Hostile from fighting in CZ - no missions taken

[Kaocraft]

Denizens of the said station have residency permits. Mercenaries don't, and if the do not behave, they get shot at

That's fine as a post-hoc explanation but I just don't think it really makes any kind of intuitive logical sense.

There are always a plethora of plausible explanations for why something could be some way, but in any situation where the vagaries of the in-game fiction appear to contradict common sense, it is good practice to signpost and then handwave the contradiction in some overt way.

The fact that none of the various play mechanics, voice clips and flavor text in the game do anything to point to why things are the way they are, is an indication to me that there's a bunch of people working on this game and they're shooting from the hip without a strong unifying sense of what they're building and what it means. I think everything could be explained by your somewhat bizarre "residency permit" explanation, but I strongly doubt that any of this has been thought through like that.

 

[Maymo]

Quick question,

If I’m fighting for Faction A and controlling Faction B becomes hostile and I’m unable to dock, will I still be able to cash my bonds in at another system that Faction A has presence in?

And will those bonds matter in the war effort?

Also, there’s a anti-decay rate with minor factions isn’t there? Don’t they cool off from hostile > unfriendly after a day or so...

Or is that just the superpowers? Or am I just making stuff up?

 

[Phisto Sobanii]

Quick question,

If I’m fighting for Faction A and controlling Faction B becomes hostile and I’m unable to dock, will I still be able to cash my bonds in at another system that Faction A has presence in?

And will those bonds matter in the war effort?

Also, there’s a anti-decay rate with minor factions isn’t there? Don’t they cool off from hostile > unfriendly after a day or so...

Or is that just the superpowers? Or am I just making stuff up?

Yes. No. Yes. No. No.

 

[Maymo]

Yes. No. Yes. No. No.

Right, so the bonds have to be handed in at the actual system the war is taking place in order to be effective.

3 years in.....still learning!

 

[Aashenfox]

WHOOPS! I need to eat some crow. The patch dropped May 2nd (right?) and the conflict I referenced ended on May 1st. I think what confused me was us taking massacre missions and having our reputation drop because of that.

Massive pie in my face aside since we were working the conflict with our reputation in the toilet anyway conflict zones affecting reputation was moot. Based on that I'm not convinced this is a bad change but I'll be happy to adjust my tune if future experience demands it.

Regarding your final comment I wasn't speaking about GARD specifically, it's more the general tendency I see of folks like AEDC to work the meta and not the game. Makes it had for me to take them seriously about these matters.

I hear ya mate. This change has unbalanced attacking a new system though. We have no hope of beating aedc in any system they own now, especially since they tend to exploit their ability to bounty hunt in their own systems and hand in at a war zone, we already struggled to do enough cz completions in time to meet their effort, and now we will have to use an interstellar factors to hand in combat bonds as well (increasing cz completion time by 100% or more). I'm moany cos it was already a sisyphian task and they just made it much harder.

Then there's the Sirius controlled systems, which are like a virus, Sirius just spreads and it's so well supported by randoms doing missions for rep (as well as misguided supporters) and so well spread out that they can use every bgs dirty trick in the book, but they don't even need to, effort by randoms is anyway near impossible to wipe out and everywhere they go they slowly acquire all the assets. We tried fighting them in lhs 380 recently and it was just hilarious. No matter what, their influence jumped each day.

Like I say, to be made reasonable it needs some gameplay added, that's all. On the bright side, I understand they just fixed the '100k bounty transaction equals 2 cz clears', so that should be better at least. But again, Jane and her minions had to figure that out on their own. No good, FD, no good.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Yeah I mean I dont want to get into deep arguments about "realism" but I think it would be a good idea if Frontier at least made some decisions behind the scenes about how their world "works," and then take some steps to make sure all of their play mechanics reflect the underlying fiction or at least don't contradict it.

I think part of the problem is that there's a lot of things in the BGS which are very difficult to reconcile with a comprehensible lore, but if they changed the BGS to make it more comprehensible that would also cause problems by slowing things down massively.

I think your ritual combat theory makes a lot of sense - a week is long enough for one side to demonstrate that it has overwhelming might and support, so everyone agrees to call it there and skip to the peace treaties without anywhere near as much loss of life or damage to infrastructure as would be involved in a conventional war.

 

[Jmanis]

Like antagonistic behaviour needed more of a kick in the guts.

Great... now you can lock yourself out of participating in a war, by participating in the war. Ridiculous.

Seriously. FD need to hurry up and either:

• Allow docking when hostile, using Anonymous Protocols; or
• Spawn a megaship friendly to either side during a conflict, so you can go hand bonds in there.

Almost tempted to bugreport this...

(Corollary: Becoming hostile for fighting against a side in a war "makes sense", but not with the botched implementation of rep effects right now. Been saying it for years, since 2.1 dropped and they implemented the inability to dock when hostile... they needed to fix that rock show before pulling this sort of rubbish)

 

[Mangal Oemie]

So basically. You want your cake and eat it too.

I'd like balance between opposing sides.

I am perfectly OK with there being a consequence to fighting a faction. That is already the case with massacre missions, and you can make a choice whether or not to take them, given where your rep is. I am also fine with rep dropping to unfriendly, so after the war I have a poor mission selection from that faction until I repair it.

Locking players out of stations because you're fighting in a war, and maintaining that hostility after the conflict is over, may make logical sense, but creates a significant imbalance between the effort one side needs to put in versus the other.

But anyway, it's clear that this discussion is premature. Let's see this play out, and wait until people start getting locked out and how they like that.

 

[Jane Turner]

The C&P rewrite supposedly meant that if that happens you get transported to a detention centre - but I don't know if that's actually the case.

I can confirm that that is exactly what happens

 

[Mangal Oemie]

It's not just "one side" - it's the aggressor!

Frankly, this coming from a player in a group known for their desire to spread their preferred factions is kind of hilarious. Let's speak plainly here: it hurts your efforts and has nothing to do with game balance.

It's always a bit disappointing when you're trying to argue for game balance that benefits everybody, and it is interpreted as self-serving.

Ironically, we'll likely be one of the main beneficiaries. While we may be known for our desire to green the galaxy (just like others have their own largely unrealistic game goals), over the last year+ we've been under near constant attack, mostly by people and groups who won't even come forward and declare they are working against us. And with our long aim to own as many stations in any particular system, as a group we probably on balance stand more to gain from this change than to lose. The more members you have, the more you can spread effort across members, minimizing the rep degradation.

I like my conflicts to be a fair test of strength, though. Not where one side needs substantial less effort to win a contest.

So far, since there isn't a lot of pushback against this, and the change is therefore likely to be with us for the foreseeable future. Big factions with many members will be affected by this the least and will work around it. It's the lone wolves and small groups up against larger player groups and larger factions in their area, who after even losing their war won't be able to dock and run delivery missions to many stations.

 

[Mangal Oemie]

In "real war" you don't care about things like rep or what faction hired them - you kill them and destroy their stuff.

Story time! The Reapers recently fought a conflict where the system had a base most of us couldn't land at right next to the appropriate conflict zones. The base we could land at was 1,800 light seconds away from the conflict zones.

Do you know what we did?

We flew the 1,800 light seconds and got the job done. Amazing, aren't we?

That has always been the case. There is no problem with that. We have fought wars in systems where large ships can't dock at all. We've run missions from stations 250,000Ls from the star because the entry system was a Tourist station with nothing. This is nothing to do with that. All of that affects all sides.

But realize that soon you may have to make gains like this all the time, including not being able to dock at all and refuel/repair and restock outside the system, without a place to drop your bounties.

And you welcome that change...

 

[Mangal Oemie]

To be fair this CZ rep change hasn't been in effect since the beginning of my example but I think it's still pretty strong. In fact, it's even more solid because we were very careful to retain access to stations we needed to be effective.

I mean, if you're going to take actions that leave you at the bleeding edge of hostile reputation and then get upset when a small change punishes you for that I'd say it's time for a more well rounded BGS strategy.

As I explained before, I went from neutral to hostile in about 10 CZ trips. You're making a lot of assumptions, Phisto. It doesn't become you.

 

[Aashenfox]

What's the point of having a castle if the Hand of God forces you to fight on perfectly level ground beyond the ramparts?

But it's not level to start with, you've got your castle, you can hand in data at your castle, you can hand in bounties at your castle. If you own the system and /or 'castles' you have an advantage (under the old model). I can't think of a good analogy to the new system cos there's nothing like this game in real life, but that castle advantage has just been multiplied tenfold.

 

[Kaocraft]

This discussion reminds me of another argument/suggestion about CZs, which I now realize would solve the problem here as well:

What if Combat Bonds (and I guess massacre missions) didn't count for anything? They would still give you money/personal rep rewards, but the only thing that "moves the needle" in a war is actual ship kills and actual CZ wins?

This would mean that the "home field advantage" would mostly apply to convenience of restock/repair, and cash rewards, but wouldn't grant such an outsized advantage to defenders on the actual warfighting front.

Say what you will about how realistic or unrealistic, how fair or unfair it is for the underdog faction to lose Station access - it's entirely another thing to lose a war because the outcome is based on turning in "prize tickets" and the defenders are the only ones with ready access to the ticket tallying machine.

It might be realistic to lose access to a station, but it only draws more attention to the carnival games style nature of the conflict in the first place. Maybe get rid of Combat Bonds and Massacre Missions as deciding factors, and let wars be fought on the battlefield?

 

[Mangal Oemie]

Quick question,

If I’m fighting for Faction A and controlling Faction B becomes hostile and I’m unable to dock, will I still be able to cash my bonds in at another system that Faction A has presence in?

And will those bonds matter in the war effort?

Also, there’s a anti-decay rate with minor factions isn’t there? Don’t they cool off from hostile > unfriendly after a day or so...

Or is that just the superpowers? Or am I just making stuff up?

No.

If there is a war for your faction in that other system, it may help there, but that would need to be tested. It will not count for the war you got them in. You can sell your bonds at an IF, too, but also there, they will have no effect on the war you fought in.

It takes roughly a week for hostile to degrade to unfriendly, again, IIRC.

 

[Phisto Sobanii]

That has always been the case. There is no problem with that. We have fought wars in systems where large ships can't dock at all. We've run missions from stations 250,000Ls from the star because the entry system was a Tourist station with nothing. This is nothing to do with that. All of that affects all sides.

But realize that soon you may have to make gains like this all the time, including not being able to dock at all and refuel/repair and restock outside the system, without a place to drop your bounties.

And you welcome that change...

I'm honestly not worried about it.

As I explained before, I went from neutral to hostile in about 10 CZ trips. You're making a lot of assumptions, Phisto. It doesn't become you.

Thanks for the clarification about your reputation.

I'm making presumptions, not assumptions. Always happy to update them based on new information.

 

[Mangal Oemie]

This discussion reminds me of another argument/suggestion about CZs, which I now realize would solve the problem here as well:

What if Combat Bonds (and I guess massacre missions) didn't count for anything? They would still give you money/personal rep rewards, but the only thing that "moves the needle" in a war is actual ship kills and actual CZ wins?

This would mean that the "home field advantage" would mostly apply to convenience of restock/repair, and cash rewards, but wouldn't grant such an outsized advantage to defenders on the actual warfighting front.

Say what you will about how realistic or unrealistic, how fair or unfair it is for the underdog faction to lose Station access - it's entirely another thing to lose a war because the outcome is based on turning in "prize tickets" and the defenders are the only ones with ready access to the ticket tallying machine.

It might be realistic to lose access to a station, but it only draws more attention to the carnival games style nature of the conflict in the first place. Maybe get rid of Combat Bonds and Massacre Missions as deciding factors, and let wars be fought on the battlefield?

Agreed.

I think we have a couple of possible fixes, now (outside of simply reverting the change):

1. Don't count bonds at all. They're just a "sweetener" just like cash from massacre missions
2. Introduce squadron carriers (though that wouldn't help non-squadron affiliated CMDRs)
3. A temporary docking station for bond drops and refuel/repair/restock

I think anyone who thinks this is a problem could live with any of those solutions (though I have reservations about 2).

 

[Kaocraft]

Agreed.

I think we have a couple of possible fixes, now (outside of simply reverting the change):

1. Don't count bonds at all. They're just a "sweetener" just like cash from massacre missions
2. Introduce squadron carriers (though that wouldn't help non-squadron affiliated CMDRs)
3. A temporary docking station for bond drops and refuel/repair/restock

I think anyone who thinks this is a problem could live with any of those solutions (though I have reservations about 2).

I like option #1 the most because it's the only solution that doesn't require Frontier to do real work. I LIKE the hostile faction thing and the repurcussions it can bring, but as it stands now it's just one more semi-random change that Frontier has made, possibly without even understanding what they were doing, by essentially "flipping a switch". Any viable solution needs to be something they can do with an equally low amount of thought or effort. My guess is that they'll just flip the same switch BACK to the way it was, but as a person who would like to keep the changes to faction hostility in place, I feel that it's important to advocate for balancing solutions that are at least as simple as the alternative of "ok we'll just set it back the way it was before, then"

 

[Phisto Sobanii]

I'd be good with the bonds change as a compromise.

 

[Ulon Yuanshi]

Agreed.

I think we have a couple of possible fixes, now (outside of simply reverting the change):

1. Don't count bonds at all. They're just a "sweetener" just like cash from massacre missions
2. Introduce squadron carriers (though that wouldn't help non-squadron affiliated CMDRs)
3. A temporary docking station for bond drops and refuel/repair/restock

I think anyone who thinks this is a problem could live with any of those solutions (though I have reservations about 2).

4. Allow docking at hostile.

To be fair, I would like this solution the least, but it would address the problem too.