What does that mean?
Crime and Punishment not fit for purpose - needs overhauling
- Thread starter rootsrat
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Fish might perhpas be the 120 cell form in 5d space that could be used to achieve something that would work; 
Simplifying the notion is rather harder than defining it mathematically.
Simplifying the notion is rather harder than defining it mathematically.
Forgot the towel, I’ll need that round my head!!
Hard disagree.
What you're conceptualization here is twisting the definition of "mercenary" in order to fit the rules of a video game. In other words, you (figurative) want to do civilian massacre missions and would prefer that the game universe not consider it a war crime or murder. But if civilian massacring and other similar crimes were treated as war crimes then we'd have the opportunity to engage in extremely high-risk/high-reward activity.
What we need is for the game to mirror reality a little more... it would get quite interesting...
Let's say you take a civilian massacre mission. If authorities catch you in the act of murdering then you'll get instant maximum notoriety and extreme fines. All of civilized space would treat you as the worst possible threat. Consequently the rewards for this activity would be greatly improved due to the risk involved. You are not just a simple mercenary fighting for a side. You are a war criminal and the faction that hired you would disavow any knowledge of interacting with you if you were caught.
So what about mitigation?
First, you should be able to hide your identity when performing these tasks. Otherwise getting caught would be a foregone conclusion especially if you were doing in a lawful system. No amount of credit/material rewards would be worth getting maximum notoriety just to complete a single mission. So it should be possible to spoof your identity in order to deal with being "caught". A lot of interesting gameplay could be created around this.
Second, wiping the slate clean from maximum notoriety should not be possible by just waiting it out. You should have to break into the criminal database and clear your record. Doing so should be difficult but not impossible. Again this makes sense from a logical point of view - society isn't generally open to war criminals being rehabilitated over and over again. Perhaps there would still need to be a timer of sorts so that PvP griefing/etc wouldn't be easily cleared.
The game would need to do a better job at communicating the risk being taken by the player when embarking on these missions. Like categorizing illegal missions in a completely separate way so that it's unambiguous: here be dragons!
If FD were to ever redo C+P this is the direction I wish it would go. Logical consistency solves a lot of problems. Griefing in starter systems would impose such draconian penalties that most people wouldn't bother doing it more than once. Sure it would still happen and can't be "prevented" but the rate of this behavior would drop so much as to not really matter anymore.
It also opens the door for a much deeper and challenging criminal path for people that are into that kind of thing (both PvE and PvP). There's so much opportunity here.
Imagine if players had the ability to scramble incoming scans. The scanner would just see a jumble of random characters. This would of course attract a lot of unwanted attention and the scrambler would have finite uses. Counterplay would be military grade scanners that all system defense ships would be equipped with. Players can equip them too at the cost of it using a lot of mass/power (so it's not always equipped). Players could now "fight" criminals by interdicted them and killing their scramblers with a modest reward for doing so. And if unscrambled criminals are caught then they receive extreme draconian punishments that take a long time to undo.
Obviously a system like this can be tuned so that new/unsuspecting players aren't stuck with draconian penalties. But this is also pretty easy to solve because career criminals are repeatedly caught over time.
Indeed, but murder is murder... No degrees of such in this game.
There's a cool thing where if you keep doing hostile things while already at minimum reputation where a faction will occasionally send an assassin after you (complete with a message from the faction giving you the ol' "you have interfered in our plans for the last time") which will shortly thereafter have a "friend" from another faction tell you how you're being tracked and you can break the trail by sabotaging a surface installation.
I've never actually made it to the surface installation - the assassin always found me first and I blew them away like any other mission assassin. It'd be neat if they actually had any teeth, or at least enough teeth that doing the hack was worthwhile.
Although honestly it's hard to talk about C&P from an immersion perspective - we're not playing in the real world, we're playing in the dystopian hellhole of the Elite universe where human life is considered extremely cheap and the crime of impeding capital by obscuring a landing pad for a couple of minutes is punishable by death.
These assassins should be smarter...waiting until our CMDRs are at a disadvantage. Showing up at that surface installation after most people would have deployed their SRVs would be a nice touch; the implication being the 'friend' is just an agent of the faction you ed off leading you into an ambush.
On a side note, I was really hoping Odyssey would allow stuff like this (well, minus the teleportation):
My CMDR sitting down at the bar after a hard-won mission, just about to raise his refreshing
I'm not so sure...that dystopian hellhole that Elite: Dangerous should be, but isn't, is the real world for about five billion of the eight billion or so people on this planet.
I'm using the point that you hi light to argue for more nuance, where there is none, and you are disagreeing with me in order that you add one more dimension of nuance, in my previous posts I've mentioned k dimensions, that is what the k if for, a variable that replaces the numerical quantity of dimension required to represent every degree of nuance; As such, what are you hard disagreeing with exactly, which order of logic?
A linear representation of the 'levels' of nuance is a gross over simplification, the concept that I am arguing for has little to do with the semantics of the word 'mercenary' it very much has to do with groups, making the model cyclic and not linear, however this is a complicated problem and an involved solution that is not an easy to explain.
Arguing the rule book and the semantics of the words in it, is non sequitur in the context of a systemic solution, a judicary system capable of applying any rule book that it is given, intelligently.
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Although this has nothing to do with the system proposed, and more to do with one possible rule set that said system might be given to implement; I will also add:
The word "mercenary" comes from the Latin word mercenarius, meaning "hired" or "working for pay." It derives from merces (meaning "wages" or "reward"), referring to someone who is motivated by financial gain rather than loyalty or duty. Over time, this term evolved to describe soldiers hired to fight for foreign or private armies in exchange for payment.
The mercenary notion that you describe pertaining to the rules of war, could only apply within a totalitarian system; A system that does not exist in the current galactic balance. Perhaps there will be some agreement between all factions as to some holy governing book; I for one am do not regard this as ever being likely to happen. As such, I rebuke your rational as being of an ideal that is only achievable by dictate, the pilots federation would have to become a totalitarian overlord to implement such, but this is not nor has it ever been the role of the pilots' federation.
The entire raison d'être of the pilots' federation is to maintain confidence in pilots, that you can trust in their ability and their nature, to get your job done. Of course, pilots who have killed all their passengers on public transport missions or steal their clients cargo, would quickly loose their standing with the federation. But not abiding by the rules of a foreign power, when another power has signed a contract assuming responsibility for their acts; how is this going against or breaking confidence in the federation? Quite the contrary, it is bolstering the very foundations.
Perhaps a more pertinent point, at this time: how in the galaxy are you going to enforce that the thargoids follow your dictate?
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In fact, the game has this vector in play. If we supposedly accidentally get a notoriety 1, no ATR is sent after us. We have a choice to drop it or keep committing crimes. It is only by reaching 9 that we get punished.
The problem is that there is essentially no punishment in the game. At any time we can stay on the station and go to sleep. In the morning, we'll be clean.
The problem is that there is essentially no punishment in the game. At any time we can stay on the station and go to sleep. In the morning, we'll be clean.
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There was a variation of this many years ago.
I was taking part in a Bounty Hunting CG there was a good RES in the outer region of the system in fact there were supposed to be two but the other was below the exclusion altitude of the planet.
I would go there in my combat AspX chewing through wanted ships until ammo ran out or damage ran up then take the long cruise back to the hand in station, sometimes towards the end of these stints the Oy leave our ships alone message changed to the Assassin has been hired one. If they arrived before I had to leave it was fine just another target but sometimes they would interdict me on the way back which would be more dicey as I would be down to just lasers and or damaged.
But no tipoffs from friends or the like.
Sorry to interrupt but I'm staring at a whole yard full of dead crows.
Because people are strange.
Because the alerts would be ignored like the ones from the wedding cruise liners.
Conversely, from what I hear about PP2, it seems to include a major ground-up rethink of the "C&P" concept: it's no longer about whether your action is "legal" but about which powerful people it upsets or supports and you get rewards and consequences on that basis.
I'd personally like to see that applied to non-Powerplay actions too - the idea that if you kill a pirate their friends might swear vengeance is the topic of spooky Halloween stories, not something which happens in-game - but that would need more rethinking of a lot of minor faction interactions, and the lack of Powerplay's opt-in switch for it would probably also need more explicit "lie low" / "false identity" options.
I think that this aspect of gaming more generally is going to become an area of great interest in the future, similar to the way that raytracing and lighting effects have done in the past. AI is the next frontier for gaming hardware, and this is exactly the area that could be massively improved by CPU's having neural nets built in. It is reasonable to ask: 'what will game design focus upon when photorealistic rendering is one of the choices?', the domain that seems the most likely to me is, AI in game and the use of AI in generating assets.
This is also an area that massively parallel systems can do well, but these are really hard to both design and program, Imagine if elite were running on many more cores, it could have entire cores dedicated to AI's behaviour if only there was a roadmap to how; Not tomorrow but this is I think, going to improve beyond recognition in the very near future.
Which is even explicitly called out in the description of anarchy factions.
"AI" is just a marketing term for "computer program", and Frontier are already using a computer program to manage the C&P system in-game, so I wouldn't expect any revolutionary changes from that angle.
One of the key requirements for a C&P system (in a computer game, though it helps in real life too) is that the outcomes be relatively straightforwardly explicable, documentable and ideally even intuitive - which is the sort of thing a conventional non-marketed computer program implementing a static set of rules is good at. Throwing in huge amounts of complexity to the extent that even Frontier can't explain "why did I get a 40,000 credit bounty for selling Grain to this station?" without spending a week looking through tens of thousands of lines of code and megabytes of action weighting data, and then have no way to fix it, really doesn't help there.
Conversely, if a bit of randomness in outcome is considered desirable,
outcome = random(1,6); has worked for decades and doesn't require an entire extra co-processor to run on.OK, fair enough, let me rephrase that; The creative use of neural nets and domain specific language.
Boolean logic is simply not enough here, a state machine with a far more refined language is required, also a notion of time and with certain amount of memory.
Hard agree on this one, complexity is the issue, and you can not solve the issues of complexity by giving the task to folk who love complexity. Which paradoxically, is far to often the case of computer programmers, rare it would seem, are those who appreciate elegance and simplicity.
I'd argue that this is where the meeting point of procedural generation with AI generation could really take off in the very near future. Again, neural nets and domain specific language. One thing that computers are far better than humans at is generating things procedurally, when you ask them to do that and combine it with randomness, neural nets and a very large database, you basically get LLM's.
I'm a fan of the apple approach to AI, not the farm it out approach, which is a world with slightly smaller domain specific private AI [k-dimention state machines] call it what you want. I do think that you could make a rich grammar specifically for a C&P system, that would require far less than an actual full blown LLM, and still give the ability to generate procedurally, basically with a richer surface texture if you will, to the in game AI system.
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