EVE General Discussion

I still propose limited engagements — temporary wardecs between ad-hoc groups added and subtracted from on the fly.

· I commit a crime against you — you are now now allowed to initiate an engagement with me.
· If you do, two teams are set up, with a RoE copy-pasted from wardecs, just to keep things consistent.

· Anyone supporting either side will be added to that side for the duration of the engagement (someone who aids a character that is involved in multiple engagements will be added to all those engagements… so choose carefully).
· “Implicit” members (e.g. corp members in case of theft) will have the team pre-selected for them, but will not actually be a part of the engagement until they personally initiate hostilities and/or support acts.
· Team assignment follows the old aggression timer logic: keeping up aggressive and/or support acts keeps the timer from counting down (or perhaps more accurately, repeated acts resets the team assignment timer).
· The engagement as a whole ends when one team runs out of assigned members.
· For the individual member, the engagement is over when their personal assignment timer runs out.

· The only graphs required is a single “can fight” between the teams; the teams themselves are just a list of characters with individual assignment timers. No inheritance is needed — what was a messy graph of inheritance spaghetti now becomes “add name to team A in engagement Y” and “if in team A, anyone in the list of B-team members is a legit target (and vice versa)”.

· Bonus feature: closed limited engagements — the same thing except support acts trigger the suspect flag proposed by CCP (same as for interfering with wardecs — hell, wardecs could just be that with everyone pre-added to the team lists). Can be initiated through a contract between pre-determined parties…

…aaand I'm sure there are roughly a bajillion immediate bugs and exploits.

Purely instinctively, I'd say new (potential) engagement that the victim can choose to initiate. That's a good point, though: one kind-of-1-to-1 flagging that is needed is to track all the potential engagements you can start. Still, since they're not inherited, it shouldn't be too messy… I think… maybe…

The only “reuse” that I envision of existing engagements, and creating cross-over between teams like that, is if you choose to rep members of both teams… in which case you are added to both teams. Congrats — you are now free-for-all to everyone in the field.

Isn't there plans for mining ships with bigger buffer tanks in exchange for lower yields? And it's not like mission ships etc are often the target for suicide gankers.

No, judging by their actions and plans, (and when I say plans I mean the actual details of what is planned not the hype) the goal is to transform Highsec into a PvE Themepark effectively free of non consensual PvP.

I suppose… and some would doubtlessly try to have fun with that, but then I'd imagine (or at least hope) that both sides would simply say “ok, screw this guy — let's blast him and then get back to fighting among ourselves”.

…still, I can see one issue arising from that idea. Instigator #1 warps in and gets collects as many targets/teams as he likes and instantly gtfo:s; instigator #2–#97 meet up with #1 at ze sekrit rendez-vous spot, tag him with their small remote reps, and then warp back to the main fight to blow everyone up.

So yes… some kind if limitation on the ability to add yourself might be in order. Or maybe that kind of double-teaming should just remove you from both teams and set a suspect flag instead.

Yes. I also realised another thing: suspect flagging would simply be a blanket right for anyone and everyone to initiate an engagement against the perp. This could still be used by the co-instigators above, but at least others would have to actively choose to get involved, knowing the risks, rather than the instigators auto-inviting themselves to any fight they see.

That raises another issue, though (and not just in the suspect-flagging case but for normal engagments as well): multiple overlapping engagements where people with the same opponent start supporting each other could potentially create a huge amount of duplicate engagements that need to be tracked. It would be nice if (and even be necessary that) such situations could be detected and have those engagements collapse into one.

A team-based solution would get rid of a lot of the flagging kudzu, but the self-inclusion is indeed tricky to control. On the other hand, that's just your average bar brawl, which kind of goes nicely with the kind of wild-west style law-making that permeates EVE.

Now we're getting somewhere... hell yah Tippia.

So let's say this happens... there are two sides of this limited engagement, and just for the sake of argument let's call them "criminal team 1" and "vigilante team 2". So 2 new unaffiliated players come into the system... they both can flip someone, and then one of them engages w/ vigilante team 2 and the other w/ criminal team 1. Are both teams now criminals and able to be attacked by the randoms in local? What if a member of vigilante team one commits a criminal act like flipping a can, does everyone inherit the criminal flag? What if a member of either party pulls a GCC?

It's these random instances that keep sinking anything I come up with. If we can find a better solution I'm sure CCP would listen... I just keep finding loopholes in everything else I consider.

Lets refrain from massaging crotches until we iron it out. One f*** up and the whole mechanic crumbles.

Depends on what you mean by “engage with”… if they attack them, CONCORD comes and sorts them out because they aren't party to that first fight — they only have outstanding engagements with whomever they canflipped, and only those who got canflipped can actually initiate those separate engagements.

If you by “engage with” you mean “remote-rep”, then they'd be added to the respective teams (at least as described above…), and the outstanding engagement with the canflip victims is still a separate engagement.

The whole idea is that under this scheme, it's not about any global “vigilante” or “criminal” teams — it's about very specific teams built around a single transgression. Each transgression creates a new set of teams.

No, because there is no engagement yet. If the canflippee (yes, that's a word now… so there!) decides to act on the crime, then a new engagement is initiated, and only then can people assisting that vigilante be added to the (new) team in this separate engagement.

Then CONCORD blows them up. Other people will inherit the felon flag as per CCP's plan and gets blown up as well (or, more likely, they will not since they've set their safeties to not allow them to perform any felonious acts). This is really no different than pulling a GCC in an Incursion fleet or some such.


As for the self-invite problem… idea #2:

What if supporting a team member did not automatically add you to the team. Instead, you get a “invite” flag (for the lack of a better term) for the team you picked and it's up to the other team to act on this and choose whether or not to officially add you to the brawl by attacking you. Thus we have an RR parallel to how the victim of the crime is the one who has to respond to the engagement proposal (hah!) to begin with and start the actual engagement. Thus, while you can still choose to warp in and RR people, this does not give you any free targets — the (potential) targets themselves have to choose to actually fully draw you into the fight before you're allowed to shoot anyone.

…of course, new exploit: a mole joins the “vigilante” team, and when the “criminal” support (suspiciously still consisting of gank battleships with small RR mods) warps in, he juuuust so happens to be a trigger-happy newbie who “accidentally” pulls those guys into the fight. It's not quite self-invite any more, but it's still very easy to work around to get free targets.

I'm beginning to think that, yes, any kind of group solution will inevitably have this problem, but on the other hand, I can't quite see how to get rid of the inheritance mess without doing a group or global-based solution.

I like where that idea is going too, Tippia. I'd started to think along those lines, but read somewhere (or heard in the presentation maybe?) where Greyscale said he wanted to avoid temporary wars where you're constantly adding and removing people.

However, it does seem a better solution both than what we've got now and where we're headed. Perhaps Greyscale will reconsider?

I think there will always be some way to work around the system with plants on the other side or through deception. As long as the rules and implementation are reasonably straight forward and easy to understand, it stands a chance.

Alternately:

What would be the drawbacks of simplifying the system even further... instead of calling it a suspect flag, just make it a "I give up my concord protection" flag?

- If you steal from someone, you get the flag you can be attacked by anyone.
- If anyone attacks you, they get the flag and they can be attacked by anyone.
- If another person shoots or reps either of you, they get the same flag.

A PVP-bar brawl. You can choose to stay out of it entirely, or just cut loose and everyone runs the risk of there being too much to handle.

Who's allowed to shoot those with the buttinski flag?

So it's the suspect flag. Except that shooting suspects will also make you a suspect.

EDIT: Did not notice the first line of your post where you said exactly that.

I think we've been over why the global flags aren't a great idea.