Crime and punishment suggestions from a criminal - Odyssey edition

[Screemonster]

So, way back in december, I posted this thread: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...nt-suggestions-by-an-in-game-criminal.560800/
It got a generally positive reception. Notably, some parts of it (especially part 2!) are actually pretty close to how Odyssey updated hot ships and the like to actually work, which is absolutely fantastic - I've always thought it silly that a career criminal could just keep a "clean ship" to be able to freely do business in places they're wanted, so good work.

I've had some thoughts since, and my thoughts have evolved. How to make C&P more reasonable in a way that allows some level of getting-away-with-crimes, without it just being "lmao just AFK your notoriety away and go to an interstellar factors and all is forgiven". Generally speaking, this thread will focus on what should be relatively quick changes - the last thread went into criminal missions and piracy and the like, but honestly there's not an awful lot that's changed about those in space and Odyssey is generally pretty good about giving neer-do-wells fun things to do.

So without further ado - CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 2: WILD WILD WEST

PART ONE - GETTING BOUNTIES
One of the things I mentioned in the last thread (and honestly in a lot of threads) is the all-seeing-eye of the bounty system. All crimes committed outside an anarchy jurisdiction are instantly punished, even when the only witness is now a cloud of rapidly expanding debris and the security response is jammed because you're in a mission signal source so help will never arrive. Odyssey has only made this even more stark, with stealth kills in a closed room instantly getting a bounty from the omnicient crime database, while the guy literally standing outside the room is none the wiser - unless he scans you and discovers the crime that way. Effectively, there's not really any reward for being stealthy over being loud, besides the advantage of being able to take the base on one at a time instead of all at once.
As such, I'd suggest the following changes:

• In space, instead of merely preventing security responses, areas without a system link disable the ability to report crimes entirely. Even in high-security systems, there are these little pockets of lawlessness where you can ambush and be ambushed. Hazardous res sites and compromised nav beacons are de-facto lawless. You can still claim bounties and see whether someone is wanted or clean on a basic scan, but reporting a crime is disabled and as such you can never become wanted in these areas.
• If the alarms at a settlement are disabled, so is the system link. Yes, this means offline settlements are effectively lawless too.
• Crimes committed on-foot require someone to actually report them, rather than just instantly getting a fine/bounty the instant you commit them. Reporting takes NPCs a couple of seconds or so, similar to raising alarms, so if they see you with a gun out they don't get to instantly fine you in the tenth of a second it takes to shoot them in the face.
  • Outside of settlements, at PoIs, etc, there's no alarm relay to call it in. Yes, these areas are effectively lawless outside of a ship too.
  • NPCs that attempt to call in a crime, even a fine, and find they're unable to because the alarms are dead will immediately become hostile and attempt to reinstate the alarms if they have access.
  • Murder bounties are issued when someone finds the body and successfully calls it in, or the alarm is raised for any reason.
  • If you are caught/killed at a settlement, any bodies you created are automatically found regardless of whether the alarms are on or not.
  • None of these stealth factors apply to your ship - if the system authorities find what's left of a murder victim in the middle of a bomb crater, and call up traffic control to be told CMDR Nukem was seen in the area immediately before an explosion was detected and his ship loadout was "a frankly unreasonable amount of missiles" they're gonna consider that to be beyond reasonable doubt. On-foot weapons are a lot more subtle, and since literally any ship passing through the area could have been carrying the guy wielding them, CMDR Nukem has a lot more plausible deniability. (is there a CMDR Nukem? And did he stop gaining imperial rank at Duke?)

And finally:

• Murdering a person, not a ship, and actually getting a murder charge for it, sets your notoriety to a minimum of 1. Even if it takes several subsequent kills to get your second point. The reason for this will be explained below in part two.

Yes, there is a bias here towards "wild west", where anything that happens out in the desert is between you and the cacti. Note that if someone discovers a body at a settlement and nobody saw you kill them, if they're able to call it in or raise the alarm it can be assumed that they will find out who did it by checking the settlement's surveillance tapes or whatever and when the alarm is raised the footage is sent to the faction HQ or Omnipol or whoever to do their CSI zoom-enhance-gottem thing, and disabling the alarms also messes with the footage. While I'd love to see an extra security terminal or something at bases that you can hack/interact with to delete the security footage and so on for some extra gameplay, that's beyond the scope of this thread.

PART TWO - CLEARING BOUNTIES
As I mentioned in the last thread, bounties are currently simultanously too punishing for minor/accidental/incidental crimes, and too easy to get rid of for career criminals. Having a bounty, no matter how small, and not having the nearest IF bookmarked is a huge pain, whereas someone going on a murderspree can just wait out their notoriety then vanish it like nothing happened.
As such, I'd suggest the following changes:

• Interstellar factors are no longer used to just disappear your bounties with credits. A bounty isn't "just a fine but with harsh words"- they want you dead. Paying them off ain't gonna cut it. They want your head on a platter. Sure, for 400cr they might not want it very much, but their position on your legal status is "wanted dead or alive", not "this bum owes me money".
• Instead, bounties decay by half on the weekly tick as they cease caring so much about wanting you dead any more.
• If you have no notoriety, bounties below 5000cr become fines when you next jump. (hence why on-foot murders should always put you on at least 1 notoriety)
• Make notoriety decay while people are offline 'cause seriously come on the current situation is daft and gamey. Even decaying at a slower rate would be an improvement over what we have now.
• Split notoriety by superpower, as fed factions shouldn't really care whether I just tore a path through the empire.

PART THREE - SECURITY LEVELS AND NPC BEHAVIOUR
One thing that has kinda followed Odyssey from Horizons is that security levels don't mean a whole lot. In Horizons it determines the speed of the authority response and that's about it, in Odyssey it's a general indictor of whether you're likely to see a goliath or ships patrolling overhead, but really most settlements aren't that different to each other beyond that - workers inside the command building at a high-security military base will react to unescorted personnel in much the same way as those passing you on the path at some random agriculture facility.

• Personnel on higher security bases should be more prone to sounding the alarm - on a high sec military base, for instance, finding a body should be a case of immediately sounding the alarms before doing anything else, instead of running around to try and investigate themselves.
• People reacting to gunshots should just sound the alarm straight away if they hear more gunshots, even if they've not yet seen the shooter. "What was that?" is fine for hearing the first shot, but if they hear more then that's very definitely an active shooter on base and they should react accordingly.
• NPCs should be more suspicious of people that haven't registered with base security - if they see some guy with a weapon out that didn't arrive by requesting clearance and touching down on the landing pad, that's not a case of "yell at them to stow their gun", that's "sound the alarm immediately".
• Guards should have a wider "come over and tell you to hold for a scan" radius under the same circumstances.
• NPCs should have a reaction to bad-but-not-immediately-illegal behaviour that isn'tjust a case of either ignoring you entirely or opening fire, and they should be more sensitive to this if they're already suspicious. If they're annoyed enough at you, you should be asked to leave the base and effectively given a timer similar to the trespass countdown for entering the mailslot without clearance, after which the base will turn hostile and shoot you on sight for trespassing. (Naturally, this should require them to be able to call it in, ie. if the alarms are off they can't give you the trespass warning). The kinds of things that should eventually annoy NPCs to the point where they want you to leave regardless of criminal activity could include, but not be limited to:
  • Creeping around and getting spotted (obviously trying to hide)
  • Not arriving at the base through proper means (ie on the landing pad)
  • Hanging around for an extended period near, but not quite in, a restricted area.
  • Anything weird has happened recently, such as alarms having been raised and then cancelled without finding anyone, something was found e-breached or cut, etc.
  • Hanging around creepily close to the point where they feel the need to call you weird.
  • Having an unfriendly reputation!

Hopefully this brainstorming will help BANISH THE SCOURGE OF THE ALL-SEEING EYE and make criminal gameplay more fun and improve the stealth situation (which was already pretty good until we started figuring out what things the NPCs will tolerate no matter how sus we're being!) while actually meaning that those that just plain go loud will actually have to deal with it.

 

[CMDR Nathan Atterlein]

I think NPC behavior already has some form of neutral-bad-immakillyounow attitude slider programmed. Whenever i tried zapping a guard after i let him start the scanning animation, the first target could always be tasered in their face. But every time i tried to pull the same trick with the 2nd/3rd guard, they could pull their shields up right before i finished the overload. This lead me to think that the locals incrementally became more prepared for my shenanigans, until they could catch me in the act.

This is reproduceable behavior. I suppose its the same mechanism that commands npcs to warn you if they see you use illegal tool modes once, but become hostile after repeated sightings.

 

[Screemonster]

Yeah, it'd be great to have the guards raise their shields before they start the scan if they have any reason to suspect you might, say, quickdraw and shoot them in the face with an audio-masked Tormentor while they're standing still.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

There's a completely different way to approach it that wouldn't be as annoying and as complex as the whole thing with crime, punishment, bounties, fines, notoriety:

If an alarm is raised the settlement goes into lockdown mode and most of the valuable loot will become inaccessible or harder to get.

• All passwords become scrambled and all locked containers/lockers require an e-breach in addition to the cutting tool to open.
• Data takes longer to download (with hopefully the current base amount being reduced).
• Ammo and other resupply containers self-destruct or close as well.
• Recharge ports become inaccessible

If the goal is to minimize the amount of NPCs players serial-kill in settlements and use less brute force then messing with their bottom end is more likely to get that result.

But currently I'm not too sure on even what the intended gameplay is that the crime and punishment stuff is supposed to drive you towards.

 

[Screemonster]

There's a completely different way to approach it that wouldn't be as annoying and as complex as the whole thing with crime, punishment, bounties, fines, notoriety:

If an alarm is raised the settlement goes into lockdown mode and most of the valuable loot will become inaccessible or harder to get.

• All passwords become scrambled and all locked containers/lockers require an e-breach in addition to the cutting tool to open.
• Data takes longer to download (with hopefully the current base amount being reduced).
• Ammo and other resupply containers self-destruct or close as well.
• Recharge ports become inaccessible

If the goal is to minimize the amount of NPCs players serial-kill in settlements and use less brute force then messing with their bottom end is more likely to get that result.

But currently I'm not too sure on even what the intended gameplay is that the crime and punishment stuff is supposed to drive you towards.

That'd be interesting but beyond the scope of this thread. This thread is mainly about getting bounties, avoiding getting bounties, and getting rid of bounties, and NPC behaviour related to discovering crime. I only really mentioned raise-the-alarm mechanics as they relate specifically to murder bounties.

 

[DemiserofD]

• Interstellar factors are no longer used to just disappear your bounties with credits. A bounty isn't "just a fine but with harsh words"- they want you dead. Paying them off ain't gonna cut it. They want your head on a platter. Sure, for 400cr they might not want it very much, but their position on your legal status is "wanted dead or alive", not "this bum owes me money".
• Instead, bounties decay by half on the weekly tick as they cease caring so much about wanting you dead any more.
• If you have no notoriety, bounties below 5000cr become fines when you next jump. (hence why on-foot murders should always put you on at least 1 notoriety)
• Make notoriety decay while people are offline 'cause seriously come on the current situation is daft and gamey. Even decaying at a slower rate would be an improvement over what we have now.
• Split notoriety by superpower, as fed factions shouldn't really care whether I just tore a path through the empire.

Okay, I like everything you've proposed except for this part.

I think the more fundamental issue is that they're issuing such tiny bounties at all. It doesn't make any sense that they'll try to murder you for a 500c infraction in the first place, not unless you've already done a lot of other stuff and it just pushed things over the edge.

So this is what I'm thinking.

• Bounties and Fines are based on your relationship with the controlling faction. At Allied, you get no fine or bounty if caught, but lose rep, almost certainly taking you straight below Allied. Basically, Allied players get a freebie. At Friendly, Cordial or Neutral, you get progressively increasing fines AND lose rep, but still don't get a bounty unless the crime takes you straight to Unfriendly or below. And at Unfriendly and below, you instantly get bounties for everything, even things that would normally be a fine. Consider that many of the bounties issued classically were for things like Horse Rustling, not murder.
  
  
• Standard bounties can still be removed at an IF, but only AFTER getting your reputation with the faction up out of Hostile or Unfriendly. You can accomplish this either by finding another system where they're a minor faction, or by completing Search and Rescue POIs/fighting for their side in CZs.
  
  
• Once you get your relationship down to Hostile, further crimes will result in a Superpower bounty also being applied. Superpower bounties, unlike normal bounties, CANNOT be removed at a Factor, and having one also prohibits removing bounties from any system under that Superpower's control. Instead, they decay at a rate of 50% + 100k per day.(IE, 1m->400k->100k->0) Getting killed with a superpower bounty doesn't remove the bounty, it just sets it inactive, meaning it can't be claimed again, but if the player commits further egregious crimes in hostile systems, it instantly reactivates at its full value, and it still prohibits paying off other bounties until it decays. Essentially, Superpower Bounties take the place of Notoriety, only these bounties decay even while the player is offline. They also last longer, but since they're not universal, like Notoriety, it allows the player more leeway in becoming a criminal in one area but remaining untainted in another.

The ideal result of this is that there's no need to have bounties change from bounty to fine in the first place. Small crimes will be unlikely to take you down to the point of being unfriendly, and the damage can be undone with a few donation missions. Of course, the price of those missions would be far greater than the fines themselves, but that's the price of crime. Meanwhile, larger crimes will have exactly the results you'd expect, only with a small grace window, that essentially prohibits behaviors like flying around in an unshielded sidewinder near stations to give inattentive players a murder bounty + Notoriety.

 

[Screemonster]

I think the more fundamental issue is that they're issuing such tiny bounties at all. It doesn't make any sense that they'll try to murder you for a 500c infraction in the first place, not unless you've already done a lot of other stuff and it just pushed things over the edge.

The reason it's necessary to issue a tiny bounty is, essentially, to make it legal for the person you just assaulted to return fire. It's not about the money, it's about making you legal to kill.

Before the C&P update when bounties had timers attached to them after which they would simply go away, an assault bounty only lasted for 10 minutes then disappeared on your next jump. It's not there to punish you financially, it's there to make it legal to fire back, that's all.

Under the system you propose, I could attack someone while allied and it wouldn't be considered a crime, while my victim returning fire would be a crime and you'd get people baited into getting killed by the cops.

 

[DemiserofD]

The reason it's necessary to issue a tiny bounty is, essentially, to make it legal for the person you just assaulted to return fire. It's not about the money, it's about making you legal to kill.

Before the C&P update when bounties had timers attached to them after which they would simply go away, an assault bounty only lasted for 10 minutes then disappeared on your next jump. It's not there to punish you financially, it's there to make it legal to fire back, that's all.

Under the system you propose, I could attack someone while allied and it wouldn't be considered a crime, while my victim returning fire would be a crime and you'd get people baited into getting killed by the cops.

Can't you can shoot back at someone who shoots you, even if you have your crimes turned off?

 

[Screemonster]

Can't you can shoot back at someone who shoots you, even if you have your crimes turned off?

If you have crimes off and return fire on a clean ship that has crimes on, you become wanted even if they fired first.

 

[DemiserofD]

Huh, weird. Guess I've never been in that scenario.

Well, nonetheless, given that each shot on a non-criminal target is its own crime, and they already have metrics for determining damage dealt in terms of criminality(IE it's not a bounty to hit someone with a multicannon shot but it is a crime to hit them with a missile), it seems somewhat reasonable that the first few shots wouldn't be considered a crime, especially since the other player presumably has the same window of leeway. They would just lose reputation in direct proportion to their damage dealt. And targeted shots would lose more rep than untargeted shots, same as it currently works.

So you shoot them a few times and don't get a bounty, but they can also shoot you a few times without it being a bounty. But if they keep shooting or actually kill the other player, it would instantly become a bounty. If they can kill that player without the damage required to do so being enough to lose enough rep to get a bounty, that player absolutely wouldn't have survived an attack anyway, and the murder would then push the attacking player down by a large chunk of reputation that would then need to be earned back.

From the lore perspective, if an ally of a faction starts shooting someone, the first presumption wouldn't be that your long-time ally suddenly decided to murder someone randomly, it would be that your ally has a good reason to be doing what they're doing, and you probably should at least figure out what's going on first, before interfering.

 

[Screemonster]

Honestly?
The reason my suggestion for bounty removal is just down to a few bullet points is the K.I.S.S. rule.
You get a bounty for doing a crime. That bounty decays over time until it reaches a lower limit, then it goes away. Simple. Understandable. Even a newbie can wrap their head around it. You could even have a counter next to it working out how many weeks to go before it goes away by running ceil(log2(bounty)).

The more complexities and nuances and faffing around you add to the system, the more likely it is to go wrong, the more likely it is for people to fall foul of some daft little niche scenario or quirk and get mad about it, and the more pointless explanation posts will have to be made every week or so when yet another player is like "how I get rid of bounty I cannot find IF" or the more recent "I found an IF but it won't let me remove my bounty".

The old bounty system wasn't perfect, but "5000CR BOUNTY WITH AUTOCRATS OF GAMMA HOROLOGII - EXPIRES IN: 6 DAYS 12 HRS" took absolutely zero explanation to understand.

 

[DemiserofD]

That's somewhat true, but it also leaves some gaps, and that's where the problems arise. For example, bounties being converted to fines on low wake isn't exactly intuitive, and also getting a bounty for hitting a target with a missile but not with a multicannon remains an issue, or, of course, sidewinder death griefing in stations. These are things that shouldn't be a problem in the first place, so while the bandaid of the bounty conversion sorta repairs the problem, it doesn't fix it entirely.

By contrast, a reputation-based system would be fairly straightforward, too. We already have systems like this in games like Skyrim. Steal from an ally and they'll be like "Hey! Watch it!" for a few times, then "I'm warning you!" For a few times more, and then finally, "Alright, I didn't want to have to do this. Guards!"

By contrast, doing the same to a neutral target jumps straight to "I'm warning you, stay back!", and an angry target will just jump straight to murder for just about anything.

It would be clearest if it actually showed your current reputation, of course, and the effect your crime has had on it. But then again, that would probably be good regardless. What the heck does REP++ even mean, anyway? Nothing, to someone without experience, but a simple game mechanic like Rep shouldn't need experience to understand.

 

[Screemonster]

Don't get me wrong, it'd be great for rep to have some effect, but honestly I'd go for something simpler (again) like...

If you're unfriendly, the security level is treated one step lower when calculating security response times as they simply don't care enough about getting there quickly.
If you're hostile, you're fair game. There isn't a bounty on your head, but nobody's going to incur a bounty for firing on you either. 911 just hangs up on you.

 

[Maolagin]

The reason it's necessary to issue a tiny bounty is, essentially, to make it legal for the person you just assaulted to return fire. It's not about the money, it's about making you legal to kill.

Before the C&P update when bounties had timers attached to them after which they would simply go away, an assault bounty only lasted for 10 minutes then disappeared on your next jump. It's not there to punish you financially, it's there to make it legal to fire back, that's all.

Under the system you propose, I could attack someone while allied and it wouldn't be considered a crime, while my victim returning fire would be a crime and you'd get people baited into getting killed by the cops.

Putting it this way really makes me think that those two purposes should perhaps be separated. E.g. if you commit an assault, you immediately get a CRIMINAL flag that makes you a legal target, but goes away when you leave the instance. And totally separately, crimes yield fines and bounties that are large enough to have some nonzero level of consequence, with the threshold to getting a bounty being rather higher than it is now.

 

[DemiserofD]

Don't get me wrong, it'd be great for rep to have some effect, but honestly I'd go for something simpler (again) like...

If you're unfriendly, the security level is treated one step lower when calculating security response times as they simply don't care enough about getting there quickly.
If you're hostile, you're fair game. There isn't a bounty on your head, but nobody's going to incur a bounty for firing on you either. 911 just hangs up on you.

Well, the reason I want it to work both ways is because right now, the C&P system tends to be too punishing towards accidents and mistakes and noobs, but not enough against actual criminals. It takes approximately the same effort to remove a 500c bounty as it does to remove a 50000000c bounty, which is especially punishing towards low-reward activities where bounties can be obtained accidentally, while being much easier on career criminals. A career criminal can just ignore it and keep doing crimes until they get done, then remove it almost coincidentally when they move onto their next activity, while someone who's trying to do legal things but accidentally gets a bounty needs to completely stop what they're doing and go spend 20 minutes fixing their honest mistake.

This would essentially invert that. As long as you're not committing crimes much, and gaining positive rep somewhat regularly, you wouldn't see ANY consequences for accidental or occasional criminality, as your mistakes would be outweighed just by playing the game. By contrast, people who commit lots of crimes would overcome their natural rep gain and would need to intentionally undo the damage they're intentionally doing.

 

[Screemonster]

Sounds like we're both brainstorming different approaches to the same problem, because this is absolutely spot on:

It takes approximately the same effort to remove a 500c bounty as it does to remove a 50000000c bounty, which is especially punishing towards low-reward activities where bounties can be obtained accidentally, while being much easier on career criminals. A career criminal can just ignore it and keep doing crimes until they get done, then remove it almost coincidentally when they move onto their next activity, while someone who's trying to do legal things but accidentally gets a bounty needs to completely stop what they're doing and go spend 20 minutes fixing their honest mistake.

Under the current system, the small / incidental / accidental bounties stick with you for way longer than is necessary or desirable and make you have to go out of your way to get rid of them or at least go do your thing in a different system until you get around to it, while the big bounties for a whole crime spree? Eh, just get rid of them when you're done doing crimes and because you were setting out to deliberately do crimes you almost certainly bookmarked a safe harbour well in advance of getting your hands dirty.

 

[DemiserofD]

Sounds like we're both brainstorming different approaches to the same problem, because this is absolutely spot on:



Under the current system, the small / incidental / accidental bounties stick with you for way longer than is necessary or desirable and make you have to go out of your way to get rid of them or at least go do your thing in a different system until you get around to it, while the big bounties for a whole crime spree? Eh, just get rid of them when you're done doing crimes and because you were setting out to deliberately do crimes you almost certainly bookmarked a safe harbour well in advance of getting your hands dirty.

To be fair, I do think your proposals would work, just not as elegantly as I'd like. To me, even needing to wake out after a simple mistake like clipping an ally with a missile should be unnecessary.

But if the choice is between your proposal and nothing, I'd happily take yours every time. It's at least better.

 

[Screemonster]

To be fair, I do think your proposals would work, just not as elegantly as I'd like. To me, even needing to wake out after a simple mistake like clipping an ally with a missile should be unnecessary.

But if the choice is between your proposal and nothing, I'd happily take yours every time. It's at least better.

When I was first starting out and bounty hunting in high-res's, clipping a cop with my little courier's guns tended to leave me waking out ASAP with a horde of angry red triangles on my tail anyway, hahahahaha.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

This has been on the back of my mind while playing more lately and I think the main focus on any improvements or re-balance to crime stuff should focus on streamlining it so it wouldn't have so many gotchas and obtuse rules.

The most obvious thing that comes to mind:
Notoriety should be shown as a timer/duration instead of an integer.

This way it's self-explanatory what you need to do to get rid of it. No googling or reading the (incorrect) Pilots Handbook necessary. ATR response isn't actually tied to notoriety as described there it seems too. Even the paragraph about it not updating while docked is wrong (at least in odyssey).

Especially with on-foot murders already adding a fractional amount of notoriety. I haven't tested this too thoroughly but it seems like 10-15min a murder.

Everything else can be reworded around it without changing any of the mechanics.

The extra step of converting it to an integer isn't helpful for anything in-game because the only thing it seems to be affecting is how much of a bounty you get for murders and you can do the approximate math on that in your head based on hours remaining just as well.