Yeah, I remember that feeling of realising I'd been holding my breath at the point where the 'S' appeared on screen.
Doomed anarchies
- Thread starter Obi Wan Naboo
- Start date
Compared to ED it wasn't any more dangerous than a RES filled with sidewinders, adders and very occasional bigger ships. The main difference was that in the original elite you were in a Cobra MkIII (that could out-run everything and had self repairing hull damage).
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If you had everything minimum threat seven (or upper end spank rating), only the dedicated or skilled would enter and prevent the 'Notoriety is not for me' cardboard warriors from using them like they do.
Seeing Warning:Anarchy should prep biowaste production for the unprepared.
You guys know what "anarchy" is, eh? Anarchy is a theoretical socio-political construct. I dont know what FDev intended by calling some factions "anarchy". In an anarchy there is no faction, no common goal, no one who speaks for the people, no one who could place bountys on someone, no government structure etc. A criminal organisation is not an anarchy, this groups have a hierarchy and are mostly governed in the style of a dictatorship or similar.
It used to be that the majority of wanted ships in ED were from the local pirate faction (the anarchy faction). Dipping into a RES of any kind nowadays the spread of factions a wanted NPC is much more evenly split & in my recent experience if the controlling faction has really high inf (I was doing a lot of expansions) most will be from the controlling faction.
This seems like a positive step for the game, but I was still seeing plenty of 'kill 15 pirates' missions specifically targeting those anarchy factions & not many (if any) 'kill pirates' missions aimed at any other type of faction. There are, or should be baddies & goodies in all faction types, as you say, dictatorships & similar may have their own government structure but they are still likely to disrespect the laws of other types & therefore be wanted where their faction is not in control.
I agree Anarchy government types should not necessarily mean wanted criminals but there is a good chance that even a 'nice' anarchy faction NPC is likely to ignore the laws of other government types & therefore be wanted in the eyes of other controlling factions. In ED they are almost universally just considered to be simple 'baddies' by most players.
It made more sense in the 1984 version. Without minor factions in the game and being able to see who is in charge you have the appearance of going into a system where no one rules so there is no central organisation to organise policing. Anarchy meant criminal because no-one was keeping the pirates out. So the difference there was that the pirates were just pirates, not necessarily under the jurisdiction of the controlling faction (or at least could be viewed as such).
Honestly though, I wonder if this is just another dead horse topic. Repeated nerfing of criminal gameplay and buffs to lawful gameplay make me think that removing the criminals from the galaxy is part of the game for this era of the Elite universe. Working as intended.
its why I wrote
criminal anarchy
in small letters.
But you are right, its mislabeled. (Criminal) Anarchy should be lawless, hippy anarchies removed and uninhabited systems....well, uninhabited (so a subclass of lawless, like now). In ED terms these places are systems outside of government control.
I find it ironic how the thing that makes Anarchies unique, practically the only faction type to have a tangible effect on the system, is that they just had the legal mechanics deleted from them. They didn't get anything to replace it, so they just...do nothing. And so they're completely helpless because the NPCs only know how to react negatively to two things, Hostile rep (haha) and having a bounty on you. They can't set bounties, so... nothing. God forbid a pirate gang retaliate against someone without being fully backed up by the local law (themselves!)
Letting anarchies put a price on your head, a bounty, would be a fine bandaid fix. But only if you're screwing with them, they don't care if you steal from someone else in their system, why should they? It'd still fit without making Anarchies hilariously many times more forgiving than the law-abiding factions of the galaxy. But this isn't a new suggestion, so I can only assume by this point that the bounty mechanics are so hardcoded into the game at this point that Frontier doesn't want to commit the time to change it.
Letting anarchies put a price on your head, a bounty, would be a fine bandaid fix. But only if you're screwing with them, they don't care if you steal from someone else in their system, why should they? It'd still fit without making Anarchies hilariously many times more forgiving than the law-abiding factions of the galaxy. But this isn't a new suggestion, so I can only assume by this point that the bounty mechanics are so hardcoded into the game at this point that Frontier doesn't want to commit the time to change it.
Yeah, the problem that anarchies face is more one of incentives than of lacking any particular BGS levers.
The main thing that made people dump on them so specifically when odyssey launched is because, outside of the immediate short-term "they shoot back", there are absolutely no consequences for wiping out an anarchy base. No bounties, no notoriety, not even any rep loss.
If I knocked over a lawful tourist base looking for opinion polls and ignored stealth in favour of speedrunning the alarms console then blasting anyone that might object to me being in the restricted area, I'd rapidly end up hostile with the controlling faction and they'd start to shoot on sight. I know this because it's exactly what I did when odyssey launched (before update 6 when foot kills didn't accrue notoriety, I figured 1kcr per kill was a pittance)
Now, I'm off doing shady stuff in the fringes and I've.... upset some of the locals by running missions to their horizons bases repeatedly, to the point where my rep has tanked. Being hostile with one of those factions now means I have no safe harbour in one of the systems where I'm fighting a war. It's a way bigger deal than merely being wanted.
If you made anarchy factions (or any factions really) start giving you the same rep loss as a murder for any kill regardless of wanted status, you might see a change in player behaviour.
edit: while I'm wishing for unicorns: have NPC pirates patrol outside anarchy stations instead of authority ships, change AI behaviour so they no longer run away immediately if they're hostile inside the no-fire-zone, and have pirate-type NPCs go hostile on sight when you're at hostile rep just like authority ships.
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Not trying to nitpick here, but it isn't really theoretical. Somalia was definitively anarchic from the 90s to the mid-00s. Territories were split up and ruled by competing factions and large areas of the country were administered as completely autonomous regions that lacked any sort of authority. No central government, no official military or police to speak of, and so on. To be fair though, there are no countries that are currently true anarchies, although the Central African Republic comes pretty close.
So, when we talk about "anarchy" in a political sense, it might also simply be a reference to a country (or system) that has entered "statelessness". The Journal of Comparative Economics featured a fantastic piece by Peter Leeson on why "anarchy" was, in fact, the best word to describe the situation in Somalia, and the situation there closely paralleled the kind of stateless paradigm that exists in ED's anarchy systems.
Even in Somalia in this time we had people who represent law and authority like warlords and tribal leaders etc. in their controlled areas. That is also not an anarchy in the theoretical political concept. These rulers or leaders would not let some crime (that negatively influenced their area of power) get unpunished. They even collected taxes from their subordinates and "citizens".
Although I see what you're saying, this is sort of like when some Americans get upset that their country is called a "democracy" instead of a "constitutional republic". Yes, it's the latter, but it is run by democratically elected officials and "democracy" is just a term used to separate it from dictatorships, monarchies and so on. We use "anarchy" in much the same way to highlight the fact that any semblance of a central government has collapsed and lawlessness has ensued.
This fits the description of what happened in Somalia, and it works in ED's anarchy systems too. If there is no central authority in a region and the laws that such an authority would impose are not being enforced, the situation is anarchic. We all know what it means in general terms.
Thats not the point. The anarchies in ED are not lawless regions. The anarchy factions (a term that in itself makes no sense) are criminal factions (mostly) or at least i interpret them as so. Criminal organisations would not let some Cmdr go unpunished when interfering in their business like raiding some of their drug producing facilities or similar. The flaw is that this criminal organizations do not lower the reputation, do not call out a bounty and just let it happend.
Yeah. Fair enough. Not a political blog this forum is
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I think the key phrase in Shabine's definition is:
I think having the anarchy faction represent lawlessness (the lack of central authority) is fair enough for the purposes of a game. That other factions represent any kind of central authority, even a mafia-style dictatorship doesn't mean they do not do criminal things in the eyes of others, but because they run the place they get to decide what is legal & what isn't.
I do quite like the idea that anarchy stations are 'patrolled' by pirates in a similar way to the system authority NPCs of other factions but without a central authority there can be no record of bounties in their jurisdiction (who would record & store that database?) without a kws, which is how it works now anyway.
The stare of the overy attached girlfriend can make even the toughest of Somali pirates request asylum.