Assembly Hall

Hello all,
I just got caught up with the fanfest video about crimewatch, and it set off a domino-chain of ideas. I'm going to start with the core concept, and follow up with some auxiliary ideas.

Core concept #1: making ISK PVPing in lowsec.

There are essentially three groups here: pirates, victims, and deputies. We'll start with pirate mechanics: any player with a -5 or worse sec status can affiliate himself with a NPC pirate corp. A player corp may also affiliate itself, and all it's members will be automatically affiliated. In return for that affiliation, the player gets a bounty for any ship (excepting pods, noob ships, shuttles, and the like) of a player (pirate, deputy, or otherwise). The bounty is proportional to the hull destroyed and skill point level (in that hull) of the pilot flying it, probably maxing out around 80-90% of the price of "platinum" insurance (to prevent farming). For non combat hulls, the skill points of the pilot is not a factor.

Example: A player has command ships 3 and is flying a vulture. Platinum insurance costs 30 mil and pays out 100 mil. The bounty on this player is 16 mil (30 * 90% * 3/5). The exact formula can change to be balanced. This seems high to me, so maybe 50 percent or something.

Deputy mechanics are similar. Deputies can affiliate themselves with a NPC police corp if their sec status is +5 or greater. In return, he get's a bounty for destroying a ship whose pilot has a sec status of -5 or lower, or any flagged pilot.

0.0 systems yield no bounties.

Core concept #2: luring in innocent victims.

This part is simple. Make lowsec more profitable. More incursions, better rats, better ore, etc. Or, here is a radical idea, stop seeding veldspar in highsec, and load it up in lowsec! The point here is to make lowsec a little bit more vibrant than cops versus robbers. Give robbers someone to rob.

Aux concept #1:
Deputies with high sec status get special privileges. For example, a +8 sec status deputy may use light dictor bubbles in lowsec. Of course, if this pilot ends up on the killmail for innocents or deputies, he will receive a sec status hit. Clever pirates may get someone deputized to lay a trap, but it will take some doing to get to that point, and easily lost.

Aux concept #2:
The higher the sec status of the system, the larger the bounty the pirate receives. Accordingly, gate guns and station guns deal much more damage in higher systems.

Aux concept #3:
Players collect small amounts of LP for their kills. Also, new faction pirate ships and police ships (squad cars, if you will) will be seeded. LP needs to be a low enough fraction to prevent farming.

This would need an ISK sink to balance it out. I think it would be better if the ship just dropped everything instead of half of it being destroyed. That would double pirate income without adding any fancy new game systems or extra ISK faucets. An official ransom system would also be nice. Something like the new war dec mechanics. You can offer money to surrender in a war dec and the winner of the war can't redec you for a while. The same thing could be used on ransoms. Pirate pops up a ransom window and if the victim accepts the pirate can't lock them again for a period of time. That would prevent the griefers who don't honor ransoms from ruining things for professional pirates who actually want to make money.

Compared to many of the ideas posted in this forum, this is well thought out. And for that, I am thankful. Im afraid though it still doesn't get my support.

I agree with the notion that PvP should be more profitable and that lowsec should be more useful. The reasons I dont support this particular idea is because;

- We already have too much ISK being generated from nothing. I would prefer to have it "transferred" instead of created.
- I always prefer to keep NPC mechanics out of the equation.
- I don't like the idea of arbitrarily calling some people pirates, and some people deputies. I would much prefer something more organic, and emergent.

Simpler changes make a bigger difference, especially with the freedom they afford. I think a fixed bounty system would go a little way to helping lowsec in the ways you propose. There has been a lot of discussion here about how to fix the bounty system.



^^ Simpler, and with fewer creases to iron out. Might be worth writing a proposal thread specifically for that idea. With prices as high as they are at the moment the economy would benefit from there being higher numbers of mods in total, and it would make PvP more profitable. The only immediate problem I see with that, is that suicide ganking in highsec would become ridiculously common.

Having killed ships drop all the loot instead of destroying part of it will have uninteded consiquences. In EVE, every item/module has a descent chance of being destroyed in one way or another. That's what keeps them valuable. Making it more likely for modules to drop makes modules in general less valuable. If not because of a reduction in demand, but because of an increase in supply. I don't know what the long term affects would be, but CCP needs to keep them in mind if they make a change like that.

If you want people to go to Low Sec to make money, then you need to make enough money available there where low sec profit (isk income - ships lost) is greater than high sec profit. That number needs to be sufficiently higher such that the increase in cost after the pirates start building up to kill them, does not push the low sec profit below high sec again.

This all has to factor in the extra time required to be safe in low sec, the effort of getting fleets together to watch your back, or to give an extra share to your scout. All of those come together such that low sec would require a several times increase in the payout from available income (missions, bounties, mining, anomolies/signatures etc) before it became valuable.

You don't rat in high sec...you run missions.

Rat Bounties are a waste of time.

Your logic is a little bit flawed....but we get the point...low sec should be more profitable.

I agree with your last two points, but here there is a net loss of ISK. You could say that the net ISK loss per ship is more now than if this were implemented, but ideally the aggregate would be more by encouraging more destruction.