Please rework Crime and Punishment

[g0oglyeyes]

I know there's a lot to argue about but can we at least all come together and agree that you should be able to pay off fines while carrying notoriety?

 

[Jmanis]

I know there's a lot to argue about but can we at least all come together and agree that you should be able to pay off fines while carrying notoriety?

this is absolutely a bug. I can't double check atm, but I'm 99% sure the Codex has words to the effect of "fines can be paid when notorious, but bounties can't".

Note: in case it's not clear, this is distinct from fines when you also have a bounty issued by the same faction, which just go onto the bounty tally and cannot be paid.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

For example, it's never really made much sense to me that you can just pay off your bounties. A bounty should be a fairly substantial thing that only goes away over time, but that also gives you more leeway at lower bounty totals.

Here's my core idea: Bounties and Fines get rolled into one thing. The division between bounty and fine has to do with how big it is, not the cause. It doesn't matter what it is, even murder; if it's a first offense or so, you can pay it off without a problem. It's only when it goes over a minimum threshold that it becomes a 'bounty', and you have to wait for it to decay, instead. However, you can do certain signal sources or missions from other systems to reduce your active bounty down to the point it becomes a fine and can be paid off. Refueling NPCs, for example, would have them put in a good word for you and reduce your bounty.

Bounties would have two halves; the Active bounty, and the Inactive bounty. The active bounty decays quite quickly, but the inactive bounty decays much more slowly. However, if you commit any crime, the inactive bounty reasserts itself and you go back to the full total. This includes if you get killed; that will reset your active bounty, but not your inactive bounty. This allows for more player leeway and freedom while retaining significant punishments for serial offenders.

This is pretty much how it worked prior to 3.0, though that did still distinguish fines and bounties.

Bounties took a certain amount of time to expire, depending on their size, and reset every time you got a new one with that faction. Could be between near-instant [1] and a week. You couldn't pay them off.
Once they expired, they essentially became fines which you could pay off. But if you got a new bounty for that faction without paying them off, they'd be reactivated (because a fine gets converted to a bounty at that point)

It was, on balance, a better system than the one which replaced it - though anonymous access for fines was a good addition in the new system to encourage people to pay their fines at all.

[1] But even when the timer ran out, you had to make a further hyperspace jump. This basically let the tiny assault and trespass bounties be "authorisation to open fire" to get you to run away without having any long-term consequences.

 

[PilotB]

The current system is bad. Fines and bounties are fairly irrelevant they haven't kept up with the times and notoriety is useless as it locks you out. A lockout from stations is all fine and logical but if the aim is to discourage crime. Shutting down station services so people can basically only do crime and a small set of other activities is counter productive.

Criminal stations should remain accessible to players who are criminals and there needs to be an active gameplay loop to work off the Notoriety. Ideally we also work in some gameplay mechanism to pull of clean heists in ships. I do like that you can silent run at megaships but most places have god scanners and don't care what you do they're going to fine you. Paying off fines and bounties is becoming a bit of an issue now that colonisation has created huge homogenous tracts of space where just 3-5 powers cover hundreds of ly and the prison ships don't exist.