the problem with trying to have this sorts of system in place in Elite is that there are quite a few ways a player can hurt another player, besides using weapons.
I have thought about this, and I have come up short on how such a system could be implemented without some major changes to how things works in the game.
Lets just look at some of the ways I a player can cause another players destruction...
* Weapon fire, this one is the obvious one. simply add a friendly fire option between players could solve this issue, but should my shoots just pass through? or simply do no damage at all? what about players just shooting off a barrage after barrage of missiles at another players, should we show these explosions etc? if we let these things pass through, a player could try to block your view and have you shoot at the wrong target, that is now obscured from your view
* Collisions, so if I cannot shoot you, I can still ram you, so now we could look at the friendly fire option and simply remove the damage from the collision, but this would now make it possible to use other ships as a bouncy castle and fling ships all over the place, also players could decide to block a starport by jamming themselves in the mailslot, and everyone trying to push them away would bounce back without any way to push the out. would be quite immersive breaking, so the other option is to make it so that we can pass through other players ships, now this produces a new way to cause problems with a player, and that is that I place my ship over your cockpit and now your view is severely blocked, so this quickly leads to the next thing is that we need to make player ships transparent when they are in close proximity to each other. We already today have teh station suiciders that rams speeding players and die, and the game logic is simply, ship collision, one ship got destroyed, the other ship was speeding, guilty of murder, station opens fire. this only happened after we got speed limits, to resolve the previous issue with you could ram players to death near a station without penalty! so these things are not so easy to fix.
So regardless of how much no PvP mode we would like, this cannot happen without some major changes to how many basic flying and fighting mechanics needs to change between if it is a NPC ship or player ship. And this is even before we start to look into stuff like healing lasers, that needs to work despite no friendly fire, which might sound trivial, but when wee now can stack 4 ships in a single location due to no collision, how will this now work?
So I like the general idea of a no PvP mode, but I cannot find any solution that do not involve some quite big changes on how the game works and causing inconsistent behaviour between if it is player ships or NPC ships.
I do agree with the very badly slanted game mechanics that today favours unwanted PvP with very little downsides to that chosen gameplay. And there are lots of options we can do with the current open to adjust these sort of things. Now some of these changes would also cause some issues with some game mechanics that we could justify by the fact this is a game and not a 100% simulation.... and here we already have some mind bending logic problems like how do multi crew work across the galaxy etc. and the arcady gunner role etc. And players are very creative in finding new ways to play with the game rules in their favour, so even if we fixes one such sitation, the fix could create a new sitation that we overlooked when the fix was designed or was not even possible before.
So lets think about other options we could address this problem.
* Rebuy, we could simply remove rebuy cost if you was killed and not being wanted, ie the standard clean. So you are on your merry way and someone decides to make you into their target practice, and you go boom, now atleast you do not need to suffer the rebuy costs. a small consolidation for your loss
* give you an option to regain your data (exploration, combat bonds, bounties, mission status), cargo (including mission cargo), etc, that you had when you got destroyed. since a fully loaded mining ship could be worth quite alot more than your rebuy, not only in credits but in time too. Here we need to balance this against potential abuse by players, what should we do with fake pirates, where a barrage of hatch breaking limpets empties parts of your cargo hold and then blows you up and now all stuff not in your cargo hold is lost.
The most player friendly to make a ship destruction least painful, is to simply put back all cargo, data etc, you had when the fight started except for cargo you dropped by choosing to eject it. Another option could be to give you separate mission to go and retrieve your data core and pick up your cargo, this would a solo instanced mission regardless of what game mode you are in, meaning only can see or pick up your stuff, even other players are in your wing etc. The downside to this is that you loose some time, but this could be used for all ship destruction especially for the data part, imagine making a mistake and you crash with your exploration ship, now you could get a mission to go and collect your data from where you crashed...so sure you made a mistake, but you can learn from it and go and collect your stuff continue. and if you got blown up in the bubble on your way back, the ship to go and collect your stuff would be very short, so weeks, months of exploration is not lost due to a single mistake.
* Lost time, this is not as easy to fix. as this involves travel time, but if you get killed by another player and get the no rebuy applied, we can give you more options on where to respawn, besides the standard option we have today
- In the previous system you came jumped from. This would be just like if you logged back into the game and was not docked at a station.
- If you was in the target system and had a destination set, ie station, base etc, you would get the option to respawn at that location, here we need to be careful about abuser potential about the potential abuse this could for long super cruise journeys, as if I get killed in the system and can skip 40+ minutes of super cruise, then this would be abused. so some restrictions need to be applied to show this option
- Give option to respawn where you died, with an added option to select a different game mode.
Now these are mostly focused on making the destruction of your ship as painless as possible, I have not touched that many of these things should not apply to powerplay engagements, because if you engage in powerplay in open you are in fact doing an opt-in to PvP, so if you are module shopper, do these things outside Open... and hope FDev gives us a much better way to go about to get these modules that does not cause chaos for the players who actually enjoy Powerplay, but that is another big can of worms to dig into.
There are also quite alot of stuff that can be done to limit where and how unwanted PvP will take place. not making it impossible, but raising the skill level for it and give it consequences that time and effort to resolve, like if you do enough kills in Federation space, you get a permanent ATR taskforce that will hunt you whenever you are in Federation space, you can still be in Federation space, but you will be detected and treated as the villain you are. There are quite alot of things that can be done here as well, that will not block this play style, but make it quite a bit harder todo.
And many of these things, could also make it easier for players to actually try PvP, becuase if they do not ahve to pay rebuy when doing a PvP fight, then that makes the entry to PvP easier for those players who want to be try new things. And here one thing that could help is the possibility to show if a module is engineered or not, not what engineering is done, but just that it has some engineering done to it, does not matter what or what level, just that it has. This would allow even lower entry requirements for players, as they could now arrange PvP matches in un-engineered ships.
I do not engage in PvP, I prefer co-op play styles. I have been killed 3 times by other players and killed 0.
