EVE General Discussion

As noted by Jester/Garth in his recent blog http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2012/10/know-what-you-dont-know.html there has been alot of hand-wringing about what changes crimewatch is actually going to make. However, truth be told its all an academic exercise at this point as other changes made by ccp in recent time have rendered Crimewatch pointless on arrival.

In order for Crimewatch to have purpose there must first be actual crimes for it to impact. What are these crimes? Well in highsec it would be can flipping and ninja salvaging/wreck flipping. CCP, however, has largely eliminated both of these activities from the game. Specifically, the Noctis basically rendered ninja salvaging/wreck flipping obsolete, while the recent barge changes have put can flippers out of business due to the large ore holds of the retriever and mack. So the question becomes, at this point why implement crimewatch at all? Its not needed in low sec where everyone can shot everyone else anyway. While in highsec, CCP has eliminated most points of Player to Player conflicts on a ship to ship basis. Sure there is still suiciding - but concord already takes care of that, and war decing -but that is outside of crimewatch, but every other point of conflict is gone or rendered so marginal as to be effectively the same thing. In fact, IMO the only place where you see the opportunity for crimewatch to have an impact is outside of hubs like jita where there are cans strewn left and right. But these cans are left around solely for the purpose of either gaining consensual fights or ganking newbes who dont know to leave them alone. Hence the implementation of crimewatch will have counter-intuitive effects - it will not add consequences to crime since crime has largely been eliminated through ship design but it will suppress consensual pvp (unless of course ccp adds a flagging system making this even more wow like ) while hurting new players who touch cans and suddenly find themselves aggro to everyone outside of jita.

Of course if crimewatch is to have meaning, ccp could make can mining and ninja salvaging viable again by nerfing ore holds and making it possible to tractor other people wrecks, but these changes would probably cause too much whining so its probably better if CCP simply scraps crimewatch before it causes a decrease in whatever little pvp highsec has left.

Edit:
Now that the crimewatch blog is up - it is apparent that the devs have gone to a wow like flagging system and have made combat more predictable and linear. In my view these are not good changes as they make the game boring since they enhance the rock paper scissor aspects of the game. Worse they do nothing for increasing the opportunties for criminal interactions between players. So while they needlessly tinker with aggro mechanics they are working to limit the opportunities to acquire aggro in highsec. So ultimately the changes are largely either pointless or damaging to the notion of eve being an open world pvp game.

So you say there is no crime to be watched. Let's see how it goes after crimewatch is active. Until then: speculation.

Ok, so explain to me under what conditions a starbase with just "attack if aggression" set would fire on a player under the current implementation of Crimewatch, and how you as a player would go about predicting its likely behavior (before we removed that option, of course).



PS For anyone concerned about whether or not we've done any design work for this, I recommend waiting for the blog to come out some time in the next week or so.

You're doing this on purpose, no?
Why not just write: dev blog incoming somewhere next week you'll be pleasantly surprised, instead of the thing people from now on will focus on: CCP will remove "attack if aggressed" from our POS, red alert! Panic all!! Dogs & cats will be living together etc.


/shakes head.

The "attack if aggression" option was removed quite some time ago. Note this is not the same as "attack if aggressed".

The idea that the Noctis stops ninja looting is *snip*. It doesn't and it continues to this day.

What would stop ninja looting would be to prevent any ship not in fleet from warping into a mission room. I'm talking stricctly about Lvl 1-4 missions here.


EDIT: We have a word filter for a reason, please don't try to circumvent it in future - ISD Type40.

I agree with the OP's sentiments.

I think this only justifies further the need for a simpler crime watch though. However, I think the simpler crime watch is going to cause an age where it isn't in the interests of the petty criminal in EVE (hi sec criminal, vs low sec criminals) to be criminals anymore.

The Low Sec criminals need some love under the new crime watch. And I am watching very carefully what they do there.

There are also some very serious concerns about the state of grabbing loot from an enemy wreck at the moment. How is that being addressed? Because taking someones wreck will set you red to everyone, which is clearly stupid.

Also, it was mentioned _possibly_ that suspect flags would earn you gate aggression in low sec. Which would be freakin even more profoundly horrible, because that means anyone grabbing anyones wreck in low sec, including Faction warfare pilots, including grabbing the wreck of the person whom just tried to kill you and lost, would set you off to essentially have GCC.

There are many things that have been thrown around about the Crimewatch 2.0 that are needing severe examination of why they would act the way they are proposed.

Anyways, I wait for the devblog.

If we wanted to do that then we would've spent a month putting in code that stopped you from committing crimes in the first place, rather than a year overhauling the system that gives interesting consequences for committing crimes.

A bunch of freighter pilots in Uedama would probably disagree with you.

"Attack if aggression"

...does this mean you fixed your own POS shooting at you when you have a fight outside the POS bubble?