I have no problem with that whatsoever. My only worry with the karma system is that it will do very little, if anything, to stop actual griefing. I don't think people realise just how determined real griefers (seal clubbers, station rammers etc...) actually are. Buying a second account is an option. Grinding missions to restore their karma is another and believe me they'll do it. Anybody with the patience to G5 their pwning machine certainly has the patience to restore the karma and start the cycle afresh.
Its just going to be a stat tracker is all. I imagine it will be fully automated as far as whatever is concerned.
That is why whatever tracking system that is put in place cannot be fooled by a rep grind the other way to get out of trouble. The limiting factor will be time.
break it down to a simple merit system. I am sure thats not what they are going to do, but it works for demonstration purposes. Lets say you blow up a trade ship with no cargo and you are in a military fitted corvette. The whole encounter took 3 minutes That would result as one bad merit. So to fix that bad merit you first need to do a mission to positive karma. First mission will be making up for the crime and basically admit to guilt. Next mission would bring your standing back to neutral status. So one to pay for the crime and one to increase the Karma. Lets say each mission takes 10 minutes to complete. So 3 minutes of bad requires 20 minutes of good to fix.
Now if the griefer has been killing new players in the same Corvette every day for an hour for a week. Then it would go as follows. Each mission/merit for each infraction would need to be accounted for. Lets say he killed 30 people over that time. So 30 missions will need to be done to pay for the merit infractions and another 30 will need to be done in order to bring you back to neutral that would be 600 hours. Now we know that is waaaaay too much work. So there will need to be some missions worth more merits not to mention mission stacking that can be done. So lets say he can clear it up in 20 to 30 hours. So that is fine. However this was done over the course of a week. So in addition to the 30 hours of actively trying to clear the bad merits it would take an entire week for the infractions to clear. If at any time during that week a real crime, not an accident occurs then all the work to fix the Karma has been lost and the timer resets from that time. If after that time has passed then the first consequence is applied. Increase rebuy of ship to 50% Insurance. Next Infraction loss of access to stations in High, Med, and Low Security Systems etc....
And so on and so forth until finally after a month straight of killing for no reason, no profit and whatever has been done the ship is finally gone. No getting it back if you die. If you die in any ship for that matter. If you used multiple ships, then you lose multiple ships. So You really need to commit to the role. Or dont.
Once you have cleared your Karma and you are back to neutral your pilot will still be known as an instigator for a time. Maybe 2 weeks of staying neutral. Once that is completed then more missions can be taken to increase Karma to above neutral.
Thats only 1 week wait and 30 hours of missions to clear you name to neutral. Its much less than any Power Play pledge time to get the beneficial reward. So its not too much to ask for being a criminal. That is an example using a merit system. I do not know how they will do it but what ever they do it needs to be a 2 to one ratio and time must be a factor. It will take twice as the amount of time per tick or whatnot in order to clear the
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I get that, but remember if theyre RP-ing these sort of roles, thats the sort of thing thats going to happen. I hate real world analogies but in the second world war, U-Boat commanders would prey on vessels steaming independently for this very reason.
I know you've not mentioned it, but this also applies to those horrid pirates people talk about. If you make a threat 'surrender cargo or die' and the other party runs. If you dont carry out your threat, It doesnt incentivise the victim to cooperate in future.
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You're blurring the whole pvp community into one person there.
No no I am not. This is what is being done now for the lulz. I have been killed by the same person many times and each time that person had a different lame excuse for why my Asp Explorer needed to die. I am most defiantly not lumping anyone into one person. I am telling you how its being done now and that is how it would be bypassed in the future if RP alone was justification enough to kill newbie traders or whatnot.