Hello all!
Time to dive in to this thread with our current thoughts:
Scamming:
In game - well, there will be certainly be the ability to scam.
We have the concept that a commodity/equipment canister does not necessarily contain what it says it contains. So there will be methods to disguise a canister's content.
On the flip side of the coin, we have ways of seeing what a canister contains (and this equipment/these methods will be available to use in player trades), so there is a potential arms race between lies and truth.
Why are we doing this? A couple of unrelated reasons, actually.
Firstly, we are not interested in making player trading the central pillar to trading game play. The various markets fulfil that role. So we don't need to protect player trading. The Elite universe is full of smugglers, pirates and general ne'er do wells.
Secondly, I think the ability to lie/cheat *using game rules* is reasonable and opens up more gameplay options. If you get traded a canister of "grain" that turns out to be "human organs" you can be sure of a number of things:
- The player that traded it had to go to some effort using game rules to set up the scam
- That player altered their reputation when they made the trade
- If you spent the time/resources, you could have detected the scam before the trade completed
- If you detect the scam we may be able to directly generate missions/events from the process
Now some folk may understandably still balk at this, but my response has to be that I think it makes the game better (mainly by giving us lots of mission/event potential from NPCs as well as players).
So in this case, we will hopefully be aiming for a very "light touch" because in theory we see nothing wrong with players role playing "bad guys".
Griefing:
So, we've said we don't mind bad guys. In fact, we go further; we have bad guy gameplay options (piracy, smuggling etc.) By default, this includes psychopathic behaviour - randomly attacking other player "because you can".
We're currently looking at two different angles of defence: an in-game law system and private groups.
The in-game law system should be pretty robust. It allows plausible but strong responses from NPC factions to criminal activities (using authority ships, structures and factional bounties), as well as player-driven bounties (via the Pilot's Federation) and player bounty hunting mechanisms (e.g. broadcasting "sightings" of know villains to help player bounty hunters track them).
All of this should mean that that if you're being naughty you are generating additional challenges for yourself which will undoubtedly make the game harder in some ways (this applies equally whether you are attacking players or NPCs).
It won't guarantee safety, even though it guarantees additional challenges to the bad guys. Which I think is about right; we don't want to make being the bad guy impossible.
The second factor is our grouping mechanisms.
The way it's currently standing, players will be able to enter and leave private groups of some sort reasonably easily, so they will be able to control the level of perceived griefing they want to suffer.
I know this is a very contentious issue, which I have been wrestling with since I first came on to the project. The way I see it at the moment is pretty straightforward:
- We have players that want a range of different experiences
- All of those experiences are valid
- Some of those experiences are mutually exclusive
So my answer is to say that we will support all of them but not to the point where one player is happy at the expense of another. And a clean way to do this is by using a grouping system.
The worst case scenario here is that a player who wants to avoid an encounter will vanish into a private group. In this case, the player will be forced to escape conventionally first (via hyperspace, docking or something similar).
In this instance, the aggressor still gets some benefit - they "defeated" their prey, and we can hopefully build on this in terms of rewarding them in various ways: via reputation, which can lead to missions and events, via player bragging rights (perhaps only players that remain in the "all group" can feature in various global news feed articles) and potentially via limited physical rewards.
If players are going to live in private groups, well, that suggests that if we had a single environment they would be playing offline or not at all, so they aren't part of the equation.
Players that dip into the "all group" after farming "private groups"; there are a few things to say about this.
- They are unlikely to have as good player-vs-player skills as those who live in the "all" group day in day out.
- NPCs can and will offer appropriate risks (in fact, it would not be a lie to suggest that we *could* make NPC ships significantly nastier than any human ships in the majority of situations. Not that we will, mind. But we could), so to get a tooled up advantage such players will have been facing a appropriate threat level (basically private groups should not be considered "easy mode").
- Everyone has access to their own private group(s)
It's not perfect, but it's my best shot at the moment.
Anyway, taking these two strands into account, again, the result will again be hopefully a "very light touch".
Other:
Offensive behaviour during communication, whether in game or on the forums is always
unacceptable. We will have some form of reporting/investigation service to service this. We will also allow players to "ignore" communications so that they don't have to listen/read stuff that doesn't interest them (on a related note - I'm very dead set against session-wide or bigger chat channels. In my opinion they ruin ambience and are uneccessary for Elite: Dangerous).
I can't actually think of out-of-game scams that could be possible at the moment.
Finally:
On a personal note. I also find (even mildly) derogatory terms and statements unpleasant and unhelpful. They don't advance arguments and they are used to intentionally insult people/groups. It's perfectly fine to disagree, but it's not fine to insult (just as it's not fine face to face).
I also think that more civil (if not understanding) we can be (in game and on the forums) the more likely we are to grow the community which will be to the benefit of us all.
