Agreed. I had to be reminded of this the other day when we were all discussing this in detail.
Open Play and Crime and Punishment; a Proposed Holistic Approach
- Thread starter CMDR Kai Zen
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That I am unsure of. With credit earnings the way they are and with the balancing happening it's hard to say what would be a prohibitive cost in regards to what can be earned in credits/hour for various activities. Definitely have a security response that is capable of making it difficult. The fines and bounties applied would have to be well balanced. Non-consensual PVP should still be able to happen, with penalties, but not at the rate it is now. I also think being able to live and avoid having your bounty claimed should be rewarded, and I'm not talking about leaving the game on overnight while docked to clear notoriety, there should be a game play loop. Offering the PVP solution as you did to flag oneself for it I think will take most of the bored PVPers away from ganking and more into hunting each other, especially if they can be tracked via the Galmap.
It may take a couple kicks at the can as it were to find the happy medium, and in the end I'm sure many will still hate it.
Ozric
Volunteer Moderator
I did indeed miss that distinction, as did others.
Wow, that's a really nice attitude.
Bingo. And outside of CGs or that day's best-price mining system, anywhere you do meet a player there's little to no chance of them carrying anything worth stealing - and anyone that does have anything worth stealing has every reason to go there in solo.
Add to that the fact that people are prone to just mashing the menu button the instant a hatchbreaker comes in (assuming they don't log out as soon as you send them a message) and piracy is frustrating at the best of times. To make matters worse, most people, upon being interdicted, will flip and run without even looking at chat because - what a surprise - they have no way to tell whether you're a pirate or a ganker.
Seriously, a couple of days ago I was doing my pirate thing. I'd followed a mark into the ring and was watching them from outside sensor range for them to mine some rocks so they'd have something to steal - only for an FDL that had followed me into the ring to blast past me and demolish them in a single volley.
This being an unpopulated anarchy system, there was no crime there. But the thing is, that very same day I sent two other miners to the rebuy screen for picking option C when presented with "Drop 20 painite or I hatchbreak you. If you attempt to run I will open fire." - how exactly is any automated system supposed to distinguish between demolishing some random miner just for being downrange of your weapons, and blowing them up for refusing to comply with a demand? What, if you manifest scan them first then you're a pirate? All that'll do is get gankers to fit fast scanners and wait for the scan to finish before opening fire.
They wouldn't even need to be winged up - all the necessary comms can be done out of game - and a stealthed Sidewinder with enhanced drives could be pretty hard to spot until it was too late in the chaos of a fight, if the enemy ship is filling your screen with multicannon fire to block your view.
And yes, it's an unsolvable issue. The problem is that at the moment, it doesn't matter that it's unsolvable, because the consequences for accidentally hitting the stealth Sidewinder are fairly minor - a bit of a bounty, a bit of notoriety, nothing too bad. So gankers don't keep a pet stealth Sidewinder in their flight group because what's the point?
Once it starts being a good way to get "lawful PvPers" who don't have perfect aim some multi-billion bounties? Then there's a bit of an incentive to actually start trying it.
I'm not being at all facetious here. This is a really serious problem with every "make C&P much harsher" proposal.
We've already been through this twice - once with "make station ramming illegal" and a second time with the 3.0 reforms - making C&P harsher deters habitual criminals who can plan for its effects very slightly ... and hits people who aren't 100% familiar with every niche and loophole of the C&P rules like a tonne of bricks.
Sure, it'd be funny for the gankers if the people currently complaining about their 200 credit assault bounties for not paying attention around NPCs, and 100LY trips back from the detention centre, to instead be complaining about their 200 million credit bounties and total ship destruction at the hands of some lawful vigilante (or more likely, the ganker's friend) who now has a lucrative but extremely poorly defended easy target.
But, you know, watch your aim, you shouldn't have been in Open with that sort of target discipline if you didn't want a 200 million murder bounty from the local joker, everyone knows that.
If one stray shot (plus the Sidewinder then suicide-ramming me) is enough to get me a 200 million bounty, then I'd want it to be pretty close to perfect.
Now sure, you might not. You might be happy to take that risk every time you log in. Me - who has never killed another player outside an arranged duel - I'd give up and go to Solo, thanks. Not worth the hassle.
Under this system, you would need to learn to Pirate better, equip a wake scanner and follow the miner. Interdict them while they are passing through anarchy space.
RE: They wouldn't need to be winged... That wing statement was referring to a hypothetical of making wanted targets wing members legal targets - it had nothing to do with communication.
So a couple things; being placed into this ranking system and getting the 100% ship value bounty would only apply to actual murders. Not misfires. In the case of suicidewinders and the like, that needs to be addressed by including Crime & Punishment education as part of the new player experience. A huge part of real pilot training is learning the laws you must abide by, I don't see why it should be any different in Elite, especially given the consequences.
As far as baiting people to shoot you or crossing in front of peoples weapon fire, the game gives feedback. If you accidentally shot someone who intentionally tricked you/dove in front of you they are likely going to kill you and you are unlikely to finish the job on them. If you do, then you did it on purpose because the interface gives me ample, constant warnings when attacking someone.
And as far as the bounty being "harsh", the new players that need to be protected are accounted for in the design of using ship value to assign the value. If you are in a loaned sidewinder with loaned outfitting the thing literally has no value and thus no bounty can be applied. By the time you get into a ship worth multiple millions you have likely gotten to the point of knowing how not to murder another player on accident. If you haven't then that's a lesson learned.
As far as suicidewinders are concerned though that'd be the only real problem with this system aside from the "It's not purrrfect" maybe something could be done specifically about that method of tricking people. Such as the loitering zone around the mailslot being extended or exempting "first ram kills" from the system? Or simply expecting people to not speed or suffer the consequences.
Wouldn't work.
Suppose I'm a trader/miner. I fly out and high wake to my next system with a full hold and notice there was a ship hanging around where I jumped. I get jittery and decide to emergency drop as soon as I'm in the next system.
The pirate turns up and sees... nothing. The wake already disappeared.
Or I just plot a route through inhabited systems (galmap- economy- remove 'none'- apply selection to route)
How am I supposed to interdict or wake scan someone that just logged out, got blown up by a ganker, or was never in open in the first place, did you even read?
More of that sort of thing is fine, always room for Frontier to be improving the tutorials, but I think that this is ending up taking things in the wrong direction.
The game is already incredibly complex from the point of view of a complete beginner - and sure, once you know it all, actually most of it is quite simple systems really, but there are a lot of them, and a quick glance over the forums will show that even plenty of experienced players are unfamiliar with the details of many of them because it just doesn't come up for them much in normal gameplay. And at the moment it's okay because the consequences for a one-off mistake are pretty small, really.
At the moment:
- people can shoot you in Open
- you can shoot back, not that it's likely to do any good
- you lose a little bit of money if you die (not very much if you're still in a Freewinder, and ...
... die?) and it's only 5% of ship value anyway.
- and still some people don't think that's worth facing and go Solo/PG instead, which is fair enough.
With this:
- you start out needing to be trained up in the intricacies of the C&P system ... which if it's official Frontier training won't say "and here are all the really dangerous loopholes in our rules you have to be aware of", it'll just say "don't shoot other players, avoid Anarchy systems, here's the legal PvP league you can join, etc."
- if you forget or get careless at any time, someone can exploit the documented loopholes to stick a bounty for your full ship value onto you
- there's not going to be any more people trying to do that there are currently gankers, so the chances of remembering what you're supposed to do the first time it happens in a panic situation is tiny
- so you'll get it wrong, just as beginners getting attacked by a PvP FDL forget all the theory about "dodge, boost, high-wake"
- and then you get a 100% of ship value bounty
- or you could go Solo where you don't have to worry about that, because mistakes versus NPCs don't cost you anything significant, and therefore reinforce exactly the wrong lessons about C&P if you do stay in Open. Yeah, that time you accidentally killed a clean NPC was annoying, but you handed yourself in, flew back from the detention centre and got on with it, nothing to worry about really.
I don't see how this is an improvement over what we currently have for attracting people into Open.
So how exactly would this system not be an improvement on the current system? You have these same issues right now as a Pirate... what does this system make worse?
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The whole notion of "attracting people from solo/pg into open" is a fallacy in my opinion and is not my personal goal in the slightest. If people want to play solo/pg they are going to do it because they want to avoid the possibility of what they perceive as negative interactions. Nothing short of simply preventing people from killing them entirely would bait these people out so treating it like improvements should be geared towards that goal is not a good way to focus changes on.
Instead the changes should be focused on ensuring that those who do wish to force others into combat lose the abillity to hide from the consequences and those who wish to be lawful and punish them for those actions should have the incentive to hunt them down. People who run around murdering others have clearly indicated that want pvp. They shouldn't be allowed to have their cake and eat it too. So yes, for me this boils down to "don't let murderers play solo until their bounty has been claimed" and "stop letting people clean modules and swap ships to escape retribution for pvp crime".
This system goes a long way towards achieving that while offering an avenue for open, ffa pvp for those interested.
I personally think people place too much emphasis on the "new player experience". Elite has a learning curve. New players will eat rebuys, whether at the hands of another player, or due to a combination of their own lack of knowledge or just pure stupidity.
Scrap the modes. Separate the wheat from the chaff, and make the choices open or uninstall. Then, fix C&P, BGS, and PP.
Scrap the modes. Separate the wheat from the chaff, and make the choices open or uninstall. Then, fix C&P, BGS, and PP.
Some have bought this game because it has a solo option... are you really willing to refund their purchases of the game, DLC and ARX?
This is a moot point anyway as FD has articulated that this will never happen.
It's a nice idea, and I particularly like the idea of forcing pvp players in open all the time, just cuz it's more fun for us all that way, but ultimately the proposal is a bit misguided.
-You're disregarding the biggest issues with game balance: stacked defense makes it impossible to kill anyone who pays the remotest attention to survivability and doesn't want to die.
-Bounty hunters will secure a bounty maybe once every few months.
-Meanwhile, everyone will farm baby seal kills to help them transfer money to friends and alts, and there will absolutely be dedicated players who generate wealth then gank in order to help out PVP buddies by giving them a kill.
-Selling the ship's hull to clear a huge bounty is still viable because you don't address the issue of bounties following ships vs cmdrs, unless I missed it.
-Combat logging would still save bounty targets from the most desperate times.
-Tracking players is already done via the friends list. Anyone in the PVP community, whether gankers or competitive players (there is WAY more overlap here than most PVEers seem to think) or even some of the "lawfuls" can see the current hotspots in the bubble much more accurately by scrolling down their friends list than checking on inara or whathaveyou. A bounty board would seem to be a mildly helpful addition, but it would be a noob trap. Only the unprepared would try to take advantage of it, and they'd only wind up either adding some credits to their target's bounty or watching their target wake out.
-Open play, as was stated above, is already an opt-in to PVP.
-Gankers can and will gank from accounts with limited assets and limited/no engineering in order to have nothing to lose, denying bounty hunters of their huge rewards, obscuring the true value of the targets on the bounty board and still getting copious kills from starter builds. They'll have the added benefit of securing many more kills without racking up much bounty since they're doing it with harmless rank.
-Piracy lacks the centralized sell locations of the past. Supercruise times are much shorter with fleet carriers in the mix. Carebears love their combat logs. Piracy will remain dead until those issues are addressed, regardless of incentives.
Still the best crime and punishment proposal, which went completely ignored by the devs:
They ignored that, so there's honestly no point in trying to influence them on this. Nice to see someone trying, though.
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Not really interested in why others bought the game, but, to be "fair", yes, I would be willing to purchase four or five more copies of the game if it meant toxic carebears disappeared.
@Elliot Coleman
Can you explain 'toxic carebears' and how they will disappear when you purchase additional copies of the game.
Can you explain 'toxic carebears' and how they will disappear when you purchase additional copies of the game.
Anyone who doesn't play the way he wants to, I'd imagine...
The best thing that could happen to this game would be for PvP & PvE modes to exist, equally... Then he needn't have 'toxic carebears' in his game and everyone else loses the toxic attitudes brought by those who are intolerent
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Oh man, I forgot about that one. By far my favourite but almost certainly too ambitious. Judging by the forum thread, there was some response on a livestream, but obviously, it didn't go anywhere. Even just the idea of a station offering a consistent array of varied jobs rather than the slot machine we currently have...we can dream.
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