Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Honestly, I question why facpo continues to exist in the first place. If there is anything holding back player interaction between neg sec status players in highsec and everyone else, it's that.

As for the comment about 'if you want to PVP go outside highsec' - more real-loss PVP happens in the Jita system than any other system in the game. And that's not even counting starship combat that happens in Jita. Highsec players that seek to avoid starship combat PVP still leave a considerable mark on the sandbox, and must accept that some of the people their actions hurt will seek revenge - sometimes through 0.01 ISK wars, sometimes through ganking.

For instance, Red Frog's actions (prior to my alliance turning on freighters) seriously reduced the price of hauling. An independent hauler can turn to sponsoring ganking as a way to seek recourse. Starship combat PVP to intervene in market PVP.



On the OP's suggestion.

I broadly like the idea but dislike the numbers. Having more options for players to form meaningful defense fleets to defend both friendly and neutral non-combat ships would add conflict to the game.

On the numbers, however. -2.0 is easy to accidentally hit. A rookie that accidentally shoots a player pod (not destroying it) in their rookie system would probably hit -2.0 and become basically permanently suspect flagged until they get above -2.

I'm curious as to how this would play out with -3.0 being the cutoff for permanent suspect flag, a lighter Facpo response at -5.0 (no scramming but they do shoot you), and a heavier Facpo response, with scramming and EWAR, at -8.0.

Effects of these changes.
Sec status change. Pretty much nil. Anyone who cares about their security status can keep it above 0 anyway, anyone who doesn't will be below -5. This actually makes life harder for Low Sec residents while doing nothing to significantly affect ganking.

Shortening Criminal Timer. Lets them gank more often in the same play time, significantly increasing loses to (as mentioned almost unstoppable) ganks in the choke points.

Making LE longer than criminal timer. Allows killing of people who shot at a criminal after the criminal timer expires, meaning no-one else can help them fight against said ganker anymore. Meaning the 'good guys' have to dock up and can only respond to every second or third gank.

I really don't like this list of changes, it's far too abusable by gankers and actually gives them far more of a free run. And won't encourage more open style PvP. Just more ganking.

BeBop and I were discussing this a while back, and I think we floated the idea of Crimewatch invoking a 10 min red card for ganking, but with a concurrently issued 20 or 30 minute yellow card. So it continues 10-20 min after the red card expires.

That alternative would address this concern. If I gank (or fail to gank) Fred McHauler and escape in my pod, then undock as soon as off redcard, Fred, his alts, mercenaries hired by him or just people offended that I attacked Fred can seek revenge.


Also please don't call ganks in choke systems 'almost unstoppable'. They are nothing of the sort. Every gank of a noncombat ship begins with significant, avoidable mistakes by the noncombat ship, such as 'Oh look, Uedama has had 160 kills in the last hour, I'm going to fly my freighter through there without a scout, rather than the lowsec alternative route'.

The other advantage of this would be the fact that the ganker would be at a disadvantage if attempting to take advantage of their limited engagement timer. This is a good suggestion.

-1
Will not have the intended affects on high sec PvP. Unless your definition of PvP is suicide ganks.

As much as I would love to see a reduced criminal timer, I wouldn't hold my breathe. It's a buff ganking proposition in a nerf ganking world. Shorter criminal timers will directly equate to more ganks.

Longer LE timers would be a lot of fun, but it doesn't make very much sense. The anti-ganker is playing hero. He is assisting CONCORD in dealing with a capsuleer who committed a criminal act. The LE timer for shooting a criminal who's ship is flagged for Concordokken should be 0.


The first idea gets absolute support from my end.

The second idea eliminates most of the benefits from the first idea. Prohibit docking? Maybe. The other two? No.

Let's find a middle ground on the third idea. The criminal timer makes CONCORD behave like current faction police. You can warp around in a new ship but they will hunt you until the timer is completed.

I would love to see faction police completely removed and replaced.

Faction police is a terrible game mechanic. It severely limits player interaction AND its completely passive. The effect on ganking itself is marginal. If someone wants to run around missioning and exploring in a -10 ship that every player can shoot at, that's something CCP should encourage. Players could actually hunt "pirate scum" because some of us would leave station to do stuff other than gank. As it is, there is little room for "mistakes" with faction police, because its a guaranteed "you lose your ship" function. Addressing faction police is just trying to polish a turd.

Instead, give players active tools to deal with criminals. A criminal only bubble would be great, because now the white knights know where we will be(destroying that bubble, which gives a suspect timer if attacked!). Now we have to fight them off if we want to leave.

For one, you can actually be a pirate in highsec(and I mean that in the original sense of the word). No capitals or cynos. So people who want to haul things actually move it. Haulers provide fun targets and they can to use intel tools/friends/alts to help them out. And Concord provides a higher level of safety for people looking to just earn isk.

This has a lot of potential, the problem is defenders have very few options for actually dealing with criminals. Its almost a solved game for us. NPCs do most of the work(ensuring they can't do anything other than gank in highsec) and the antiganking tools are limited to ewar or blapping, in which case you get a crappy 2-8m isk killmail every 15 minutes for your effort.

But if white knights could bubble our undock and we didn't have faction police camping, well then you would get proper fights. We would need to deal with those pesky bubbles and everyone could attack us while we did it. so we couldn't just undock catalysts.

Camping gankers by stopping the instawarp undock is an interesting proposal. My worry is how a criminal bubble in empire would affect lowsec PVP pilots.


An LE timer that allows gankers to attack the anti-gankers like this is a bit strange though. It's CONCORD granting the ganker the right to attack a capsuleer without CONCORD intervention because the capsuleer helped CONCORD.