My mechanic is merely to post your start time in advance the forum, with your normal details (eg CMDR / Ship / Ship Name). This could be as much day in advance (handy if you wanted to run against a competitor) or as little as 5 minutes in advance (this will be the minimum), whatever is more convenient.
Your start time photo would have to show the specified time or later. I want to capture the feeling of ElecticZ's live events during Buckyball-9. Open mode's essential for The Black Riband itself, but I'm tweaking things so that those who don't like open can participate - they just won't be eligible to hold the Black Riband.
Ideally, as this will be a long race and participation isn't expected to be too high, I'd like every run to be listed on the boards - including
all the failed/aborted runs, not just the one perfect run out of half-a-dozen; and for the runs that go wrong, I'd like to be able to include the details of what went wrong.
It's an interesting idea, but I would be wary using it for any other race. I feel it's likely to reduce participation, especially in a normal length race, due to the need to post a time.
It could work well in an unlimited time race like this one, but I'm already reluctant to fly Black Riband 1.0, due to the need to bump an old thread. (That's probably me just being silly / anxious, but it's a feeling that exists.)
The other consideration is how much pirating and "customs officialsing" would be encouraged. I'm decent at interdicting things from doing some powerplay and Iridum Wing escorting, but I'd still feel bad ruining another racer's good run, unless it was explicitly stated that this was "proper behavior." I'd be a terrible griefer, I know
It also gives someone like me an advantage, since I can easily schedule a run for 0400 UTC, when 75% of players are asleep.
Another idea that I've seen bandied around is a race where you have to leave at the top or bottom of the hour (or on a 5 or 10 minute mark) to encourage racers to complete simultaneous runs. (probably with a shorter race than these awesome smuggling runs.
)
I'd actually go as far as to say that fellow competitors would
probably be discouraged from interdictions, but I'm not too fussed - as with the original Bootlegger Challenge, anyone making a Black Riband run would be consenting to pvp - so:
a) Fat Tony's not interested in whiners - it's impossible to grief in this event.
b) Little Nuk wants to know
all the details.
c) I think everyone already knows that cmdr Bruski is very, very competitive (in a good way), so I don't think you'd need to feel too bad about it.
As there's no shame in pvp attacks during the race, I'm hoping the attackers will consent to being named and that mods will be okay with this arrangement as this is consensual pvp smuggling event - so Little Nuk's planning to use any details passed to him to contact the pirate or customs official in question, to see if they'd like to get the fame/infamy that they deserve. If it proves to be a problem with the mods, then I'll take that particular list off site to Reddit or it's own webpage.
The 4am thing is interesting, it's certainly perfectly fair, as a good smuggler should time their runs to avoid interference. The target black-market systems will be player controlled systems though, this is part of the reason for the pre-declared runs. It's a necessity I think, because I need the presence of a black-market to be as stable as possible, so I need the controlling factions to be stable and preferably the powerplay status of the systems as well.
I don't think that participation / cargo quantities will ever be enough to have a serious negative effect on the BGS of those systems, but I want to give those players the opportunity to try and block the smugglers if they like. One of the groups that I've chatted with were very keen to do some customs checking, but I was a little worried that nobody would ever get instanced with them due to time zone differences.
