Separation of piracy and murder

[Maur]

At the present, anyone who is a potential victim of a pirate may be interdicted, or approached in normal space, and threats issued: 'Drop your cargo or else'.

The situation may then go one of several ways:

1. The victim complies.

2. There is a fight... and:

A. The victim is destroyed.

B. The pirate is destroyed.

C. Someone jumps to supercruise or another system.

Of course, there is a variant, that being hatch breaker limpets, but only NPCs appear to fail to react to that.

A variant on the theme of piracy is that of the murderhobo: Victim is interdicted/approached, combat ensues, and the better skilled and equipped attacker usually wins.

In both cases, should the attacker destroy the victim, the attacker is treated the same way: imposition of a bounty, but otherwise if the attacker is rich enough... nothing else. Just a relative slap on the wrist.

The trouble with this is that piracy is touted by FDev as a legitimate career option, yet murderhobos who don't even pretend to want to steal valuables get treated the same as a pirate wanting to turn a quick credit.

How do we fix this situation? How can we distinguish between "Illegal and somewhat antisocial" piracy, and "Illegal and really antisocial unprovoked murder"?

This would involve a number of linked changes to the game:

1. We need an incapacitating but non-lethal weapon system. Right now, only the Thargoids have one, in the form of the shutdown field.

However, I would propose a weapon similar to the Ion Cannon from the Star Wars universe: A directed weapon that has minimal effect upon a shielded ship, with minimal capability to damage shields, but once those shields are removed, hitting the target ship with it will quickly result in that ship shutting down with minimal hull damage, effectively entering a prolonged reboot cycle.
The bigger the target ship and the more protected the ship's modules, the more hits it will take.

2. Collector and/or hatch breaker limpets need to have the capability to grab or eject all or specific selected cargo from a disabled ship... or "copy and delete" mission data.

3. The game needs options to converse with any ship, whether it be an AI NPC or a real player, to make demands such as "Drop x/all tons/credits of y/any cargo, or else..."
These demands could be tailored to automatically allow the issuing pirate to quickly select a quantity between 1 and the pirate's free cargo capacity or the target's cargo tonnage, whichever is less, with options for common fractions (1/2, 1/3, 2/3, 1/4, 3/4, and so on) of that upper figure in case the pirate doesn't want to just demand "everything" he can hold or the target supply.
The reasoning behind this system of canned demands is twofold: Firstly, the demands can automatically be translated for players who do not speak the same language, and secondly, it informs the game that the intention of the attack is piracy.

4. Players should be able to purchase cargo insurance, at a rate of some percentage of the maximum payout value, that lasts for some time (perhaps a real month) or until a claim is made. Claims pay out 90% of the value of the lost cargo.

What if murderhobos demand cargo, then kill rather than incapacitate? My answer to that is that murder in the course of piracy is a crime even worse than unprovoked murder. A good pirate shouldn't need to kill in order to turn a profit... and a dead target can only be robbed once, while a live one can be robbed repeatedly.

So, once there is a clear distinction between piracy and murder, how can we discourage the latter without excessively discouraging the former?

Historically and currently, committing a murder in the course of committing another crime was and still is punished more severely than the motivating crime. However, the modern day equivalent of the traditional punishment for unprovoked murder - namely execution, the modern day equivalent being a player ban - is not something that FDev would want to do, especially when the offending players are only doing that which the game explicitly allows.

So... what do we do with the murderers? The answer lies in-game with a combination of the old and the modern day equivalents of the punishment for murderers... imprisonment with hard labour, and outlawry.

What would this mean for those who commit murder? Immediately post-crime, nothing much would change... the murderer would gain a bounty, though it would be larger than that for an act of piracy without any deaths. However, it wouldn't stop there. Those with multiple murders on their record, say, 10, would find that their ship rebuy insurance has been cancelled. Once a ship is destroyed, it's gone.

Secondly, on destruction of their ship, the murderer would find themselves in a prison station in a prison sidewinder... a ship without any weapons or a frame shift drive. No shooting, supercruise or jumping for them... and if they fly more than, say, 1000km from the prison station... Boom! After a warning of course.

Thirdly, this bounty will attract bounty hunters, both players and NPCs... and lots of the latter, all of whom will tend to gang up in wings or multiple wings. Nobody likes a murderer, and lots of people like the idea of getting a billion+ credit bounty, and they'll try to play it safe when they do, in tanked, engineered ships and with lots of skilled friends attacking simultaneously, wherever the murderer may try to hide. It will become very difficult to remain out of prison. Not necessarily impossible, but they'll have to work hard at it.

How does the prisoner get out of prison? They buy their way out, of course, by performing hard labour... that being prison missions, flying around, doing boring things like scooping debris, scanning other ships and the like.

Easy-peasy, you might think... but this is where the outlawry thing comes in. Everyone wronged by the prisoner has the right to kill them in their weaponless prison sidey once... both players whose ships were destroyed by the murderer, and NPCs seeking revenge for deceased relatives. And every death sets the prisoner's prison credit balance back to zero. Of course, if a wronged individual opens fire on the prisoner, and the prisoner makes it back to the prison station's no fire zone, that's a win for the prisoner, and that person may not legally attempt to kill the prisoner again during that sentence.

Finally, in order to encourage prisoners to do their sentence in Open, the lump sum release payment should take about 8-12 full hours of play to achieve in Open... or about ten times that in Solo, mainly by giving much higher rewards for prison missions issued, flown and claimed in Open than for those where the prisoner spends any time at all in any other game mode. Without the prisoner working toward their release, the imprisonment will continue indefinitely... or at least a year in real-time. This will prevent prisoner players from simply logging on and idling away a fixed term sentence. Unless they want to wait a long time without having to log on at all, they must actively work toward their release.

Once released, the ex-prisoner may purchase a FSD and weapons again, and may retrieve any other ship that they possess. Their crimes are considered atoned-for.

Harsh? Maybe so, but a few hours of grind in-game is a reasonable enough simulation of a punishment for the ultimate in antisocial behavior... and it would be a learning experience to grind for hours to get free of prison, only for someone to swoop in near the end and wipe it all away and make them start it all again. That's how the players who are these murderers' victims feel, when they lose their ship and their hard-earned cargo and other valuables are arbitrarily destroyed just so the murderer can get a quick thrill.

Besides, there are places in the world where the real-life equivalent of such behavior would gain the offender a death sentence, or life in prison, either of which could be simulated by account cancellation or a permanent ban, neither of which is commercially warranted for FDev to do. This penalty is still a pushover in comparison...

 

[Ian Doncaster]

What if murderhobos demand cargo, then kill rather than incapacitate? My answer to that is that murder in the course of piracy is a crime even worse than unprovoked murder. A good pirate shouldn't need to kill in order to turn a profit... and a dead target can only be robbed once, while a live one can be robbed repeatedly.

That's true of real life, but not of Elite Dangerous, where a dead target might learn to give up the cargo the next time.

But certainly the other changes you suggest would make it a bit easier to disable a ship to rob it without risking accidentally destroying it. Things like the ability to make cargo demands to players and NPCs would be very useful all round (and similarly for traders to make standardised replies).



As for the murder penalties you suggest, there are three major problems:

1) If you make the murder penalties that harsh, you'd better have superb trigger discipline and speed control - wouldn't want someone to deliberately fly in front of your guns or ship so you blew them up ... they get an easily recoverable rebuy, you get 12 hours game-time (which is a few weeks real-time for the average player) hauling rocks.

Station ramming to get people blown up by the station guns is already a minor issue ... but at the moment it's generally easier just to shoot people directly. Make the punishment for shooting people so much higher than the punishment for being shot, and people will just do it the other way round. Look at all the threads from "I was blindly spraying fire around a RES site and now I've been transported to a detention centre, this is terrible" ... and now imagine that rather than a ten minute flight back they were facing a 12 hour hauling job because the target they hit was a silent running player trying to catch stray fire?

Meanwhile, the actual murderers are just not going to die and take their punishment in the first place all that often. It is basically physically impossible to destroy an engineered combat ship before it can high-wake, even with a whole wing attacking it, unless you get extremely lucky or they're not actually trying to run away.



2) Piracy requires murder. Not necessarily murder of the trade ships - as you say, they're better left alive if possible - but of the ships which defend them. If a trade ship has someone flying escort, or a bounty hunter comes after the piracy bounty, or a police ship comes to the trader's defence, then they are absolutely legitimate targets (in game terms, not in-universe legal terms) because they're trying to kill you.

It's also the case that, while a trade ship can be encouraged to surrender, that's currently only true on the basis that the trader has more to lose than the pirate from the encounter going badly. If the pirate has far more to lose than the trader, then the trader has no incentive not to fight to the death. After all, they can recover the costs of their cargo and rebuy in a few trade runs, while the pirate they just rammed themselves to death on is facing hours of hard labour.

(Sure, this isn't true in real life. This is because in real life mugging victims who fight back and get stabbed to death aren't back on their feet in a few minutes having paid the insurance excess. This sort of thing makes applying "real world" behavioural incentives to Elite Dangerous often counterproductive.)



3) An unprepared trade/exploration ship can be destroyed easily by an unengineered frags Vulture, which is obtainable, nowadays, in an hour or so of play - quicker, if you have friends.

So a planning-ahead murderer might well use an alt account, which they just reset if it ends up in prison: no big deal, just have a friend drop them some money (Void Opals, Meta Alloys, Wing Missions, etc), rebuild the ship, carry on killing. Much quicker to get a reset account to murder-Vulture level than to run 12 hours of prison missions.

It won't take out a prepared trade/exploration ship with a good pilot and decent shields, of course. But then, neither would their fully engineered murder ship. So why not use a resettable account?

 

[Maur]

My point was that you don't get the grind-based prison sentence unless you've committed 10+ unprovoked murders for no good reason.

The game would need to be considering the reason for any ship destruction. Obviously, self defense isn't murder, and neither is hitting an innocent bystander while engaged in combat... unless the bystander is targeted and hit repeatedly.

The point of a bystander in an eggshell ship in silent running trying to get hit by another player engaged in combat is dealt with easily - if the firing player had targeted another ship and was firing upon that ship with any degree of success, the bystander shouldn't have hung around there in the first place. It"s not the firing player's fault. To intentionally destroy ship A who is trying to survive, while targeting and firing upon ship B is likely to be so difficult that we can discount it as a feasible scenario to kill A while avoiding the egregious murder charges.

If a pirate is attacked by their intended mark when the pirate has the capability to disable said mark, it's self-defense for the target, and only murder for the pirate if they destroy rather than disable the target. Any other NPC ships responding to an act of piracy would also be legitimate combat targets for the pirate, so while the pirate would gain a bounty for destroying them, it would not count towards their score for purposes of punishing deliberate, egregious murder of innocents. Obviously, fighting in a CZ is an act of war, not murder.

As for the 'Ion Cannon'... I would suggest that like the Star Wars sims from which I got the idea, the Ion Cannon should disable most non-module-reinforced ships faster than they could be destroyed, once the shields are down.

However, having used an ion cannon upon a ship and having disabled it, that disabled ship should then have a special status:

Disabling a ship should not contribute to the attacker's combat elite rating.

Destroying a disabled ship (unless all crew are removed first, if that's even possible) will be considered to be unprovoked, egregious murder, and in either case, will not contribute to the attacker's combat elite rating.

Disabling a ship is not considered a kill for purposes of completing any kill/destroy type mission.

Really, "unprovoked murder" would apply mostly to attacking fellow players, or at least would rack up the points way faster, without roleplaying piracy and at least attempting to disable the ship.

The point I made about the Ion-Cannon-like weapon that only disables the target was of great importance to my proposal. With that, a pirate could strip shields from any ship attacking them, and then neutralize them faster than they might otherwise be able to destroy them. Attackers neutralized, murder avoided, pirate escapes.

With cargo insurance, a pirate's target is better off not risking a fight - surrendering the cargo costs them less than fighting and potentially also losing their ship, though if it becomes known that pirates carry ship disablers, fighting may be a good option, since the consequences of losing is little different to surrendering the cargo... unless the pirate says something like, "Give me 10 tons of your X, but if you fight, I'll take all 100 tons." Then surrender is again a good option as the risk is higher if the victim tries to fight.

As for the "reset the account rather than suffer the prison grind" thing... if the murderhobos want to do that, I say let them. It may be quick to get an unengineered frag vulture, but that isn't the pinnacle of combat technology in ED, and if they want to sacrifice any progress toward an engineered combat ship, that's up to them. It'll keep them relatively unable to do much harm compared to those murderhobos with fully engineered ships like cutters, corvettes, anacondas, FDLs or mambas and so on. And, if they hang out in the newbie zones, their friends won't be able to drop them valuable goods unless they leave, and if they behave as they seem wont to do, it won't be long before they can't get back into the newbie zones.

 

[Maolagin]

I have to agree with most of what Ian says above. And there is a broader point that I think needs to be emphasized: This is a (sometimes) multiplayer game, you must always consider balance effects of people using mechanisms otherwise than intended.

This idea of a disabling ion cannon - you've just suggested a supercharged Grom bomb, which are already notorious in the hands of recreational murderers as a mechanism to prevent their targets from waking away. Since those players already routinely fly around at max notoriety, it's unlikely they'd be deterred by any extra criminal penalties associated with its use. So regardless of the affect on piracy, such a weapon would undoubtedly make ganking worse, and yield plentiful salt here.

Similarly, I think you are failing to appreciate the can of worms that any kind of "intent detection" implies. If the game easily triggers the "murderous intent" flag and applies enhanced consequences, griefers will easily use it to troll less-experienced players. But if it requires very specific circumstances to trigger the flag, then it becomes meaningless because experienced killers will quickly learn to work around it. Assume everything will be gamed, and it becomes clear that relatively simple, neutral, and unambiguous rules are the way to go.

That said, some of the tweaks you suggest are excellent ideas: the ability to hail NPCs with a simple, context-aware dialog menu; hatch breakers that can (sacrificing speed or amount of stolen cargo) target specific cargo from a ship's hold; a better interface to tell collectors what to collect or prioritize. Those would all improve piracy gameplay with no negative consequences I can immediately see.

And while C&P is a can of worms itself, I do like the idea of prison involving something more than just respawning at a detention ship and going on your merry way. 12 hours is far too punitive, for reasons described above, not to mention duplicative with the existing notoriety system. And I think the concept of letting wronged players get free dunks on the prisoner is, I'm sorry, both unworkable and inappropriate. But having a system for "community service" missions you can be assigned would be interesting, especially if it sets up a choice between "paying your debt to society" vs "escape from prison and remain a wanted criminal". With credits so easy to come by after all, it's only the very newest players who actually worry about paying off the bounties if they land in jail. It's a far more interesting choice to decide between paying with time, or escaping via skilled piloting.

Without introducing space legs or anything else we don't have yet, here's how I imagine prison might work:
1) You respawn at the prison ship. Unlike previously, your bounties have not been paid off, although you can still lose your ship if you didn't have the rebuy. However, you don't respawn in your ship, but a loaned "prison work" ship, maybe a Hauler or similar.
2) You get a welcome message summarizing the situation - welcome to prison, you are here to work off your bounty of XYZ, you are in a loaned work ship. The work ship has a disabled hyperdrive, so you're stuck in the system. Your own ship is stored in the shipyard and you can visit it at any time, but it is a crime and you will be attacked if you take off in it before your "release".
3) The mission board offers you prison missions that are completable with the work ship (scan stuff and return data, go scoop stuff and return goods, go mine something, etc). The mission payment is a reduction in your bounty. When your bounty reaches zero, you are legally clear and free to go.
4) The following details are hidden somewhere, maybe in the station news feed, or at a local beacon: the hyperdrive on your owned ship is also disabled, but only with a software lockout. You can reenable it and escape if you collect the right data. Perhaps a sequence of data points you have to scan on the prison megaship or visit and scan beacons in the system. Obviously this is illegal, and you will be hunted from the moment you take off in your ship. If you fail and are apprehended, the situation resets and the escape attempt is added to your bounties to work off.

 

[RamirezKurita]

This whole thing seems a bit moot to me as a good pirate should never kill their marks. They are after cargo, not kills, and if a trader is willing to hold onto the cargo at the cost of their own life then it is up to the pirate to force them to drop their cargo by using hatch breakers or by destroying their cargo hatch.

Rather than trying to let pirates kill without full consequences just because they have made a token effort to claim cargo doesn't make sense, they should be judged based on their actions rather than their intent.

If anything, the real issue is a lack of tools available to allow piracy against an uncooperative target as hatch breakers have their limitations and blowing out the cargo hatch is pretty tricky at the best of times as it then relies on you keeping the enemy in realspace for a while afterwards for their cargo to leak out. I'd say that more tools for shutting down modules and preventing escape are necessary; in particular, more escape prevention methods are important as traders with any reasonable degree of defence can simply submit and high-wake without being truly threatened in the available time frame and even if destruction is threatened there is still not enough time to bring out hatchbreakers or wait for a destroyed cargo hatch to do its thing before they jump out.

We already do have deliberate shutdown weapons in the game, the ion disruptor, cytoscrambler, scramble spectrum mod and the thermal shock mod. Unfortunately, they are all mostly useless at actually disabling the target. The ion disrupter and scramble spectrum mod can only lock down a single module at a time, don't stack in quantity and provide the target a very long immunity period between lockdowns, which overall combines to make them more combat irritants rather than piracy tools. The cytoscrambler kind of does its thing of destroying shields well, but overall has its issues with regards to effective range and is only available in class 1 fixed mounts. The thermal shock weapons are basically useless due to severe overnerfing, plus the threat of a few seconds of overheating isn't enough to pressure someone into not spooling up their FSD as the threat of the heat is much less than the potential threat of the pirate themselves. There's also the ion disruptor mod for mines and the FSD reboot missiles, but again they have their limitations and aren't well suited to locking someone down long enough for their cargo to leak out of a broken hatch.

 

[syloom]

I think any crime that causes no damage shouldn't be reported until you arrive at a station so a pirate can pull rob and leave without alerting the law if they cause no damage to the target, a new module like a small cannon that does no damage but has a chance to make targeted modules malfunction causing cargo to drop or engines to reboot would help too.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The point of a bystander in an eggshell ship in silent running trying to get hit by another player engaged in combat is dealt with easily - if the firing player had targeted another ship and was firing upon that ship with any degree of success, the bystander shouldn't have hung around there in the first place. It"s not the firing player's fault. To intentionally destroy ship A who is trying to survive, while targeting and firing upon ship B is likely to be so difficult that we can discount it as a feasible scenario to kill A while avoiding the egregious murder charges.

The main weapon of murderers - because of its high first-strike damage - is usually the frag cannon (or the Powerplay variant). At the ranges it's effective at, it doesn't really need a target lock to be aimed, especially versus the typical large trade ships it's used on.

If they can get away with (enhanced consequences for) murder simply by having a friend drop into the instance to be the apparent target of their frags, while the unfortunate real target "just happens to get in the way of a few shots as a bystander" - they can hit their friend with the frags a few times before they high wake out, to make it look more legitimate - then they'll do it.

Establishing intent from raw actions is an incredibly difficult problem for computers to solve reliably and instantly. It's a pretty tough one for humans - the process of trying someone for murder can take months or years in the toughest cases. This is why station ramming intent detection issues are still in the game, and why there's always some thread on the forums about friendly fire in a (PvE) RES site.

Adding more complexity and exploits to the crime system - that the average player will only encounter when they're unexpectedly on the pointy end of them - makes things worse for the average player and better for the murderers.

 

[Soron Silin]

The big problem with prison would be false positives. It would be incredibly bad PR if FDev stuck a newbie in prison for months for something they are innocent of.

Meanwhile a griefer will just clear their save or even pay out another £5 on fresh copy of ED. (At least in the Steam sale.)

I like the idea of prison. Maybe there are super elite NPC bounty hunters out there. Bots can do amazing things, especially if their ships cheat. If you get more than a certain amount of bounty in a certain period then they come after you.

Maybe the bounty could be reduced if the pirate stops to scoop the cargo. That doesn't make much sense in real life, but it would prove the pirate wasn't just griefing and it gives the victim more reason to empty his bays. If all you do is piracy, it should be possible to make as much profit as you want without triggering the murder bots. But if you kill every player you meet just for fun, then the bounty quickly reaches the threshold.

Maybe the counted bounty is only for kills. If you don't kill then you don't have to worry about the bounty limit. If you do kill then you can negate that factor by scooping 100% of cargo.

I think prison should also:

• Confiscate the ship you were flying at the time of arrest and/or those used for murder.
• Confiscate (and replace) the on-board computers on all your ships as "evidence of crime". As a side-effect of that, all your blueprints disappear.
• Remove all money. If you escape, you get out with 0Cr. If you do your time, you'll be given 1000Cr.

It is impossible to stop griefing. There will always be antisocial trolls who are perfectly happy to spend full-price on a new copy of ED every month. But if it is given consequences then it will enhance immersion and dissuade casual griefing.

 

[dxm55]

Penalties need to make sense in the context of the games rather than RL.

You can't imprison players or prevent them from playing the game for any set number of hours, or even minutes because they are paying customers.
As long as they didn't use hacks or cheats, they are permitted and perfectly entitled to kill you for any reason at all, be it piracy or simply to troll you and ruin your day.
Too bad.

The only penalties that you can apply in game is to make life hard for criminals.

- Deactivate insurance and rebuys for the player or ship once he crosses a certain bounty and/or notorriety threshold.
Yes, we can't simply deny rebuy, because anyone can make a legit mistake and accidentally get a bounty. But the ones with the higher notoriety are likely to be ones who do it on purpose, so they should live the life of a criminal.

- Adjust ATR response according to Bounty/Notoriety levels.
It's already in place, but still a little weakass. We need wings of fully engineered, Elite, Condas and FDLs continually dropping in on highly notorious CMDRs whenever they appear in Med/High Sec systems. They should also be actively interdicted when in SC, not just when they attack another player or NPC.

- Make all legal factions and stations belonging to a Superpower hostile to the CMDR once his notoriety/bounty has reached a certain threshold.
Not just the local faction. That's fine for low level crims. But once he reaches a certain level, he should be wanted by the FBI, and that means across all states, not just the county.

Basically, a known wanted criminal cannot just sashay or stroll along the shopping boulevard, He's wanted for a reason. Nobody is gonna allow him to walk freely in a civilized, populated area.