Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Not a major issue to me, but being able self destruct your ship to avoid a kill mail seems pretty lame.

If you self destruct you should get no insurance payout for starters.

To fix the killmail thing I would make it so there's an initial blast that takes you down to a fraction of your structure, followed 5 seconds later by the final explosion that blows up the ship. Giving your enemies time to land that final blow themselves.

That's a nice idea.

Yes that was exactly my intent. Why should you be able to deny a killmail and loot to someone you've lost to in a fight? I like consequences! Players should be rewarded and punished for winning and losing, but clearly you have some other strange notions of how things should work.

If you can't kill a ship within two minutes you get nothing.

System is working as intended. Don't engage caps/supers/orcas/ freighters with scrub fleets.

That is all.

I'm here to up-vote this suggestion, my proposed implementation follows:

1) No lossmail generated if there is no aggression countdown.
2) If there is an aggression countdown, a lossmail is generated.
3) If the ship is below 50% armour, or 30% shield, a killmail is generated for the highest human damage-dealer.

To explain point 3, I say the numbers I do as they seem like the most logical demarcation lines. An armour tanker at 50% armour is clearly in a fight that he's not going to win, and self-destructing is, by definition, acknowledging that the person shooting him won. Similarly, for a shield tanker, 30% is approximately the point of highest shield regen, if you fall below this, you're dead, and again self-destructing is admitting that your attacker won the fight. To determine what type of tank, have the game look at EHP and repair rates, if shield wins, it uses the shield number, if armour then armour. This might be tricky to code, so a possible alternative might be to simply say a killmail is generated if you're below 50% shield, across the board, as this is sufficient to say with certainty that there was a fight involved, and you self-destructed, thus acknowledging the loss.

This would ensure that a self-destruct done by itself still does nothing. A lossmail would be generated if you did it while being shot at, as it's no longer a simple suicide. If someone had clearly won the fight, they'd get credit. No other changes would be made, self-destructing would still ensure no loot is generated, just a wreck.

This would result in more consistency across other events that generate killmails and lossmails, as well as keeping with recent changes to self-destruct and ganking (as regards to insurance payout), as well as the recent modifications to logging off. Self-destruction to hide the evidence of your loss (either from your loss list, or the attacker's kill list), is not much different than logging off to avoid the loss entirely.

To the arguments I've seen in this thread. If you say you don't care about killmails at all, then you have no legitimate grounds for arguing against this proposed change. It doesn't affect you, you don't care about killmails. To those that say the attacker didn't kill it, they self-destructed, I say, quite simply, that you're wrong. If you self-destruct your ship while you're being attacked, you are stating quite clearly that you lost the fight, you're just saving your attacker the time, and making sure they don't get any loot.

Self-destruct, in the situations we're talking about here, is exactly like tipping over your king in a game of chess: it's a forfeit, and acknowledgement that your opponent has won. If you do it in a chess tournament, your opponent gets credit for the victory. There's no good justification or reason that evidence is not produced in EVE when the same action takes place.

Furthermore, killboards, whether you like them or not, actually can be useful. Just like damage parsers or threat meters in other games, they can certainly be abused by the ignorant and used to wave epeens around, but they can also be a helpful tool. A killboard allows you to see your group's efficiency, tell at a glance how a war was going, get intel about what your enemy was fitting, finding out what of your own fits are or aren't working. It also makes it easier to catch when your members are not following best practices and are losing hulks in high-sec during a war. All good uses, and good reason that a mail should be generated: as stated before, the guy self-destructing is saying that you beat him.

Finally, the "you should have brought more firepower" / "you didn't kill it" argument. Quite simply, why? it doesn't take a goon-sized blob to kill anything in the game. In the end, if I'm doing more damage than the target is repairing / regenerating, then I will win, unless they can kill me first. As mentioned above, by hitting self-destruct, that pilot is admitting that I have won, and they _will_ have died by my hand. If I wouldn't have killed it, he wouldn't have hit self-destruct. By hitting self-destruct, he's saying, outright, "you killed me." Especially on a supercapital, there's no reason that a fight that has clearly been lost, should generate no lossmail for the victim, and no killmail for the winner, just because he wasn't blobbed to death, and still managed to get himself killed anyway. Because, once again, he's admitting that he was killed as soon as he hits that self-destruct button.

At the end of the day, killmails for self-destructing ships involved in combat simply make sense, and are consistent with other gameplay mechanics, as well as recent changes to the game. If killmails don't matter, there's no good argument to oppose this change. If killmails do matter, there's every reason to support this change. If we don't make this change, then killmails may as well be removed from the game entirely, since they will not accurately reflect actual combat kills and losses.

In games like Team Fortress 2, if you force someone to kill himself and you're the last one who shot him, you get the kill. I don't understand why here, the last player (and his fleet) who shot the carrier , before he self-destructed, would'nt be credited for it.

Selfdestruct, instant lossmail. Aggression when selfdestructing, instant killmail to highest damage dealer which isn't an NPC. Job done.

Voila, no reason not to go down fighting, leading to better fights. vOv

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Yeah well, I was not about to copy/paste my full response from the PL whine in the Assembly so opted for an "Idiot's tl;dr" instead. Bird flipping is but part of it.

Look up self-destruct or scuttling on the Wiki (or encyclopaedia if you are a traditionalist ) of your choice for a more comprehensive look into why one might wan't to do it and why it should not change much if at all in Eve.

Overestimated your Googling skills, terribly sorry.
Self-Destruct:

Near perfect argument for no (or severely limited) killmail and no loot as one must assume a SD mechanism is designed to obliterate anything of value ..

Your quote snippet is actually also a perfect argument for no-loot after SD because we can't capture ships, since another major reason for scuttling is denying access (or easy access) to any data/equipment that the ship might have been carrying.

As I said in the PL whine thread; a mail generated after SD should either only be available to the owner of the ship or contain no data other than who "touched" it last and that it used SD. Any additional data must be presumed lost (think flight recorder/black box).