And I am not actually dragging uninvolved pilots, I thought I made it clear. Only POSITIVE, as in your own faction improving, kills are made against pilots who are committed to Green or Purple. Neutrals, lets call them Grey, are negative for your faction.
And
here's where you drag in uninvolved pilots.
Off the top of my hat, let's say you are Green pilot and shoot Grey pilot. That would be, for example, -40 influence. If you kill Purple, it is +10 influence. Killing another Green could be anything from -10 to plain 0. This to make it very expensive to shoot Grey pilots in Open, while making policing your own faction (notice another Green going after Greys, so kill them before they cause too much damage) possible with PvP.
But that's not what's going to happen in the system you describe. What's going to happen is that some
Green players will create a
Purple account, and go on a killing spree in Purple's name, locking Purple out of their system. Of course, the same will happen with some
Purple players, who create a
Green account, and do likewise. Not all of them, not even a
majority of them, but enough will do it that the result will probably be mutual destruction.
Never involved uninterested 3rd parties in something like this. Everyone should
have to opt in. The moment you allow players
ininterested in PvP to become targets that gain a "reward", you attract a
lot more of a certain kind of player who's not simply not fun to play with, which defeats the whole purpose of the system.
Ah, but I am here trying to answer the demands brought forth by PvP enthusiasts. Who complain how "their" factions are being bombed from "hiding" and so on. Now they could "own" territory without having any influence on non-civil war pilots. Pilots like Al and that one who thought claiming to be "winner" would make him one, have often complained about this. While at same time making absolutely certain that this is not activity that in any way or form has any kind of PvE component in it, to ensure nobody who is not into PvP will not feel left out. It could of course be tied into Empire/Federation/whatever picture to give more sides, but I actually think that amount of eager PvP people is actually relatively low, so breaking them into too many factions could be detrimental. This taking into account possible "fence" pvp-enthusiasts.
See... that's the disconnect. These players are
not PvP enthusiasts. They just like killing other players, and don't care
how they get their kills. Thanks to Frontier's brilliant Tri-Mode system (all rights reserved), most of the
easy to kill players are in solo and private-groups. With the soft targets safely out of Open, that means that almost everyone that remains are hard for them to kill, or even worse, can kill
them, so they whine about it. Considering the Open population includes
me, that's really saying something.
But they can't
actually whine about not being able to find soft targets, so they need a casus belli. Some cause to call for the removal of all other modes than Open, so all those easy to kill PvE players won't be out of reach. Last month it was Powerplay and the BGS. This month, it's bots using Solo. I'm sure another casus belli will be dreamed up next month. If not, an old one will be revived.
Civil war would grant them their ownership and no fear of "hidden" influencing. So I am here waiting for them to take this rough idea and start campaigning it towards Frontier to have it implemented. They only have reason not to support it if instead of their stated interests they actually just want to be murderhoboes and kill as defenseless pilots as possible. So I think that even if my suggested idea was taken in some way or form and implemented, we would still see threads like this complaining that people are not in open to be shot at like clay pigeons.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, "It's better to keep quiet, and be thought a 'murderhobo,' than to open your mouth and remove all doubt." Fortunately for us, they have a very poor brain to mouth filter.
So, if for instance you could pledge to a local faction that is allied with, oh, in your case (you Empire shill you) the Empire, others also pledged to Empire aligned factions would be penalized (details to be worked out) for attacking you, Federation and Alliance subjects rewarded for hunting down slave traders such as yourself. Independents would either a) be neutral and neither reward nor penalize someone who attacked them or b) be 'protected' under the rules of the Pilot's Federation and penalize anyone attacking them.
AND, to placate the 'open only' crowd, provide a small BGS inf boost to your faction when you kill an enemy cmdr, or a small inf penalty when killed by an enemy cmdr.
Of course, collusion is potentially a serious issue, so some kind of detection/timer would have to be put in place...
Thoughts?
Pretty much, although I'd like to see rewards for
non-destructive actions as well. If I successfully run a blockade, for example, I think that should be rewarded too, equal to the risk I took in running the blockade.
But as I said,
that kind of thing would require development resources, which I'd prefer be devoted to improvements to the game as a whole. Not only collusion detection would be required, but the need to judge relative strength of ships, some kind of ELO system for relative pilot skill (repurpose the CQC rating in the main game for this), as well as a way to judge what kind of encounter it is, and how to apply the rewards.
But IMO, simply letting players pledge alliegance to a Superpower (or even minor faction) that would affect how minor factions interact with you, could also be used as a way to encourage more meaningful PvP in open, just like Powerplay does. I
like how Powerplay works in regards to PvP, and I'd still be pledged to the Power I support if:
- I actually liked the ways to earn merits, but combat farming and ABA cargo runs are not my cup of tea. If I could earn merits, plus fortify or undermine, via Powerplay missions, I'd still be pledged today.
- The increase in the number NPC interdictions. I found it way too high to be anything but annoying interruption of my game. Players are easier to evade IMO, primarily because they're a lot easier to see coming.
