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Consequences for lawbreakers?


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What tools are going to be available to orgs for enforcing their rules? The idea of this game is emergent gameplay, of building a world and civilisation. Civilisation requires laws, and it requires the ability to enforce those laws. So how is that going to happen?

 

In modern society, the primary means of punishing lawbreakers is incarceration. In a game, that's not really an option - if you lock a character in jail, that's destroying the player's ability to have fun in the game, and will likely just result in them stopping playing - losing a customer. That's bad. So, jail is out.

 

Most forms of punishment available in a game are either trivial (execution doesn't mean much if you just respawn) or equally harmful to the game. But without some way of punishing those who transgress the rules, society doesn't function.

 

How do you enforce law and order in a world without consequences?

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Jails - either he pays the fee, kills himself to go back to the arkship or solves puzzles in a maze to escape that jail - would be fun

 

Depends on "laws" what you want to do with him. law for one org != law for another one (like: shooting is allowed in a city). If there are no stun-guns, noone ever could possibly do anything about a criminal except killing him. Cause every automated system (like: if you shoot, you get flagged (by script), when exiting the territory you have to pay 1000 credits) could be abused.

 

Will be interesting ;)

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I can actually see how punishments could work... IF it is done in a correct way...

Imagine this, if you die by simply being killed in a fight or the like, you just respawn, maybe loose a bit of money, some stuff, no big deal.

BUT if you get "punished" you loose alot more.

like, you get put in prison, you will be there for... maxium an hour maybe. (Just an arbritrary wait time, honestly could be worse) but, as you get out depending on if you were in there for 10 minutes or an hour... you have lost not just gold and items... you have lost skill points. The longer you are in prison, the more skillpoints you lose. Basicly, the punishment for being in prison means you have to work much much much longer to progress with your character, giving a good incentive to not getting thrown in jail. (You could also add that when you get out of jail you will have a small mark on your characters profile, making it clear to others you have been inprisoned and therefor can't really be trusted... (or can get invited to a pirate group xD))

Executions however... is a massive ordeal. If you get executed (as a part of a crime) you basicly loose HALF your skillpoints (or something like that) It basicly is meant to show that your old character BASICLY is dead... and this is someone new. (could also add that you have to change your name of your character, and all your friends on your friendslist get a "ping, this character have been executed, his name is changed from ..... to ....." )


now, to avoid this being missused there needs to be 3 things.

1: For you to be imprisoned or executed you MUST be a part of the organisation that did it. No one else can just randomly inprison you or execute you.
2: TO actually execute and imprison someone is a advanced thing. You must do alot of tasks and small "quests" almost every time you wish to do so, like a trial, a questioning ect ect... (Executions taking REALLY REALLY long times to actually finish, like days)
3: Only a organisation leader can order a execution. Nobody else. And once again, only on his members.


What do you think of this idea?

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Executions however... is a massive ordeal. If you get executed (as a part of a crime) you basicly loose HALF your skillpoints (or something like that) It basicly is meant to show that your old character BASICLY is dead... and this is someone new. (could also add that you have to change your name of your character, and all your friends on your friendslist get a "ping, this character have been executed, his name is changed from ..... to ....." )

 

3: Only a organisation leader can order a execution. Nobody else. And once again, only on his members.

 

 

What do you think of this idea?

 

could be abused to effectivly kill spys in your org and ruin a character completly, bad idea. Even 10% would be too much.

 

You can't kill whole branches of gameplay only because you are a "lawful citizen" and don't like griefers, scammers and killers.

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could be abused to effectivly kill spys in your org and ruin a character completly, bad idea. Even 10% would be too much.

 

You can't kill whole branches of gameplay only because you are a "lawful citizen" and don't like griefers, scammers and killers.

The point is that it will create a form of... suspence and realism to it.

 

You can't just begin shooting at your org members, or betray them that easily... you must be more carefull about your actions. Executions are simply meant to be something 1: extremely hard to do 2: a great part of your org must agree on doing it (or atleast the officers / leaders)  3: quite risky, if your leaders are eager to do executions... is it then a good idea to stay in the org?

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Don't get me wrong, i'm all for skill loss (not so much that it would be broken) at character death, but losing 50% or something of skillpoints is just broken, even if it's not that easy to do. That would just be too harsh.

 

Better to penalize suiciders and frequent killers with skill loss at a much lower margin

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Don't get me wrong, i'm all for skill loss (not so much that it would be broken) at character death, but losing 50% or something of skillpoints is just broken, even if it's not that easy to do. That would just be too harsh.

 

Better to penalize suiciders and frequent killers with skill loss at a much lower margin

Maybe.. I am not sure myself xD I just meant for execution to 1: be a very extreme and hard meassure and 2: for it to really have a massive negative impact xD

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My concern with zone laws potentially leading to steep penalties is the capacity to abuse. Trolls might make a small town, draw a bunch of new players there, and they might discover the hard way that doing something really normal there is totally illegal.

 

I'm guessing some of this will boil down to the mechanics of the Territory Unit and "claimed territory". We already know that build permissions, and mining permissions are likely going to be controlled by whichever character or org controls the TU, but the rest is completely up in the air.

 

I was hoping that scripting might be robust enough to allow a clever city planner to set up "law enforcement scripts". For example, if a city (not inside the savezone) wants a law that prevents PVP with the exception of bounty hunting, there might be a scriptable element that can "look" for unauthorized pvp, and can react. If the script could command the city's defenses to attack the offending player(s), or if you could have a script create a bounty on the offending player(s), then you have a mechanism for punishing criminals.

 

Larger cities might even have law enforcement players, but I kind of doubt those systems will last.

 

Most likely we will end up with 2 kinds of "cities". A traditional style city that is built in a safe-zone to prevent pvp and that uses TU to prevent griefing, where "laws" won't even be needed. The other would be an Org HQ, that restricts access based on org membership, and relies on automated defenses and org members to keep outsiders out.

 

I  could be wrong, I don't think the game is at a stage yet where there are mechanics for any of this, so it is very much in the air.

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With the already in place death penalty of losing items, I think not just one death but many would suffice. Meaning the player gets put on a Kill on sight list for a certain amount of time or certain amount of kills. It allows the player to still play the game, he'll just have to watch his back a bit extra for a time.  or he could just hide I guess which would also serve as a self imposed "jail" time.

 

But yeah it being a PvP game, or a game with lots of PvP w/e, that is generally the best course of action to settle matters with PvP.

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Laws are going to be org specific so the goto "punishment" is going to be exile and marking them as a hostile "persona non grata" until they pay a fine or make ammends in some other way.

 

How this works, I do not know, at first it its going to have to be a manual thing managed by org leaders but making a script that hands out 24 hour bans for firing weapons inside a city sounds like a plausible idea.

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But how will that work? Will they just be teleported outside the bounds or what? Do you have to somehow move or "arrest" them first so you can move them?

 

Will they just be banned from specific services you can specify but could physically enter the area? Would it be customizable? What happens if they try to fly in such an area?

 

Interesting questions.

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People would have to acquire a gun, or weapon of some sorts before being able to kill people, would they not?

I'm sure like everything else in this game,  things will take time to make and resources will first have to be mined.

 

I really doubt the crime rate will be absolutely crazy in the game at all,  everything you do will take time to create, and i highly doubt someone wants to be marked as a killer, and be constantly killed and lose all their things.  As was stated in an interview,  you lose everything ON you, when you die. 

 

I personally wouldn't want to be constantly hunted down and killed, that's for sure.   I'll be one of the good guys, in my hidey hole. 

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