Open letter to Devs, Why I am now combat logging and what to do with this pirate.

[SuBSynk]

No.

People are saying that there should be tangible consequences for being a pirate, rather than a slap on the cheek with a powder-puff every so often. An example would be that you as a Pirate are actively hunted and exterminated by police in all systems, excluding lawless systems, of course. You must be afraid to poke your nose anywhere near civilisation and be hunted down by all and sundry like the pirate you are. You need to be clever and live in the shadows, pouncing on your victims and then running.

That said, the entire dynamic at present is arcade in the extreme. Being a Pirate should mean that the bad will always outweigh the good. At the moment the bad is nonexistent, leading to the Bondoffski exploit. As a consequence, Pirates have no cause at all to scream foul - you have it too easy as it is and that right there is just plain wrong and will hopefully be rectified by FD asap.

Either you have not played the profession or are being purposefully misleading.

When wanted you cannot spend more than 30-45 seconds in a system with any security without being interdicted by the feds and this will continue over and over until you leave.

Once you pirate a player the Feds will arrive in numbers and proceed to fire at you as well as scan you causing huge fines. You cannot ever stop and relax as more feds will arrive in never ending numbers and you would know this if you ever played as pirate or even more so if on the top 5 list where interdictions happen even more commonly to the extent that pirating a player can be next to impossible due to fed interdictions every 10-20 seconds or so.

 

[EddyRockSteady]

Either you have not played the profession or are being purposefully misleading.

When wanted you cannot spend more than 30-45 seconds in a system with any security without being interdicted by the feds and this will continue over and over until you leave.

Once you pirate a player the Feds will arrive in numbers and proceed to fire at you as well as scan you causing huge fines. You cannot ever stop and relax as more feds will arrive in never ending numbers and you would know this if you ever played as pirate or even more so if on the top 5 list where interdictions happen even more commonly to the extent that pirating a player can be next to impossible due to fed interdictions every 10-20 seconds or so.

Never pirated, no.

Those consequences you mention are too lax. Getting interdicted? Bah! You should be getting corralled by a strike force and exterminated with extreme prejudice if caught in a law-abiding system. You should not be allowed to run to the nearest outpost and wipe your slate clean. That right there is what is wrong with the system as mentioned time and time again.

 

[SuBSynk]

Never pirated, no.

Those consequences you mention are too lax. Getting interdicted? Bah! You should be getting corralled by a strike force and exterminated with extreme prejudice if caught in a law-abiding system. You should not be allowed to run to the nearest outpost and wipe your slate clean. That right there is what is wrong with the system as mentioned time and time again.

You again fail at understanding that this would make pirates the only profession in the game with zero options to change profession.

If you cannot grasp even this simple logic and why FD will never implement your suggestion to keep criminals as wanted until a time has expired or death it is pointless to debate the issue with you...

Reread my post above on why wanted status clearing will never change to what you want and consider why you feel that pirates along with having the lowest profit in game by far should also have no option to change career when they please.

I'm now starting to see this thread is but another thinly disguised piracy hate discussion and should not bother debating the issue with players that have never even tried to pirate themselves and so know nothing about what they are attempting to discuss.

Try being interdicted every few seconds and then return to tell me how much fun you are having in high security systems...

 

[Sotapeikko]

The bounty system was intended to provide a consequence and is clearly providing a consequence insufficient to deal with natural human behavior, unless the equivalent of shooting a man in the head, walking into a police station to pay a fine for it, then going out and repeating is how we want, or the devs envision, this aspect of gameplay to function.

Well.. the guy who got shot in the head would not wake up at home with a bill for 5% of the value of the clothes he was wearing and nothing in his pockets.

 

[lorrad]

Well.. the guy who got shot in the head would not wake up at home with a bill for 5% of the value of the clothes he was wearing and nothing in his pockets.

One might think that FD has the power here but as in real life they in fact don't, the traders do.

An organized boycott of open play by traders would force the issue.

Can't be a predator if there ain't no prey.

 

[woodhouse]

Only way? Nonsense. Any way that forces PCs out of open is a bad way.

I don't see how my suggestion to have 2 opens, one PvE one PvP, is forcing PCs out of open. It will actually attract many more players to open than are currently playing open.

I recently joined the Mobius group after playing in solo for months. This is what it was like in Beta! From time to time, you meet another commander, have a nice chat, and go about your business. I think most people would love it this way but choose to go to solo because playing in open right now is suicide.

 

[SuBSynk]

I don't see how my suggestion to have 2 opens, one PvE one PvP, is forcing PCs out of open. It will actually attract many more players to open than are currently playing open.

I recently joined the Mobius group after playing in solo for months. This is what it was like in Beta! From time to time, you meet another commander, have a nice chat, and go about your business. I think most people would love it this way but choose to go to solo because playing in open right now is suicide.

You played in solo for months and now are in Mobius and therefore have no experience of open play it seems.

It is not "suicide" in open play far from it, in fact unless you are traveling through Lave or other pvp hotspots open play is very safe and almost entirely free from any commander interaction.

I really wish people would stop spreading these inaccurate descriptions of open play especially those with no experience of the mode.

 

[kapitankev]

Personally I wouldn't mind a bounty/timer on my head. I play most days for an hour or so which I suspect is quite common. Having the timer set to 26 hours would ensure if you kill today you're still going to be wanted tomorrow unless you work it off or die.

There should of course be options to work off your bounty in less time, about an hours play maybe to work of a murder. I don't feel It'd be too hard to switch to trading if I wanted to and it would ensure my bounty would be up for grabs for anyone who wants to try.

 

[SahilD]

Gutless noob, get over it.

Will it even make a difference if you stop pirates wiping out their bounties? I don't think so, I have a 1 million bounty in federation and couple thousand hundred in alliance and independent, I have never wiped out my bounty and none pathetic bounty hunter like yourself have ever taken me down, I always roam around in nav beacons, and all I see is bounty hunters charging up their drives after the failed attempt to take my bounty.

 

[SuBSynk]

Personally I wouldn't mind a bounty/timer on my head. I play most days for an hour or so which I suspect is quite common. Having the timer set to 26 hours would ensure if you kill today you're still going to be wanted tomorrow unless you work it off or die.

There should of course be options to work off your bounty in less time, about an hours play maybe to work of a murder. I don't feel It'd be too hard to switch to trading if I wanted to and it would ensure my bounty would be up for grabs for anyone who wants to try.

In that case should we also have a timer before bounty hunters are allowed to Pirate? Or a timer before traders are allowed to bounty hunt?

 

[kapitankev]

You played in solo for months and now are in Mobius and therefore have no experience of open play it seems.

It is not "suicide" in open play far from it, in fact unless you are traveling through Lave or other pvp hotspots open play is very safe and almost entirely free from any commander interaction.

I really wish people would stop spreading these inaccurate descriptions of open play especially those with no experience of the mode.

Even in Lave it's hardly suicide, for every trader that loses interdiction another will win. Of the ones that get caught many boost away with little or no damage and of course there's the unthinkable option of dropping 5 barrels of brandy that'd cost a whopping what 5-6k?

There are plenty of traders playing in open and seemingly raking in cash.

 

[kapitankev]

In that case should we also have a timer before bounty hunters are allowed to Pirate? Or a timer before traders are allowed to bounty hunt?

Well, no....piracy is illegal. Not having a timer and allowing us to wipe bounties does make bounty hunting a bit lame. Although I still enjoy bounty hunting it's always nice to find a player with a price on their head. it'd be no bad thing if it was more common.

Having a timer or some kind of tougher bounty system would just encourage more PvP and I'm well up for that. Having a timer on the other professions would serve no purpose.

Also...I'm a pirate but if I see a player with a bounty and I reckon I can take him I'll give it a go. Stiffer bounties benefit anyone with weapons. A lot of people on here seem a little too devoted to their profession.

 

[magillag]

33 pages... TLDR

I want to kill bad bad guys.
I want to know they are are bad.
I want them to know they are bad.
You baddies. I'll get you!!!!


(in Star Citizen.... when it's released...)

 

[M3SS3NG3R]

I think there are essentially two ways to fix the bounty system:

1. As suggested, make bounties stick for say, 24hr in-game time before they can be paid off at station. If bounties are constantly accumulated then reset the timer each time a new bounty is incurred. Criminals must then be on good behavior AND survive for a period of time before they can pay the whole thing off.

2. Another way is to simply make bounties scale above the profit the criminals stand to make from his activities. ie: Say total maximum profit from pirated goods is 10000cr, then the pirate incurs a bounty of 12000cr. This way criminals cannot make a net profit after they pay off the bounties (at least, not without help from a third party like mission bonus) and therefore should simply let the bounties stick.

3. Why not combine both 1 & 2?

To balance things out, some work needs to be done to ENCOURAGE piracy. For example, allow players to buy departure information from the black market that facilitates the interception of certain ships that left the station recently. The list of ships could be say, the top 5 ships (PC & NPC) that left the station with the most monetary value in goods in the last 10 minutes. The actual information could include the types of cargo, existence of wingmen if there are any and some sort of frameshift drive data that allows the pirates to directly jump to a nearby location in supercruise for interdiction etc etc.

 

[kapitankev]

I think there are essentially two ways to fix the bounty system:

1. As suggested, make bounties stick for say, 24hr in-game time before they can be paid off at station. If bounties are constantly accumulated then reset the timer each time a new bounty is incurred. Criminals must then be on good behavior AND survive for a period of time before they can pay the whole thing off.

2. Another way is to simply make bounties scale above the profit the criminals stand to make from his activities. ie: Say total maximum profit from pirated goods is 10000cr, then the pirate incurs a bounty of 12000cr. This way criminals cannot make a net profit after they pay off the bounties (at least, not without help from a third party like mission bonus) and therefore should simply let the bounties stick.

3. Why not combine both 1 & 2?

To balance things out, some work needs to be done to ENCOURAGE piracy. For example, allow players to buy departure information from the black market that facilitates the interception of certain ships that left the station recently. The list of ships could be say, the top 5 ships (PC & NPC) that left the station with the most monetary value in goods in the last 10 minutes. The actual information could include the types of cargo, existence of wingmen if there are any and some sort of frameshift drive data that allows the pirates to directly jump to a nearby location in supercruise for interdiction etc etc.

You're not going to encourage piracy by making the fines higher than the profit. Would a trader trade if his interdiction damage, cargo loss etc wiped out his profit?

Piracy needs to be profitable, it should also slot into the food chain to make PvP bounty hunting more common.

i like the idea of being able to buy info...it'd work well for BH too....it'd be nice to be able to track some of the top 5 bounty players listed on galnet. Not on my own though, I'll bring some mates.

 

[Armour]

Can't they just tie the bounty to the pilot account and the game mode it was accrued in? I'm sure an extra key field per record isn't going to massively increase the server's storage usage, and it would stop this kind of thing in it's tracks.

 

[Tacyon]

without reading each post in what is sure to develope into a threadnaught, what I'd like to see is if you pirate, you get a bounty on your head that you can't pay off but can only be "collected" and a "reputation".
This pirate rep, if you only do it once will expire, normalize, or disappear in some amount of time. (days/weeks ?) But if you continue and continue in rapid succession and repeat over days, it [the pirate rep] becomes more and more permanent. Lasting longer and longer until such time as it becomes a permanent mark. You are now a pirate. Arrrggg, revel in it!
Even tho you don't have a "kill bounty" you're still marked as being a pirate.

Now, the only loophole I can think of is ... can't we just create a new pilot name or are we locked to our current pilot?

 

[Sotapeikko]

NPC traders should drop cargo when faced by a big bad pirate with a bounty. The bigger the bounty the higher the eagerness to drop.

 

[Callidetic]

If the fines were high for the first infraction, but then added a smaller percentage for each repeat offence, that would be a good encouragement to keep the bounty open. So, first murder costs 25,000Cr, the next only 10,000, then 5,000 and so on. Paying off the bounty would mean they start again at the high end of the scale.

There's a reason now to keep the bounty, it's not cost effective to pay it off each time, but as long as you do enough piracy the payback outweighs the bounty increase.

 

[CaptainKremmen]

You again fail at understanding that this would make pirates the only profession in the game with zero options to change profession.

If you cannot grasp even this simple logic and why FD will never implement your suggestion to keep criminals as wanted until a time has expired or death it is pointless to debate the issue with you...

Reread my post above on why wanted status clearing will never change to what you want and consider why you feel that pirates along with having the lowest profit in game by far should also have no option to change career when they please.

I'm now starting to see this thread is but another thinly disguised piracy hate discussion and should not bother debating the issue with players that have never even tried to pirate themselves and so know nothing about what they are attempting to discuss.

Try being interdicted every few seconds and then return to tell me how much fun you are having in high security systems...

(okay, I'm done being morally outraged regarding flagrant combat logging - so on to the other issue mentioned in the OP)


Hi SuBSynk.

The gameplay "problems" you're identifying here seem, to me, to be pretty sensible... and not problems at all. Specifically,


A known pirate shouldn't be able to hang around in a high security system unmolested. The reason it's supposed to be safe (ie. high security) is that lawbreakers should be hunted down by the authorities. If that doesn't happen, and a pilot intent on committing serial crimes (ie. murder, robbery) can happily fly around there, then the system in question isn't high security at all.

If "High Security" can simply be circumvented, then security is not really high; that supposed security is totally compromised.


That, obviously, is due to the NPCs' method of spotting "criminals" - the WANTED status.

NPCs aren't smart. Their clockwork security mechanism relies solely on spotting ships with a particular flag showing that they have done Bad Things. And that special flag, the one that tells the NPC authorities a player has done Bad Things, can be cleared by that same player.


The NPCs are the only actual police force. In order to keep a system safe, NPCs only spot and react to ships with that WANTED status. Now if players were tasked with keeping a system safe, they'd notice in a heartbeat that CMDR SuBSynk was repeatedly attacking ships with intent to rob them, and they would move to deal with it.

The entire galactic security apparatus can be entirely subverted by a simple "dock and pay" action.


That, by extension, subverts the whole concept of "High Security" being safer, and "Low Security" being riskier.

The reason "Low Security" systems are supposedly dangerous (ie. have more predators) is presumably because they were forced to move out of High and Medium Security systems... due to the extra police heat.


The fact that players can currently control the entire NPC law enforcement response means that aggressive predatory players are just as free to hang out in High Security systems.



You're asking, How can player pirates stay and play in High Security systems if they can't become CLEAN at any time?

To me, anyway, the question itself seems topsy turvy. It shouldn't be up to the criminal to decide if they want the police to leave them alone as they continue to look for victims... under the very noses of those same policemen.


Surely player pirates committing serial crimes should only be able to find respite from the long arm of the law in places with low security. That's what makes High Security systems safe - criminals either being eliminated or forced out.



I cast my mind back to when I went on kill frenzies in original Elite; I had a FUGITIVE status slapped on me as a result.

FUGITIVE meant I had to flee from the law. Those passing friendly Vipers that used to slow me down a bit in my trip to the planet? Those were suddenly a threat, as they would attack. I came across them in Corporate States and Democracies, but not so much in Dictatorships... and never in Feudal/Anarchy.

Consequently, I had to plan my trips differently, and hang out in the Feudal/Anarchy systems "for a while", ie. I had to wait for my FUGITIVE status to downgrade over time to OFFENDER.


Once I was an OFFENDER, I had to wait for that status to downgrade over time, back to CLEAN.



Currently, in Elite Dangerous, if I can dock and I'm not broke, my legal problems disappear with a click. It doesn't matter if that's a late fine for dumping cargo near an outpost, or for mass murder and highway robbery. One click, no mess, no fuss, CLEAN.

And I think we lose something as a consequence.