100% of the time, respawn at the closest station, lose a pretty much meaningless amount of credits and that's about it.
But you won't lose 1000's of hours of progression, won't get sidewindered (unless you are a complete idiot) and definitely won't have to pick a different CMDR name to start the whole game over.
If "death" (as described above) was actually a thing in the game, I'd understand the most draconic penalties, although I bet that it would be the carebears, not the gankers, who would cry the most loudly because of it. But as things stand now, ingame "murder" is more equivalent to some petty IRL crime like pickpocketing, and is quite understandably treated as such by the C&P.
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But I still don't understand why we'd use it. If you want PvP interactions while flying in open you turn off crimes so that your opponents don't get bounties for the PvP you're seeking. If you don't want PvP interactions while flying in open you keep crimes on so that assailants are penalised.
How would an artificial scoreboard improve organic PvP when the participation reward goes to people that least need it (less rebuys, because they win), the people that most need the financial reward to take part get less (so would it cover rebuys if you're bad but flag yourself as a target)?
When a scoreboard itself can always be gamed and is ultimately meaningless, and we already track k/d if we want to, and any discussion about implementing some sort of ranking system using existing third party tools usually results in "but people would game their position in it anyway so why would we", why do we want an FDev implemented one when we know that the leaderboards for squadrons activities absolutely are hotbeds of groups cheesing their way to the top to get trophies without the effort?
How is this making PvP interactions in the game more meaningful and therefore more appealing than the sort of organic that we already do have?
How does this embed PvP activities as valid parts of BGS and power play when, realistically, anybody doing those things that would be in private group will now just not opt in to PvP flags so anyone interrupting them in Open would now just get enhanced C&P response for it?
How does this do anything to make players flying in Open more prepared that if they encounter another player as part of BGS, power play etc, they should reasonably be prepared and have the knowledge base for how to respond to that engagement without simply getting dumpstered then calling foul and blaming gankers? ie. how to build ships, how to use pips, how to high wake, how to fight back - as part of in game tutorials. As it stands people that haven't opted in to a PvP flag will see complaints about "non-consent" and gankers as even more valid if they get interrupted attacking someone's BGS in open.
Why are you so condescending about what your proposal provides when none of you seem to have spoken about its contents with the PvP community in advance? How is it surprising that people think it's an unappealing waste of energy that just reinforces existing problems, if you didn't actually do anything to address the issues that PvPers have?
Here's a really simple, un-complicated thing to implement for making PvP activity in open more substantive and to give people a reward for doing it. In addition to open weighted rewards for activity, to encourage people to do BGS in open, make it so that player kills in a CZ get you a significantly larger combat bond and a much bigger progression on the completion bar. That way, people doing CZs in open are incentivised to be tooled to respond to player interactions and can develop specialists for different scenarios and engagements, without it being a sidequest waste of time to get a player kill at the expense of grinding NPCs.
We don't need to reinvent the wheel to make people better aware of how the game works. We don't need to break everything to implement overly complicated solutions that don't even address the existing problems.
Explorers aside, of course.
But this proposal does very little to protect them anyway even in its harshest form, and if anything with the "Outer Rim" part of the idea increases the danger they're in by making any uninhabited system within 30 LY of an inhabited one a giant NPC hellhole [1] in addition to the existing player risk.
...which also would be terrible for the noobwinders. With a <10LY range getting from A to B even in the middle of the bubble often requires passing through an uninhabited system or two.
Those fancy established players with their engineered FSDs and Guardian boosters can of course just set their map to "plot via inhabited only" and ignore it, established explorers can jump right over it when getting in and out, so it only really gets beginners.
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