It's nothing to do with laziness, it's because the people asking for it are asking for some combination of:
- a complete rewrite of the game's history and base concept that would make it not an Elite sequel
- something that wouldn't actually achieve what they want
- something which would require advanced AI that could earn Frontier trillions of pounds from commercial uses if they had it, rather than wasting it on law enforcement in a game
Because that is what would really happen, the superpowers would not put up with that kind of personel loss as it stunts thier economy to not be able to move goods.
Indeed. And the NPC pirates would be cleaned up likewise, as would the various assassins who get sent after you on courier missions and the like. The Combat rank would be removed from the universe as obsolete, as there would be no-one to shoot at.
With no risk remaining to transporting trade goods, prices would rapidly equalise - no-one is going to pay thousands of credits per tonne to move cargo ten minutes from one station to another, if there's no risk of it being lost to piracy. The Trade rank wouldn't be removed, but at transport profits of a few credits per tonne, no-one would get rich that way.
It's pretty clear that "the superpowers" have a very limited choice in terms of what they do and do not put up with, because most of their "super" power is nowadays a bit of a bluff. But that means there's a game where we can fight pirates and trade goods, of course, rather than "real life but in space simulator" where we spend our days at our space desks filling out our space paperwork with our space hands because space travel is too regulated and controlled by the major superpowers to let independent people like us get anywhere near it.
The whole concept of the Elite series - going right back to the first game - is "you do stuff and people try to kill you for it". Elite Dangerous has broadened that out a bit - you can go exploring, or sightseeing, or do certain types of missions, and actually the chances are that no-one will try to kill you for it. And that's a good thing! Variety is good. But it wouldn't be an Elite game if it was set in the sort of locked down super-law-enforcement universe where crimes were so instantly punished they didn't occur. It's set in a dystopia, not a utopia.
Just raise the bounty for Player ship assualt and destruction to 400x destroyed ship cost
Okay. So here's what's going to happen if this gets implemented. An attacker is going to get an unarmed Mamba (for the speed), cost around 200 million credits, scrape the hull down to 1% on some asteroids, then head to a starport you're at. They're going to wait outside a station for you, and as you head out of the docking area and accelerate to get clear of the station, they'll hit silent running and ram you.
Their ship will explode, of course, in the collision - yours will likely be largely unharmed. And you were speeding, so clearly you just rammed a defenceless unshielded ship to death, you murdering griefer.
Cost to them: ~10 million in rebuy. No big deal, they can make that back in a single quick mission or one Void Opal core asteroid.
Cost to you: 400 * 200 million = 80,000,000,000 credits. Do you have 80 billion credits?
As with every idea to "just fix it" by making the punishments harsher, this one will lead to lots of extremely high profile losses ... but not to the people you want to lose out.
There's also a very silly consequence of making player-killing bounties based on the value of the destroyed ship.
- attacker destroys a combat-fit bounty hunting Corvette (cost ~1 billion) that really should have been able to look after itself: result is mega punishment
- attacker destroys a new player's defenceless Sidewinder (cost ~28,000 credits) that stood no chance: result - even at 400x the cost - is actually considerably less than players would be charged for murdering said Sidewinder today (your proposal: 11 million credits, current maximum possible cost: ~70 million credits)
So, do you really want to encourage the attackers to go after the weakest possible players - because those are the ones the punishment is smallest for? The usual complaint is that they don't pick on targets their own size, not that they're going after too many well-equipped ships.
In the 3.0 release of Elite Dangerous, Frontier made the punishments for crime significantly harsher:
- bounties for murder, especially player murder, were increased significantly, to several thousand times their previous value
- law enforcement against serial murderers was turned up significantly
- having a bounty could now shut you out of station services and have you transported hundreds or even thousands of light years
- an exploit which allowed bounties to be avoided without paying them off was closed
The primary result of this was not a massive decrease in player murder - but a massive increase in complaints by those pilots who didn't personally think of themselves as criminals, and who didn't feel that their technically illegal actions should be punished. If Frontier makes the punishments even harder, exactly the same will happen again.
but as it stands right now it makes no sense, my carburettor is illegal because I hit 'n run a ped but in a new car I'm as clean as virgin snow?
Part of the problem with C&P is that "realistic" solutions don't work because the Elite Dangerous setting - because it's a game - has a few major breaks from reality. The relevant one here: In real life, you can't kill yourself, pay a token resurrection fee, and have your criminal record wiped due to temporarily being dead, but leave all your property to yourself in your will. (i.e. The old Suicidewinder bounty-clearing exploit)
So the legal system in-game has to deal with issues that the real one doesn't, and therefore it does things which would make no sense in a real-world legal system which doesn't need to deal with people doing that. (And if humans ever really get that sort of resurrection technology, our own legal systems will get some pretty rapid changes too that will seem bizarre to our ways of thinking)
Tying bounties to the ship is the cleanest way of making bounties have unavoidable consequences. They did experiment with an alternative way of fixing the suicidewinder exploit in 2.4, but it didn't work very well, and led to some big complaints from players (generally those who'd just tagged an NPC accidentally in a RES) getting caught out by the pointy end of it.
Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of real-world sense, but neither does the ability to survive death, and it would be a very different game without that.
