Skip to main content

Baggage

For the last week, in random places, I have been asking a question.
What if kill rights never expired?
 The idea came from Art Hornbie. I've been rolling it around in my head and listening to other people react to it for a few days now.

Over time, I've read a lot of proposals about dealing with the bad people of Eve Online. A lot of them say that people who PvP should be cast out of high sec and never allowed to return after their first act of violence. Never ever, ever, ever, ever. Grr.

I've never agreed with that. I might not have thought about the kill right thing as much if we were not post-crimewatch. But, we are. Kill rights used to be gained for sneezing wrong in empire. Now they are gained two ways. A criminal action in high security space and podding in low security space.

Kill rights can be made public. Currently they expire in thirty days. At the end of the day that isn't a long time. One call to war, a few busy weeks IRL, and poof the kill rights expire and they are never used. What if they hung around until activated? What if that noob or hauler pilot held a grudge and planned in six months, a year, two, to take you down when you were not expecting it.

But, Sugar! You have said that the kill right system isn't useful!

Yes. I have said that. I've said that in relationship to myself. An outlaw that lives in low sec is free to everyone to kill. When I enter high sec I am free to anyone to kill. I've died to enough high sec gatecamps now that I'm much more cautious about taking short cuts. It isn't that I think they'd be super useful. It is that I think they'd be sometimes useful.

It would make people think. Chella, for instance, never does combat where she would gain a killright. That is because I use her in high sec at times. It is not a big thing but it is a choice that I make because of the mechanic.

What are the negatives? I was told that PvPers should not be punished to harshly. But, we're talking about kill rights. You get them two ways. They are rarely accidental. One of the main issues I could see would be selling a character. That and people thinking it is a dumb idea. Perhaps activation should turn on the thirty day countdown.

It may be that forever is to long. Six months? A year? Eve is a long game after all. And I've been finding something about the past following in the form of kill rights striking.



Comments

  1. Considering that bounties are forever, I think killrights should be too. Make their expiration date the same. Either one month (money for the bounty would be lost) or forever. As for the character sales, well, having all the killrights be shown before the sales would be prudent methinks. Buyer would know what they are getting - and people would think twice before committing crime in game.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Bounties expire if the bountied account has been inactive for 180 days.

      Delete
  2. Oh hell, kill rights are a crock. If one’s serious about the Hi-Sec suicide ganking craft one soon reaches glorious -10 and other pilots won’t need a kill right, they can just up and shoot you.

    Still, kill rights are adorable feedback . . . “What, didn’t appreciate my tickle? You scoundrel you!”

    I say make them permanent. That way me and the other gankers can compare lists, measure our e-peen.

    DireNecessity

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Whoopsy! Realized I better clarify a bit. When a player makes a kill right available, the ganker is notified of the action. That’s the adorable feedback I spoke of.

      DireNecessity

      Delete
  3. How about this: for double the price, kill rights transfer to all characters on the same account. That might give those kill rights on -10 characters some value.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That'll just make waste some PLEX moving characters around accounts so there's no overlap between PvP toons & Others vOv

      You'd basically punish people that only have one account while people that have 2 or more still get away with it.
      Also it makes no sense EVE is still a roleplaying game, I'm not Kaeda, Kaeda is a fictional entity given persona by me, nothing more nothing less.

      Delete
    2. @ Anonymous June 13, 2014 at 11:30 PM

      Facinating/Illuminating comment

      1) You’re suggestion dances dangerously close to trying to deliver real life economic punishment for in game activities: “Suicide gank and we’ll make your whole account unusable.” As Kaeda highlights, the obvious solution is to spawn a separate suicide dedicated account to protect one’s “good” toons from the depredations of one’s “bad” toons. If CCP is gonna do that why not just be blunt and deliver a real life monthly fine.

      2) The motivation behind the comment gets at a much deeper difficulty. What to do when “punishment” becomes irrelevant . . .

      Anonymous examines a mechanical example thereby yielding a “fiddle with the game mechanics” to make sure the “punishment” remains relevant solution.

      There is, however, a psychological dimension to “punishment” that Anonymous ignores. What to do when “punishment” isn’t recognized as “punishment” by a player but rather is seen as an in game goal, a badge of honor. If in game “punishment” is supposed to act as a tool of social control, making sure it doesn’t deliver delightfully unintended perverse incentives can be difficult.

      DireNecessity

      Delete
    3. I don't think that blanketing an account like that is in any way reasonable then kicking someone out of high sec permanently. That's taking the PvP personally and saying, "how dare you do this and now you will be punished no matter what you do".

      Delete
    4. @ DireNecessity

      A player's subjective view of his "punishment" is unimportant. Whether he holds it to be a badge of honor or not is irrelevant; only the effect on the greater gameworld matters.

      The solution I suggest above is a step in the right direction, but I do acknowledge the problem multiple accounts pose. Our issue remains:

      1) Negative sec status and kill rights are the primary means of punishing illegal aggression in high sec.

      2) Having a dedicated ganking alt completely negates those two punishments.

      A player need only spend a few weeks of training to establish a ganking alt that never flies anything more expensive that ~3-5m isk catalyst and never risks losing expensive implants.It is completely impossible to engage a gank alt in meaningful pvp they do not consent to, because their entire gameplay consists of undocking, warping to the gank site, killing the target, and warping their empty, worthless pod back to a station.

      In a perverse but very real sense, high sec suicide ganking is an incredibly low risk activity. Loss is guaranteed, but it is also guaranteed to be both minimal and exactly predictable.

      These gankers are aided by scouting, scanning, and logistics alts that are equally as complicit from a 'punishment' point of view but are completely immune to any consequences.

      Delete
    5. Do forgive me Anonymous for my mistaken presumption that the purpose of your original comment was to reduce the prevalence of Hi-Sec suicide ganking by delivering brutal, account wide punishment.

      I too agree that a game which enables easy short circuiting of Hi-Sec law mechanics via dedicated suicide alt denies suicide ganking players the opportunity for the rich, subtle game play they deserve. I, for one, agree with you that CCP should expend resources to further enhance enjoyment for players undertaking the suicide ganking craft. I’m greatly pleased to discover we’re on the same side.

      DireNecessity

      Post Script – Of course, I may be mistaken now and it may well be your desire was to reduce Hi-Sec suicide ganking via brutal (now multiple?) account wide punishment(s). If that’s the case, why bother with all of this complicated “punishment” rigmarole when CCP has the simple option of coding suicide ganking out of the game directly?

      Delete
  4. Harsher killrights would essentially accelerate ganker alt recycling

    Every player is a minmaxer, and PvPrs are known for being extremely reluctant to take any chances...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't think gankers are the ones who would fall under the affect.

      Delete
  5. It's supposedly an exploit to biomass your negative security status gank characters. Supposedy.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I like the idea, make them last till they actually get used. And I say that as somebody happily roles around highsec with kill rights active already.

    Keeps it interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I think the killrights system should be done away with and the bounty system should be reworked to compensate.

    Bounty hunting should be a viable profession by allowing bounty hunters to purchase licenses (licenses would function like purchasing insurance). Tier of the license purchased (recurring isk fee) dictates the total value of the bounty you are able to hunt. You dock up at a bounty office, enter some criteria about the bounty you want (maximum distance to the target, bounty amount, terms of the bounty, etc.) and you are given X number of bounties that fit your criteria. Don't like those bounties, you can't get more for a given time window. You should not be able to search for specific players bounties. You get the bounties the office supplies and thats it. When you accept the bounty contract (No fee for the contract. The license fee covers the fees associated with accepting bounty contracts) the target becomes a legal target for you to engage anywhere, similar to declaring war on that individual target.

    To prevent griefing new bros, once a bounty has been collected on a player they are removed from the pool of bounties for a certain number of days. Not saying a new bounty can't be placed, but it won't be made available for a certain number of days.

    How I see the contracts working are you put a bounty on someones head and dictate the terms for that bounty to pay out. I.e. killmail worth X isk, podding (option that corpse must be returned to contractee), etc. To prevent the issue of farming your own bounty, thats why I proposed you cannot search for specific bounties. Dictating the terms of the bounty should limit that as well, but if someone is stupid enough to put a 1 bil bounty on someone with no isk requirement for the kill value I see nothing wrong with the bountied player working the system to claim it.

    I'm sure there are issues with this system that haven't been thought out, but I would love a bounty system that was actually functional and with a functional bounty system I see no need for killrights.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Cypher,

      Your proposal misses a crucial link. Right now there is no connection between in game actions and bounties. Anybody can slap a bounty on another for any damn reason that pleases them. Accordingly, your suggestion becomes license to murder a specific individual for any ole reason without repercussion beyond paying a fine (bounty) upfront.

      If you required a kill right to place a bounty in the first place, your suggestion would make more sense.

      DireNecessity

      Delete
    2. I would adore a better more flexible bounty and mercenary system.

      Delete
    3. Requiring a kill right to place the bounty destroys a large possibility of emergent gameplay. That miner thats mining your roids isn't going to give you a kill right just so you can bounty him. James315 bumping you in his stabber isn't going to generate a kill right either.

      As it stands, I can war dec any corp at any time for no reason whatsoever to get a chance to kill someone for no other reason than I felt like it. For the vast majority of war decs, there is no repercussion to the war deccers other than paying a fine to concord to murder the opposing corp. We can also look to suicide ganking to see another example of murdering individuals with minimal repercussion.

      By not allowing people to search for specific contracts, you limit the specific targeting of an individual. Sure, I can put a bounty on anyone at anytime, but if its not a reasonable contract its not going to get done. Couple that with the proposal for the bounty cooldown as I suggested and you only get to kill a target 1 time as opposed to the as many times as they undock for a week you get with a war dec.

      By only allowing bounty hunters to get X number of possible contracts in Y amount of time and not allowing the bounty hunters to search for specific contracts, I believe you will greatly diminish the random targeting of players through bounties. You can even limit the number of active bounties a player can dish out to others to further reduce the random bounties.

      I think with those mechanics in place, if I really want someone to blow up right then and there for no other reason then they are on grid with me, the bounty system will be an ineffective method to accomplish that.

      Delete
    4. "By only allowing bounty hunters to get X number of possible contracts in Y amount of time and not allowing the bounty hunters to search for specific contracts, I believe you will greatly diminish the random targeting of players through bounties. ” Huh?!?!

      Cyphur,

      I appreciate your desire to make bounty hunting a viable Eve profession. The trouble with your suggestion as it stands is that it looks at the situation only from the bounty hunter’s point of view. Let’s try looking what will happen from different players' points of view . . .

      DireNecessity, being an evil Hi-Sec griefer, plants herself outside a mission hub. As each accomplished mission bear exits station in their expensively fit mish marauder, DireNecessity slaps a bounty on the player, announces in local “Marauder up! Start your Bounty Hunter engines gentlemen.” Being a kindly griefer, Dire might even evemail the mish bear to inform them that 1) they’ve been bountied and 2) ask if they plan to fly that Marauder anymore. And this is only the start of the fun. Imagine parking outside Jita . . . “Freighter up!!!”

      Cypher, your suggestion, as it stands, destroys Hi-Sec. Currently Hi-Sec players have at least a few tools at their disposal to protect themselves (being in an NPC corp shields one from wardeccing, tanking up reduces suicide gank risk, etc . . .).

      To belabor the point, let’s look at it from the carebear’s point of view. Every bear with a bounty on them is aware that somewhere out there is a bounty hunter who 1) wants to murder them, 2) gets to murder them and 3) there’s nothing, absolutely nothing the carebear gets to do about it.

      Do you really want to hand griefers such a powerful tool to take away each and every Hi-Sec player’s game?

      DireNecessity

      Delete
    5. As I proposed above, those looking for bounty contracts would be given a random selection of bounties (lets say 10 for now which would be the X in the statement above) that fit a very loose set of criteria (lets say the bounty hunter wants to make at least 10 mil for his efforts, then that would be the search criteria and all bounties 10 mil or greater would be in the pool of potential bounties for the 10 he is given). The bounty hunter can accept 1 of those contracts or deny all of them. If he denies, there is a cool down timer (lets use mission cool down timer of 4 hours) before he is able to get another batch of 10 contracts to choose from. If he accepts, he can claim another bounty contract after the current contract is completed or expires (similar to accepting/denying missions, but you don't get new bounties after denying instead of taking a standings hit). The cool down timer would be the Y in the statement above. The number of bounties you can choose from and the cooldown timer on new bounties would need to be balanced which is why I left them arbitrary before.

      So if you have multiple characters trying to get in on a bounty for the marauder bear you just saw undock, they would all have to pull the same contract out of the entire set of contracts for the length of time the contract is valid (lets keep the mission connection going and say 6 hours at a maximum, similar to bonus reward time for missions, though this would most likely need to be shorter but longer than the denial cool down).

      I don't have numbers for the amount of people that currently have a bounty. But lets assume there are at least 10,000 bounties out there. With a 4 hour cool down, each person in your group would get 20 bounties out of 10000 hoping to get that marauder bear. That is slightly over a .2% chance per person of getting that specific bounty. Now how many people does it take to kill a marauder or a freighter? Its been a few years since I've taken statistics but I'm pretty sure the odds of two people getting that exact same contract at the same time is the multiple of the odds of each getting the contract so .0004% and the odds just get far worse the more people you need to be able to successfully kill that marauder. You could also add a hardcap on the number of people that are able to accept a given contract at a time.

      So lets take a look at this from the griefers point of view. Do I get a couple hundred players spamming bounty contracts so that maybe 5 of them can get the contract or do I get my 8 friends to get into gank Nados and blap the marauder/freighter? The only argument I see here is that you only need 1 to keep point while the rest suicide, but I see no difference between that and a neutral bumping me. In this case at least I can shoot at the person preventing me from warping.

      From the carebears point of view it does add more risk. Running missions with an active bounty? Better keep an eye on d-scan (Is this not the advice players are given when running missions in expensive boats to avoid suicide ganks anyway?) As it stands, every time you undock you should be aware that 1) someone is willing to suicide gank/harass you "for the tears" 2) If your fit is worth more than the cost to the gankers, someone is willing to suicide you for the drops 3) there is nothing you can do about it

      I know the numbers are not balanced, but even in its current state I do not see this proposal destroying high sec as you claim. The proper cool down and the number of available bounties will make it extremely difficult to specifically target 1 person. The illusion of risk that a single griefer can put on someone would be much larger than it is now with bounties, but all that means is we need to do a better job of teaching new bros how it works. This would be further reduced by 1) Limiting the number of active bounties 1 player can put on other players 2) Once a bounty contract has been completed, a new bounty contract on that player cannot be issued for a certain period of time (30 days?)

      Delete
  8. Spit balling off Mikes post, why not make kill rights extend to everyone in the aggressors corporation.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Because you open up corporate awoxing to a whole new level.

      Delete
  9. Extended kill rights would be interesting. 3 or 6 month sounds reasonable. No spreading to accounts or corp its an RPG and if the once character is a bad guy that should't effect any other people.

    With the crime watch in discussion, why does a -10 can doc safely at any station in high sec? As soon as you enter the system in a ship the local police notices you but you just doc up at their station? What about a bit more restrictive like only at corporations you have a +4 Standing. Or hole regions ignore your evil doings while your faction standing is +6.
    That would allow a role play aspect for gankers like "we kill people in amarr because only minmatar are allowed to do ..."
    (would need a faction standing loss added to criminal acts in an empire, very small)

    ReplyDelete
  10. Mining-my-own-businessJune 16, 2014 at 8:15 AM

    Getting a personal kill right against a player that conducted an illegal action (in the eyes of CONCORD) against you is a good mechanic. You're entitled to revenge in sorts. The bounty mechanic on the other hand makes now sense.
    A better system would be to remove the player-given bounties. Player A that got a kill right on Player B would then have 2 choices. Use the kill right him-or-herself and freely attack Player B whenever. Or he or she could go the bounty office and report Player B. Then the "criminal" would get a standard bounty from the 1 kill right and bounty hunters could then activate the kill right and get the bounty if successful ?
    What would distinguish a bounty hunter player from anyone else could be an NPC faction like in FW, but it would be better for gameplay for bounty hunters to be able to stay incognito. Maybe a license system ?
    The current public kill right mechanic makes those rights visible for people in the same grid. Having a bounty/kill right office would make hunting for kill rights an interesting mechanic i think.
    Though I'm sure people would find a way to abuse that. I just would find it interesting to get ISK or LP for following bounty hunter careers.

    MMOB

    ReplyDelete
  11. Mining-my-own-businessJune 16, 2014 at 8:18 AM

    (And of course, the more kill rights are reported to the bounty office the higher the bounty on that player becomes. Or Player A could add his or her own reward to the bounty on Player B's head and make it even more interesting for Bounty Hunters)

    ReplyDelete
  12. Kill rights should be forever. None of this expiration crap, u kill me, I should have to right to kill you at the time of MY choosing. Expiring kill rights is just a ganker's wet dream when noobs and carebears are so often the targets and its not until they get some experience and interest that kill rights have any meaning at all.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Maybe one day!

 [15:32:10] Trig Vaulter > Sugar Kyle Nice bio - so carebear sweet - oh you have a 50m ISK bounty - so someday more grizzly  [15:32:38 ] Sugar Kyle > /emote raises an eyebrow to Trig  [15:32:40 ] Sugar Kyle > okay :)  [15:32:52 ] Sugar Kyle > maybe one day I will try PvP out When I logged in one of the first things I did was answer a question in Eve Uni Public Help. It was a random question that I knew the answer of. I have 'Sugar' as a keyword so it highlights green and catches my attention. This made me chuckle. Maybe I'll have to go and see what it is like to shoot a ship one day? I could not help but smile. Basi suggested that I put my Titan killmail in my bio and assert my badassery. I figure, naw. It was a roll of the dice that landed me that kill mail. It doesn't define me as a person. Bios are interesting. The idea of a biography is a way to personalize your account. You can learn a lot about a person by what they choose to put in their bio

Taboo Questions

Let us talk contentious things. What about high sec? When will CCP pay attention to high sec and those that cannot spend their time in dangerous space?  This is somewhat how the day started, sparked by a question from an anonymous poster. Speaking about high sec, in general, is one of the hardest things to do. The amount of emotion wrapped around the topic is staggering. There are people who want to stay in high sec and nothing will make them leave. There are people who want no one to stay in high sec and wish to cripple everything about it. There are people in between, but the two extremes are large and emotional in discussion. My belief is simple. If a player wishes to live in high sec, I do not believe that anything will make them leave that is not their own curiosity. I do not believe that we can beat people out of high sec or destroy it until they go to other areas of space. Sometimes, I think we forget that every player has the option to not log back in. We want them to log

And back again

My very slow wormhole adventure continues almost as slowly as I am terminating my island in Animal Crossing.  My class 3 wormhole was not where I wanted to be. I was looking for a class 1 or 2 wormhole. I dropped my probes and with much less confusion scanned another wormhole. I remembered to dscan and collect my probes as I warped to the wormhole. I even remembered to drop a bookmark, wormholes being such good bookmark locations later. My wormhole told me it was a route into low sec. I tilted my head. How circular do our adventures go. Today might be the day to die and that too is okay. That mantra dances in the back of my head these days. Even if someone mocks me, what does that matter? Fattening someone's killboard is their issue not mine. So I jumped through and found myself in Efa in Khanid, tucked on the edge of high sec and null sec. What an interesting little system.  Several connections to high sec. A connection to null sec. This must be quite the traffic system.    I am f