Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Today on /r/eve there was a discussion about making crimewatch more reasonable/realistic for both sides of the equation.

I'm going to expand on my comment from that thread in this post, where a dev would be more likely to see it.

CORE IDEAS

• Turn CONCORD back into the highly powerful faction police they once were.
• Add a FW-style system where players can join up with CONCORD as "citizen officers" or "vigilantes" (basically a FW militia for highsec).
• Possibly allow us to fly CONCORD ships and buy them from their LP store (these would, of course, not be the uber-poweful beasts that blow up criminals today).

Changes to CONCORD itself:

The normal, NPC response to crim timers would be changed in this system. CONCORD would be nerfed down from their god-like status into basically Drifter power levels: really tough, but killable, and you can run from them. Their response should escalate as time goes on. You shouldn't be able to sit there and RR-tank them for eternity. But you SHOULD be able to attack someone quickly and run away, or attempt to blap the NPC tackle that shows up. CONCORD should not be the end-all-be-all, because it limits the variety and the fun that could be had from cops-and-robbers scenarios.

Vigilantes:

Vigilantes (name subject to change) would be player characters that sign up to work for CONCORD and become part of the CONCORD faction, a la FW militias. They would have access to exceptionally powerful locator agents that can detect people with negative security status. These agents would be more effective at scanning as their targets go down in sec status--so a -10 player's location is determined more quickly than a -5 character, and characters with positive sec status are not targeted at all.

Vigilantes would need above a -5 sec status to join CONCORD (just as militia members must have reasonable standing to join their faction of choice).

When in space, Vigilantes can flag themselves to be summoned to nearby areas of criminal activity. A CONCORD ship establishes initial tackle on a criminal, and the Vigilantes get bridged/jumped in (killable CONCORD Titan?) to fight it out with the scoundrels.

Vigilantes get access to numerous goodies from CONCORD LP stores (ships, tags, etc), as well as increased sec status when they kill people with lower than -5 sec status.

Alright, now we've gone over the cops. Time for...

The Robbers:

With such a system in place, there can be some changes to other parts of the game. Since people can be killed without the murderer necessarily facing punishment, people may go out of their way to improve their ganking ships with shinier equipment to execute their kills faster. Also, wardecs for farming kills wouldn't need to exist. However, you'd still need a way to remove highsec towers and POCOs, so perhaps the oft-suggested "war goals" could be implemented (i.e. set up a specifc thing you want to accomplish for your wardec, and once that goal is done the war ends).

This also provides some room for changing the bounty system. Along the lines of that "war goals" system, people could place bounties on targets with a grievance--basically, a killmail. Bounty hunters could go to those aformentioned CONCORD locator agents and get "matched" randomly with a target relative to the level of the agent and size of the bounty. To prevent abuse, the person who accepts the mission needs to be both top damage and final blow on the KM, and declining bounty missions would give massive standing losses to the CONCORD faction and the locator agents.

These changes could also bring back highsec awoxing, albeit heavily nerfed, so people would actually need to pay attention to who they let into their bad mining/tax farm corp.

I still can't figure out why facpo exists. All it does is squelch potential player interaction, and force criminal players both ganker and otherwise to use disposable ships.

It's pointless.

REPOSTING THE ORIGINAL SUGGESTION BY VERGEERS

Improve the crime watch system. Make it seem more real

Right now it just feels like a worthless system. Nobody wants to take away the ability to be able to gank, but it's honestly a pretty thoroughly abused mechanic. The same systems are camped every day, all day. It's honestly one of those things that sticks out like a sore thumb and breaks the immersion because of how much the current crime watch system is abused. No galactic authority would allow that much piracy right under their nose in the same system, every day, and then do nothing as the criminals dock up in empire stations. It's pretty sad to fly through the same systems every day and see Machariels sitting on gates or bumping freighters, loads of Concord just flying around after responding to a previous gank only to have the same slow response time to the next gank right next door, and the massive number of flashing criminal flags docked up in Empire stations.



You can obviously tell how lucrative of an operation it is. Gankers kick and scream just as much when anyone talks about making changes to the crime watch system as incursion players do when those same people talk about nerfing "high sec income". It's kind of ironic when you think about it because ganking is actually "high sec income". It's done in the safety of high sec, using neutral alts to scout, perform bumping, and haul loot. Only thing the ganking characters actually do(which are usually alts rolled specifically for ganking anyways) is fly a ship out to a gank target to kill it and then get blown up. It's usually a cheap ship that is easily replaced. Because they are gank alts, sec status is no concern. So there is virtually minimal risk involved in ganking and it is rewarded by a usually large amount of profit. In all honesty, Incursion runners put more at risk for the ISK they make than gankers do. Which is funny when you think about all the "HTFU" and "Carebear" taunts that are thrown out by that community towards the other ones. Yet, when someone put forwards an idea that seemingly adds more risk to that activity(one where you are actively performing criminal acts and should be high risk in nature) the outcry coming from the ganking community is profound. It makes me think of one of their favorite phrases....HTFU. Act like a hardened galactic criminal and not some child caught stealing candy who hides behind his mothers skirt hoping she will shield you from any real consequences. Because that's pretty much the nature of the way the mechanic works right now.



One of the things I could think of would be Concord response time being affected by a systems recent number of criminal acts. Similar to the way jump fatigue works. Right know it's a known quantity so everyone knows just how much time they have and how much DPS will be needed to perform a gank. So it's just a matter of saying "we need x number of ships". If response time were variable based on recent criminal activity that would provide some degree of uncertainty, which I think is one of the few things that drives excitement in a game. It would also force criminals to devote more resources if they want to continue to take down targets in the same area over longer periods of time. Overall, it would be a step toward more realism and more immersive gameplay.



I agree with not being able to dock in high sec stations too. I'm not even sure how that makes sense. It should be set to where criminals can't dock in empire stations. That would mean in order to have safe harbor someone would have to drop a POS in space(or a Citadel when they arrive. Pirate Hubs anyone?). This would add an asset in space which could be a conflict driver. Maybe players get tired of the gankers and decide to take the fight to them. They would be forced to defend their asset or maybe hire mercenaries(that's driving more gameplay opportunities right there). Right now there's virtually no way to fight back. As stated before, gank alts are basically disposable characters. They fly cheap ships, which are already calculated as a loss when they undock, and no implants so if they're podded they lose nothing and simply respawn in a station that is usually in their main ganking system anyway. Is it any wonder gankers fight so hard to shoot down any ideas to change the system and wage such a vicious propaganda campaign? The system as it is now is horribly slanted in their favor.



Another possibility would be to make it to where a player needs to have good standing with the corporation to offset their security status. I see some players mention that even though they may be criminals, some corporations may still like them. So if you have a -5 sec status you would need a 5 standing with the corp to be able to dock. Perhaps some of the social skills can help to offset this penalty as I realize it would be difficult for players with just under 0 to worry about grinding standing just to be able to dock. This method would take some consideration but seems like a viable option.



[continued]

So in Burning Jita in this idea we would just pull out 250 Nados and alpha everything without the fear to loose the ship.

Sounds great to me i have no idea how anyone can exploit this.

-1

No. If you scale it up that high, CONCORD will turn basically back into the godlike instakillers they are now, and all your nados die.

The reason I call it "realistic" is because it'd be similar to what would happen IRL.

If you brought a small army into New York City, the National Guard would get called in and they'd stomp you to the ground pretty quickly. But petty thieves and murderers get away with their crimes all the time, because lone men are harder to catch and they don't warrant an overpowering response.

I think these are great ideas

So really, what's the point? Just to remove the punishment from small scale ganking?

The idea is too exploitable. Figure out how to make it non-exploitable, and then you might have a good ides.

-1

This basically.

The OP is way too exploitable. If each Nado in that example did their own gank or 2 to 1, there would be no scaling up. Each gank is separate and therefore cannot be linked. And no, being in the same corp isn't a link to stop exploitation.

This needs to go in it's own forum post so that people can discuss it. This is really honestly ******* gold and I would love this more than anything.