EVE General Discussion

This.

Add duel system please.

I understand now. You're just doing it wrong. All the pirates I've trained start out as ninja looters and salvagers. The Noctis is a poor choice for a ninja looter/salvager. I think it's roll is to follow friendly fleets around missions and the like to clean up after them. In that roll it does very well. If you are going to steal stuff it behooves one to travel light and fast. Destroyers and interdictors are ideal. Yah you can't tractor stuff in BECAUSE IT'S NOT YOURS (YET)! You can if you are in a friendly gang or if people are disowning their wrecks... but stealing shouldn't be risk free. I'm aready tossing around ways to turn that mechanic around and get aggression from carebears in their hero fit battleships. That's some nice loot. Now there will be more opportunities in piracy too...

Could you rephrase that? Those of us not there don't have all the details so I am not sure I understand what you wrote.

If a player is flagged suspect, to everyone presumably from the way I heard it, and someone shoots a suspect, then the suspect can shoot back. Does the suspect shooting player also become suspect or just get aggro with the initial suspect?

I wasn't talking about highsec

I was talking about regions where Noone (really) cares when you kill someone which also have a mechanic in place to somehow protect people's 'property'

No. The whole concept of this refactoring is to get rid of player-to-player flagging and all the various interdependent timers that this causes. Instead, you will have a flag that is completely independent from everyone else. Thus we have the “suspect” and “felon” flags instead: both are global flags tied exclusively to you. They change the rules for how other people are allowed to interact with you. Period. They do not change the rules for you in any way.

This means that if you steal from a can, you get flagged “suspsect” and… nothing more. End of story. You are now a suspect and a free-for-all target. You cannot do anything you couldn't do before, including shooting people. Since you are now a legal target, attacking you does not create any flags for the attacker — they do not become suspects or felons; they are not legal targets for anyone, including you. You cannot fight back, because you would be attacking “innocent“ targets and upgrade yourself to “felon“ status and get death-rayed (or however the new CONCORD implementation will work). Essentially, being a suspect is the same as a GCC, without the CONCORD intervention — you are, quite simply, dead without any recourse (aside from staying the hell away from other players). So: people will never ever get themselves flagged suspect unless they know with 100% certainty that they will dock up instantly afterwards, or that they can instawarp away to safety.

The alternative, strictly using this system, would be that anyone who attacks a suspect becomes a suspect. This creates a massive escalation problem: I steal your can (everyone can shoot me); you shoot me for my isolence (now everyone can shoot you); my backstabbing bastard buddies warp in because we successfully baited you and they shoot you, now everyone can shoot them. Suddenly, we have 20 free-for-all targets in the system just because I took your loot. No-one will come out of this alive and salvage prices will be reaching an all-time low from the massive increase in availability from all those wrecks.

edit: I should point out, at this point, that this is solely speaking within the current, very unfinished design spec as it was presented to us, which is basically just a “no player-to-player flags, evarrr!!1” — further thinking will happen, and they're showing it to us early so we can figure out flaws and exploits such as this and think up ideas to remove them /edit


In an attempt to contain this and still allow for voluntary player-to-player combat, there was talk about a duelling system: you (or your fleet / corp / whatever) ask the other guy(s) for a duel, they accept, and you duke it out. Anyone who interferes becomes a suspect and a free-for-all target (so there goes the neutral reps). Again, the idea is to not have this massive mess of person-to-person flags and inheritance of who can attack whom for whatever obscure reason — instead, you have two predefined groups that are free to blap each other to pieces and no escalation or inheritance can take place (all you can do is trigger a “suspect” flag for yourself).

One idea that was floated was to combine the two in order to provide some kind of middle-ground for the suspect and let him defend himself: I steal your can, and become a suspect. Anyone (including you) who attacks me, implicitly signs one of these duel contracts. If either one of us tries to bring in remote support, they'll flag themselves as suspects (so they won't come help you…), and as longs as I can whittle down people who come to “support” you by shooting me, I can stay alive. This will create a whole slew of new problems that we haven't fully thought out, but it at least gets rid of the whole “suspect = dead” issue.

Defending yourself while you're suspect-flagged is an ongoing conversation; we've not decided on anything yet, and we'll devblog when we've got it better nailed down



If you're talking about the non-suppressible "suicide gank" box, that's entirely replaced by the safety system.



Switch off first-level safety, steal from wreck, get suspect flag, do whatever you like with it.



The safety system should in principle catch 100% of noob-baiting attempts. You can't get a suspect flag without turning your safeties off first, and that will pop up a message saying approximately "hey newbie, the guy who asked you to push this button is trying to kill you, tell him to go away".



Honestly I'd like to have them somewhere on the HUD. They're not some big bad setting that you flip once and then leave off forever, they're a thing where your FC says "ok guys, we're going to engage them, safeties off", and then there are some flashing lights and stuff and your gunports open (that last bit I made up but you get the point).

Dang Greyscale... A+ for dedication to your work but shouldn't you be out partying right now?

DONT make it a consensual PVP flag. PVP is not consensual in EVE, nor should it ever be. Leave room for criminal activity and other shenanigans. Don't make things safer than they already are.

I think he was discussing this in the case where you can do something reasonable, like defend yourself when you're a suspect (meaning you take the can and go red, then pew pew the newbies who shoot the big mean red guy), rather than just take it up the ass as if you're a little church boy, as you seem to be going for.

Keep in mind that I'm all for going red to an entire system if I steal a can, but it is definitively un-EVE to not let me defend myself when some brave soul decides to shoot at me. Sure, people are going to use this to bait the less intelligent members of the community into dire situations, but I consider it a good thing to provide more options for PVP rather than less. Furthermore, granting a sec status for killing people while a suspect will only discourage any kind of non-war based PVP in HS that's not completely consensual.

Finally, I don't think coding in hard switches to prevent bad decisions is a good thing. I'm all for warnings that pop up with big colorful letters telling people to not be stupid, but those boxes should have a click through so that the person can commit to that action. If someone is too stupid to read the message, they should face the consequences for it.

Yes, I was expecting Greyscale to have come up with ideas that actually made sense from a gameplay perspective. I mean simplifying convoluted systems is great and everything, but I don't see how a sane person would think that doing it at the expense of completely removing non-war related PVP from highsec would be a good idea.