Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
This is where we don't agree. Players have the option to avoid the games reaction to law breaking, by having a strong ship.
If the game was able to propperly react to players actions on NPCs, it would do the same when the crime was against a player.
In the Deliberate Ramming thread, Sandro has posted a few times. I asked him about this:
There has been some discontent regarding the apparent disparity of treatment between player vs. player interactions and player vs. NPC interactions.
You mentioned earlier that the karma system is designed to deal with player/player actions - although did not seem to rule out applying a karmic hit for player vs. NPC actions. Could you please clarify if karma would be applied for player/player interactions and some player/NPC interactions or not?
Also, are you considering beefed up consequences for crime in general (that would apply regardless of the nature of the target)?
He replied as follows:
Hello Commander Robert Maynard!
Remembering that none of this is being promised, I would say this about the players interacting with players versus players interacting with NPCs:
* In general, only players are members of the Pilot's Federation, which would be the organisation dealing with a karma rating.
* NPCs don't support the game's development. They don't (as far as I can tell) enjoy or hate the game mechanics. This system is not about them. It's not even focused on verisimilitude. It's about dealing with humans in a shared game space and creating an environment which supports as many of them as possible as well as we can.
Whilst we could apply a karma system to NPC interactions it would require more data tracking and serve no useful purpose as far as I can make out.
The only "beefing up" of crime I can think of at the moment is more teeth to authority vessels to cope with heavily engineered ships (authority vessels are always meant to be a threat, so I'd like to see them visiting the Engineers).