About a week has passed since the infamous infiltration to Mobius. In addition to that within this time-frame there was an attack on charity streamers.
We've seen a lot of threads discussing these events, however, most of them were simply cursing the actions of the known player group, or proposing the counter actions.
However, within these threads these are the consequences of these events that are discussed. While one can think that it is important to respond to these actions, I think that actually it is more important to implement the ways to prevent such events from happening. I have not seen any thread specifically devoted to the discussion of how to prevent this from happening again, to discuss what has made such actions possible first hand. And understanding of the latter is going to shed the light on the possible solution.
And I believe that all players (both PvE and PvP) are going to benefit from this solution.
I think that these are the serious flaws in the crime and punishment system that has led to this unfortunate result. We have three major factions in the game (that are spread through a large number of the systems) and countless minor factions (that are represented in several systems at best). I would like to note that the last noticeable changes to the bounty systems were implemented in 1.3, and nothing major has changed since then.
Let's retrospectively look at the bounty system, and the changes to it. If I remember it correctly prior to 1.3 the bounties were issued by both major and minor factions depending on the jurisdictions were the crime was committed. Immediately after committing a crime it was possible to dock at the station in the system and pay off this bounty. It was very common that a player would attack/destroy another player, go to the station, pay off the bounty, and they were clean again, so that a player who wanted to have revenge had to commit a crime now. This lead to the modifications to the crime punishment system that are covered in detail here:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=141640
So what are the changes we are talking of? Namely, major factions no longer issue bounties, i.e. all bounties are issued by minor factions only. Bounties have a certain duration starting with 10 minutes for such crime as an assault to 7 days for a murder. The values of the bounties remained unchanged, i.e. 6000Cr for destroying a ship. So the total bounty that is issued for the destruction of the ship is 400Cr for assault and 6000Cr for the murder, i.e. the total of 6400Cr. This is the bounty for any ship that is destroyed, be it a basic Sidewinder that costs ~30k Cr, or a combat Imperial Cutter with the price of ~1b Cr. The price of the ship is totally irrelevant. It should also be noted that the cargo that might be in the cargo hold of the ship does not affect the bounty issued for the ship's destruction. This adds up to the loss (insurance costs). On a side note, I would like to mention that although there is a field "Cargo Insurance" in the right UI panel, however, there is no way to insure the cargo in the game. So the full value of the cargo is lost, which in case of the ships like Cutter with the cargo hold of ~700t might easily reach 7-9M Cr.
So if this bounty is issued in most of the cases it affects one system only. There are players who simply avoid visiting this system for the duration of the bounty, however, there is a known workaround to this issue, which is also widely used. It is only needed to go to the station controlled by the faction that has issued the bounty, buy a Sidewinder there, and make the station destroy you. According the current implementation of the crime punishment system, the bounty is paid off with the insurance in this case. This means that the destruction of any ship in the game costs less than 10k Cr.
This means that if a Cutter full of cargo is destroyed this leads to a loss of ~15-20M Cr for the ship and 7-9M Cr for the cargo.
I guess everyone can see a major flaw here.
Now I am going to cover the actions of the security ships. These are triggered if the ship that is assaulted has "Report crimes on me" set to ON. In the case a distress signal is sent to security ships, and they jump to the normal space in the instance of the ship that is being assaulted. They scan the ships in the area and start attacking those who are wanted. Seems nice, however, it is nice on paper only. Actually, it takes too long for security ships to jump in this instance. By this time the ship that was attacked has either already jumped out, or is destroyed. Moreover, the security ships responding to this distress call are random, so it is likely that if someone uses a Cutter to attack others, security is going to have Vipers deployed. What can these vipers do to this Cutter, which has 2000-3000MJ of shields? Nothing. It can jump out to SC without any consequences, there is nothing that would prevent it from jumping out.
And even if the wanted ship stays in the system it is wanted the only consequence to it is that it is being interdicted from time to time by the security ships, which in most of the cases are small ships that cannot deal real damage but to annoy.
This is another major flaw.
So I think it is of key importance to implement the changes to the crime bounty system that would significantly reduce the possibilities to commit crimes in the systems that are supposed to be secure. It is obvious that the modifications should not remove this possibility completely but to make it a very rare occurrence.
First of all, I would propose to finally implement interstellar bounties, which were announced in the dev update linked in this post, however, they are not implemented yet. The idea behind interstellar bounties was that these bounties are issued by the major factions presented in the system were the crimes were committed, interstellar bounties are issued in case a bounties exceed a certain predefined amount. These interstellar bounties should be active in all systems where there is a presence of the major faction that has issued the bounty.
Definitely, the values of the bounties should be increased, and these should depend on the impact of the criminal actions. I.e. these should depend on the price of the ship that is lost, the price of the cargo lost. This values should not be space-high though, otherwise, as this should not result in complete extermination of the crimes. So I would propose 1/10 of the insurance price of the ship. Cargo insurance should also be implemented, but this should be done voluntarily.
Then that the security response should be improved. It should be much faster. It also should be much deadlier. I would suggest doing that by predefining the ship types that respond to the distress call. I.e. if the crime is committed by the Cutter, security should deploy similar ships, i.e. Anacondas, Cutters, Corvettes. It should be noted that Cutter has the highest lock factor then security forces should deploy at least one Cutter. Security forces should come in numbers as well, i.e. they should outnumber the criminals.
On top of that to that I would propose a way to make additional improvements to the gameplay regarding the crimes committed by players against other players. For example, if a player or a group of players has destroyed a player, the destroyed ship should activate a distress beacon. Other players should be able to receive the signal from this distress beacon. This signal should contain the coordinates, where the ship was destroyed. Those who decide to respond to this distress beacon should go to the system/coordinates reported by the distress beacon, and should be able to find the debris of the destroyed ship. This should provide the name of CMDR who has committed the crime, and its approximate location. This should allow bounty hunters to attempt to claim this bounty.
Sure one can object that this is not possible as it is possible to switch game modes. To counter that I would propose locking the players with active bounties received by killing other players in Open mode. Or maybe even by allowing to pay off the bounty with the insurance only if it is claimed by another player.
We've seen a lot of threads discussing these events, however, most of them were simply cursing the actions of the known player group, or proposing the counter actions.
However, within these threads these are the consequences of these events that are discussed. While one can think that it is important to respond to these actions, I think that actually it is more important to implement the ways to prevent such events from happening. I have not seen any thread specifically devoted to the discussion of how to prevent this from happening again, to discuss what has made such actions possible first hand. And understanding of the latter is going to shed the light on the possible solution.
And I believe that all players (both PvE and PvP) are going to benefit from this solution.
I think that these are the serious flaws in the crime and punishment system that has led to this unfortunate result. We have three major factions in the game (that are spread through a large number of the systems) and countless minor factions (that are represented in several systems at best). I would like to note that the last noticeable changes to the bounty systems were implemented in 1.3, and nothing major has changed since then.
Let's retrospectively look at the bounty system, and the changes to it. If I remember it correctly prior to 1.3 the bounties were issued by both major and minor factions depending on the jurisdictions were the crime was committed. Immediately after committing a crime it was possible to dock at the station in the system and pay off this bounty. It was very common that a player would attack/destroy another player, go to the station, pay off the bounty, and they were clean again, so that a player who wanted to have revenge had to commit a crime now. This lead to the modifications to the crime punishment system that are covered in detail here:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=141640
So what are the changes we are talking of? Namely, major factions no longer issue bounties, i.e. all bounties are issued by minor factions only. Bounties have a certain duration starting with 10 minutes for such crime as an assault to 7 days for a murder. The values of the bounties remained unchanged, i.e. 6000Cr for destroying a ship. So the total bounty that is issued for the destruction of the ship is 400Cr for assault and 6000Cr for the murder, i.e. the total of 6400Cr. This is the bounty for any ship that is destroyed, be it a basic Sidewinder that costs ~30k Cr, or a combat Imperial Cutter with the price of ~1b Cr. The price of the ship is totally irrelevant. It should also be noted that the cargo that might be in the cargo hold of the ship does not affect the bounty issued for the ship's destruction. This adds up to the loss (insurance costs). On a side note, I would like to mention that although there is a field "Cargo Insurance" in the right UI panel, however, there is no way to insure the cargo in the game. So the full value of the cargo is lost, which in case of the ships like Cutter with the cargo hold of ~700t might easily reach 7-9M Cr.
So if this bounty is issued in most of the cases it affects one system only. There are players who simply avoid visiting this system for the duration of the bounty, however, there is a known workaround to this issue, which is also widely used. It is only needed to go to the station controlled by the faction that has issued the bounty, buy a Sidewinder there, and make the station destroy you. According the current implementation of the crime punishment system, the bounty is paid off with the insurance in this case. This means that the destruction of any ship in the game costs less than 10k Cr.
This means that if a Cutter full of cargo is destroyed this leads to a loss of ~15-20M Cr for the ship and 7-9M Cr for the cargo.
I guess everyone can see a major flaw here.
Now I am going to cover the actions of the security ships. These are triggered if the ship that is assaulted has "Report crimes on me" set to ON. In the case a distress signal is sent to security ships, and they jump to the normal space in the instance of the ship that is being assaulted. They scan the ships in the area and start attacking those who are wanted. Seems nice, however, it is nice on paper only. Actually, it takes too long for security ships to jump in this instance. By this time the ship that was attacked has either already jumped out, or is destroyed. Moreover, the security ships responding to this distress call are random, so it is likely that if someone uses a Cutter to attack others, security is going to have Vipers deployed. What can these vipers do to this Cutter, which has 2000-3000MJ of shields? Nothing. It can jump out to SC without any consequences, there is nothing that would prevent it from jumping out.
And even if the wanted ship stays in the system it is wanted the only consequence to it is that it is being interdicted from time to time by the security ships, which in most of the cases are small ships that cannot deal real damage but to annoy.
This is another major flaw.
So I think it is of key importance to implement the changes to the crime bounty system that would significantly reduce the possibilities to commit crimes in the systems that are supposed to be secure. It is obvious that the modifications should not remove this possibility completely but to make it a very rare occurrence.
First of all, I would propose to finally implement interstellar bounties, which were announced in the dev update linked in this post, however, they are not implemented yet. The idea behind interstellar bounties was that these bounties are issued by the major factions presented in the system were the crimes were committed, interstellar bounties are issued in case a bounties exceed a certain predefined amount. These interstellar bounties should be active in all systems where there is a presence of the major faction that has issued the bounty.
Definitely, the values of the bounties should be increased, and these should depend on the impact of the criminal actions. I.e. these should depend on the price of the ship that is lost, the price of the cargo lost. This values should not be space-high though, otherwise, as this should not result in complete extermination of the crimes. So I would propose 1/10 of the insurance price of the ship. Cargo insurance should also be implemented, but this should be done voluntarily.
Then that the security response should be improved. It should be much faster. It also should be much deadlier. I would suggest doing that by predefining the ship types that respond to the distress call. I.e. if the crime is committed by the Cutter, security should deploy similar ships, i.e. Anacondas, Cutters, Corvettes. It should be noted that Cutter has the highest lock factor then security forces should deploy at least one Cutter. Security forces should come in numbers as well, i.e. they should outnumber the criminals.
On top of that to that I would propose a way to make additional improvements to the gameplay regarding the crimes committed by players against other players. For example, if a player or a group of players has destroyed a player, the destroyed ship should activate a distress beacon. Other players should be able to receive the signal from this distress beacon. This signal should contain the coordinates, where the ship was destroyed. Those who decide to respond to this distress beacon should go to the system/coordinates reported by the distress beacon, and should be able to find the debris of the destroyed ship. This should provide the name of CMDR who has committed the crime, and its approximate location. This should allow bounty hunters to attempt to claim this bounty.
Sure one can object that this is not possible as it is possible to switch game modes. To counter that I would propose locking the players with active bounties received by killing other players in Open mode. Or maybe even by allowing to pay off the bounty with the insurance only if it is claimed by another player.
