Hello Commanders!
Usual caveat: no guarantee, no ETA! This is just another thought experiment.
A quick question regarding player-versus-player (not AI) in open:
Currently there is no real difference between crime against AI and crime against humans.
Do folk think that additional, relatively severe in-game penalties for illegal ship destruction where there was a large disparity between rank/power of murderer to victim would be a worthwhile thing?
As an example suggestion: a high combat rank player in a combat capable ship boils a low combat rank player in a trade vessel. In addition to a bounty, the murderer is unable to dock at high security systems and suffers an increased insurance premium excess for an amount of time.
Continued offences of this nature increase and prolong the punitive measures.
Would a system like this help reconcile the two factions of the PVP and PVE, or would it not really address the issue?
Thoughts?
This is going to be a mild flame post so don your asbestos underwear and hold on to your tin hat and flak jacket...
With all due respect, Sandro, I can't believe I'm reading words like "Usual caveat: no guarantee, no ETA! This is just another thought experiment."
The subject of Crime & Punishment has been an ongoing discussion in this and other forums since before ED 1.0 came out.
Ideas like including an actual "Declare Piracy" button of some sort - been discussed many times and
this one addition alone would enable your programmers to more easily deal with adding game mechanics related to the four official game 'careers' of Trader, Explorer, Pirate, and Bounty Hunter. Of all four, Piracy has been left out in terms of 'formal declaration';
Exploration : PRES BUTAN to explore (ADS & targetting for DSS),
Bounty Hunting : PRES BUTAN to scan target for crimes/warrants
Trading : PRES BUTAN for buying and selling commodities
Piracy : Well you can PRES BUTAN to interdict someone, but that mechanic has a crossover with Bounty-Hunters and those players who also interdict other players to impose 'PvP' on them. The game currently
has no idea if a player wants to interdict another player for PvP, bounty-hunting, Piracy, or just downright murder.
This is why you're finding it so difficult to balance the game - there is nothing to tell the game client that Piracy is intended - yet Piracy has always been touted as one of the official careers within the game, and I find the lack of a formal "declare piracy" mechanic hard-coded into the game from the very start to be a massive oversight.
So let's look at what happens if there was a Declare Piracy button;
1) <Mr Pirate> "Yarrr!" *INTERDICTION OF PLAYER* *PRES PIRACY BUTAN* *VARIOUS PIRACY MESSAGES*
2) The game client immediately knows Mr Pirate wants to actually pirate someone
3) Various outcomes can occur;
a) Player accedes to demands, drops booty, gets out alive; Mr Pirate scoops booty up and either has to deal with system security or escapes unmolested - there may be a fine imposed for the illegal activity
b) Player tries to escape but Mr Pirate disables ship - then see (a)
c) Player tries to escape, Mr Pirate unintentionally pops victim's ship - massive fine/consequences (because a Pirate life should be hard yes?)
d) other stuff I haven't thought of here...
"But!", you say, "What if Mr Player-Killer uses the Declare Piracy button as an excuse for popping other player's ships!?"
The mechanics above already take that into account because the game client was told "piracy ahead" and (3 c) above takes that "exploding player ship" into account - massive fines/consequences.
And if a player-killer doesn't use the Declare Piracy mechanic and just goes around indiscriminately popping ships, then it makes it easier for the game to decide that none of the four basic "careers" are being played here, so you'd include even harsher consequences for those actions.
But no, here we are more than a year since 1.0 was released, and there's been nothing done other than discussion after discussion on the same topic of Crime & Punishment and some flailing around tinkering with fines and whatnot in the meantime.
And yet we're still at the laughable "design" where "murder" == a slap on the wrist, and "loitering" == a death penalty. Where the
victim of a player-killer is punished more than the player-killer.
It's the same silly design "logic" as stubbornly keeping the SCB's in the game when it was obvious that removing them and improving the existing shield mechanics would have solved the whole SCB thing (which still hasn't been sorted out - read the various threads about the SCB's now here and on Reddit).
I'm not impressed by the "design" going on here. I think I know why it happened - it's a combination of rushing out ED 1.0, and either not having the time and/or neglecting to put in place a formal Declare Piracy mechanic, in your rush to keep adding more Stuff like CQC, get Horizons out, etc. It's understandable that you want to get these other things out, but the lack of formal Declaration Of Piracy is a serious design oversight in my opinion.
Your design, crime & punishment, AND coding life would be made
immensely easier if you spent some Dev time into adding such a mechanic in. That just seems obvious to me.
It would make it easier to code decisions into the game on whether something is plain murder or not, rather than not adding it in and as for you, Sandro, saying you are "able to make decisions based on a player's rank and their ship loadout compared to the other player's" <--- see that? That's overcomplicating things and is absolutely silly logic right there. Rather than adding in Declare Piracy which would help kill a number of birds with one stone, would probably make life easier for pirate players to - y'know - actually feel like they're being a pirate, AND helping your coders to add crime & punish mechanics that make sense, you're considering using convoluted and difficult to implement "solutions" involving looking at ranks and loadouts.
The icing on the cake however is the "No ETA!" disclaimer. After more than a year of your playerbase discussing crime & punishment, gankers, how crappy piracy is and so on.
Quite flabbergasting, to be frank.
Regards