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Binding Contracts


caravaggio2000

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Looking around at many people's ideas on here , I think one thing we need is binding contracts.

 

Hire a bounty hunter to take out that pesky pirate? You need a contract.

Hiring a miner to get that awesome ore? Contract.

Negotiating a treaty between two warring factions? Contract.

 

The contracts could have automatic rewards/consequences like pay, rewards, penalties for breaking the contract, etc. They need to be flexible though so the players can make them to suit whatever needs arise.

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who would enforce them?

What I'm saying is there would be automatic outcomes.

 

You hire a bounty hunter and give him a contract to kill Petey the Pirate. When the Pirate is killed by the bounty hunter the funds are automatically deposited in his account as per the agreed upon contract.

 

You make a treaty with the Petey Alliance that you won't attack each others territories. You include penalties in the contract if broken. If Petey decides to attack you anyway, that is fine, but he suffers whatever penalties he agreed to in the contract.

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in case of contracts with rewards that will be possible, but not in contracts with penalties, because who says he doesntjust trade everythign away before breaking it?

You can't have them set the penalty aside when the contract is formed because thats the same as losing it, you can't automatically deduct his earnings because that would potentially account crippling.

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While I can appreciate the intent behind this suggestion, I don't think it is something that needs to be implemented in-game. For one thing, how is it implemented? For your bounty hunter example, that idea is very open to abuse. Let's say you post on in-game "bounty" on someone. A friend of his then kills him and gets the money, splitting it with him and likely losing nothing in the process. I see this in GTA V all the time. There isn't an easy solution to get around this sort of abuse, unfortunately.

 

For your alliance example - how exactly would you implement it to where the contract is broken? Is it broken only by one group attacking the other alliance member? I could easily get around that by simply not defending fellow alliance members during an attack by an outside party. Or even worse, I could hire mercenaries to do the attack for me. Further, there are lots of ways to skirt around attacks, such as providing intelligence on alliance members to outside parties, stealing from alliance assets...  and these are just unsophisticated methods.. I could come up with a dozen more that would easily get around any sort of in-game contract.

 

Honestly, the best method for making people not want to break contracts is reputation. The problem with most online video games is people are often using a name besides their own for their character and if that character gets a bad rep, they simply recreate. This is where a subscription model comes in handy, especially one where characters are either limited or very valuable so deleting / remaking characters is uncommon. If the devs wanted to take it a step further, a reputation system that works across the entire account and not just per character could help... but that also opens up a whole can of worms of abuse, false reports, etc.

 

In my years of online gaming, I've found the best method for avoiding contract breakers is to be very wary of who you trust... and for those you do trust, make it more valuable for them to stick with you than betray you. Of course, you can't avoid it 100%... but in 16 years I've had very few friends turn on me.

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