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Inspecting Peoples' Inventory


Anaximander

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Cargo scanners could have a limited range, so you'd need to place them properly around the perimeter without leaving any "hole". Then, they may be expensive in terms of energy consumption, so you'd create less, on a few entrances, and the perimeter would be closed by a wall (you'd need to cover the roof of your base too, for a perfect, closed system). With a good system in place like this, you shouldn't be able to hide anything, because is what happens IRL (you can hide stuff, but with a good system in place, you can't. In an airport they would even check inside your body for drugs, if they think there's need to).

 

So this would require building skills, to create, and ofc would influence the design of the city (you don't just build crazy stuff with no funcionality, but only because they're cool). 

 

Another thing that could be added, is that with a fast enough ship, you could be able to avoid being scanned. in this case, with some LUA scripting, should be possible to set an alarm, if you enter inside without being scanned. Then what? The automated defenses start shooting. So, you may find a blind spot, to avoid the bullets (and even here, this would mean that designing a good defensive system isn't just placing turrets randomly) or in alternative, you just know you have a limited time. Since this is an MMO, your ship doesn't necessarily get destroyed that fast, so you could drop a container for an accomplice, and leaev before getting destroyed (more multiplayer activities). A simple game design choice, could benefit different parts of the gameplay. And all I said isn't hard to add to the game.

I like the ideas here.

 

What would you think about also making cargo scanners limited in terms of penetration. So a certain thickness of certain heavy materials cannot be scanned through, but they make your vehicle slow and cumbersome. The only thing that can then detect what's behind the curtain is a manual check by a player.

 

Could you just bypass all guns in this case? Well it depends. Maybe defender turrets are set up to fire on all players without a friend tag. So you'd need to already be friendly to make this kind of smuggling operation work.

 

Just another thought/option.

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Anyway, for a system like this to work, scanning needs to be relatively easy and affordable, avoid being scanned, needs to be hard. If there's always a way to hide some stuff, or if to scan it properly requires a ridicolous effort (like scanning manually), a defensive system around a city would never work. it would not be reliable enough to be worth it.

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Anyway, for a system like this to work, scanning needs to be relatively easy and affordable, avoid being scanned, needs to be hard. If there's always a way to hide some stuff, or if to scan it properly requires a ridicolous effort (like scanning manually), a defensive system around a city would never work. it would not be reliable enough to be worth it.

You missed the point of me explaing that it's a consensual process. You type /trade to a person, if they accept, you can see what's inside their inventory. If they deny, you push them off the gate (via lethal force if necessary, since it's your city and your guys are allowed to have guns). As I mentioned, you city, your kingdom.

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You missed the point of me explaing that it's a consensual process. You type /trade to a person, if they accept, you can see what's inside their inventory. If they deny, you push them off the gate (via lethal force if necessary, since it's your city and your guys are allowed to have guns). As I mentioned, you city, your kingdom.

 

It's not a problematic feature, but noone would spend their day at the city entrance, checking every single inventory of the people who wants to enter. So, just that, wouldn't work imho.

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It's not a problematic feature, but noone would spend their day at the city entrance, checking every single inventory of the people who wants to enter. So, just that, wouldn't work imho.

Well, someone will have to guard a city entrance. Either that, or a full body scanner before a double set of doors open. Then you have guards simply intervening to remove people who conceal carry. Nobody wants to play the guard duty I guess, but that's where organisations come in. If they add a salary system, that would be double the power to the whole thing. Paid to do almost nothing? Why not. Would it be better to do the same daily quests in WoW and get bored, or having the prospect of shooting possible outlaws? O.o  If your city is a trading center and arkification is not a common-place thing (or possibly developer fixxed points for dedicated builders), then you are bound to have muggings in your city, if a guy goes in to buy and you let some a-hole go in with a gun, take a few good shots with a silenced pistol and rob the guy's money that he would have used in your city's trading center.

 

 

The prospect is there and carebear police is present in any game good sir. It just so happens to be justified in such a scenario.

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Anyway, for a system like this to work, scanning needs to be relatively easy and affordable, avoid being scanned, needs to be hard. If there's always a way to hide some stuff, or if to scan it properly requires a ridicolous effort (like scanning manually), a defensive system around a city would never work. it would not be reliable enough to be worth it.

Yes I understand that which is why I was thinking that the system of protecting yourself from scans should be very difficult. If the mass and size of material required to shield a 1 sq m item from a cargo scanner doubles the size and mass of a 1-5 man vehicle, and you need to keep yourself small to remain hidden from view, and moving fast to limit exposure in order to keep your operation secret and status with the owning faction friendly, then it will be very difficult to run this kind of operation en masse.

 

Then there may also be a way to have sensors report that a friendly vehicle was spotted at a certain location. If this happens regularly then someone may get suspicious and go to investigate.

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Yes I understand that which is why I was thinking that the system of protecting yourself from scans should be very difficult. If the mass and size of material required to shield a 1 sq m item from a cargo scanner doubles the size and mass of a 1-5 man vehicle, and you need to keep yourself small to remain hidden from view, and moving fast to limit exposure in order to keep your operation secret and status with the owning faction friendly, then it will be very difficult to run this kind of operation en masse.

 

Then there may also be a way to have sensors report that a friendly vehicle was spotted at a certain location. If this happens regularly then someone may get suspicious and go to investigate.

I see your point. I can see adjacent territories linking their radar nodes to act as a network for protection. I mean, space is the final fronteir, but atmosphere is definitely not a wall. People can come and go as they please, especially if the devs add a "stealth" mechanism.

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Well, someone will have to guard a city entrance. Either that, or a full body scanner before a double set of doors open. Then you have guards simply intervening to remove people who conceal carry. Nobody wants to play the guard duty I guess, but that's where organisations come in. If they add a salary system, that would be double the power to the whole thing. Paid to do almost nothing? Why not. Would it be better to do the same daily quests in WoW and get bored, or having the prospect of shooting possible outlaws? O.o  If your city is a trading center and arkification is not a common-place thing (or possibly developer fixxed points for dedicated builders), then you are bound to have muggings in your city, if a guy goes in to buy and you let some a-hole go in with a gun, take a few good shots with a silenced pistol and rob the guy's money that he would have used in your city's trading center.

 

 

The prospect is there and carebear police is present in any game good sir. It just so happens to be justified in such a scenario.

 

Do you really think that someone will waste his free time, working as a guard in a game? For how much time? 4-6-8 hours a day? What about the rest of the day, do you close the city? What you're saying is never gonna happen.

 

Add to this, that a claimed territory may be pvp free, but you're not able to destroy blocks, market units neither, and players at this point would just be careful about people around them, shopping in groups or find another kinda safe and cheap way. Another option, if the "pvp free" is going to be a problem, is that people will just let trusted people with a specific tag to enter a closed market area. Players always do what's more convenient, safe and profitable, noone is going to pay that many people to waste their day on the city entrance. Actually you'd not even find enough people willing to work as a guard.

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I see your point. I can see adjacent territories linking their radar nodes to act as a network for protection. I mean, space is the final fronteir, but atmosphere is definitely not a wall. People can come and go as they please, especially if the devs add a "stealth" mechanism.

 

Stealth mechanism is confirmed

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Do you really think that someone will waste his free time, working as a guard in a game? For how much time? 4-6-8 hours a day? What about the rest of the day, do you close the city? What you're saying is never gonna happen.

 

Add to this, that a claimed territory may be pvp free, but you're not able to destroy blocks, market units neither, and players at this point would just be careful about people around them, shopping in groups or find another kinda safe and cheap way. Another option, if the "pvp free" is going to be a problem, is that people will just let trusted people with a specific tag to enter a closed market area. Players always do what's more convenient, safe and profitable, noone is going to pay that many people to waste their day on the city entrance. Actually you'd not even find enough people willing to work as a guard.

Trading hours guard duty only. On a rotation, for a good pay. It's the exact same as putting an order for materials in EVE. You are essentially making a quest for other players. Same could go for a jobs system. Perhaps the employee of the month could get a PLEX for such a job (if he let's say catches an assasin sneaking a gun into the city. 

 

 

And with the same logic, why would a guy, in an organisation, go and mine asteroids. It's a boring thing to do in my perspective, but being a team player and playing guard while I have a second sreen open, watching a movie, or having a chat with the other guys in the guard post over teamspeak, is a fun thing to do.

 

 

Same goes for guys working LUA scripts. I am a programmer and I find such a thing tedious. I would not want to do my job in a game. But there are some guys who want to build a sixteen legged spider mecha. It's all about what kind of player you are.

 

 

And at last, with your point of view, why would people wanna play merchants? Nobody wants to play a pack mule, but still, people in such games seek that, because it's something unique and rare. It's not like WoW, where there are a bajillion rogues. This is why Star Wars Galaxies was a good game (before NGE update that ruined it), because you could be a literal comedian, dancing around in a game and earning experience by giving buffs to other players, while throwing silly jokes around on the chat.

 

 

As I said, the prospect is there. If it's not your slice of beef, then sure, you won't be a guard-duty kind of player. But I as a person, always liked playing carebear police, even in my WoW pvp server, I used to fly around and picking messages on LocalDefense chat by people being attacked by the enemy faction. And I liked that, it even became sort of a profession in the game to bodyguard PvE players who just couldn't figure out PvP to pay gold for me to act as a bodyguard. 

 

 

And that good sir, is emergent gameplay. Players build cities, cities become rich, rich attracts raiders, raiders need to deterred. Usually by the grace of our Lord and Savior, the 12-gage Shotgun.

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I did for a while miltary guard duty in RL.

Nothing about that is fun in any way, and i had a comparatively interesting post.

 

Im pretty sure that nobody is voluntaringly to do guard duty for any amount of time.

 

A system where you can largely automate it and a player only has to intervene when something occurs that the automation cant handle.

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I did for a while miltary guard duty in RL.

Nothing about that is fun in any way, and i had a comparatively interesting post.

 

Im pretty sure that nobody is voluntaringly to do guard duty for any amount of time.

 

A system where you can largely automate it and a player only has to intervene when something occurs that the automation cant handle.

I suggested a payment system, and it won't be for 12 hours, but more like 1 or 2. And let's face it, people are conditioned by WoW and other MMOs on Daily Quests. So, you make guard duty a daily quest :P Technically, only one guy on the guard post will be there voluntarily and that would be the C,O.

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mmo daily quests usually dont consist out of simply standing there looking menacingly, though :P

Getting paid to do nothing, ain't that the dream ?(for many people I suppose, I wouldn't know tbh :/ )

 

Plus, Daily Quests are usually something boring. Gather 40 lillies. Kill 50 rats. Go mine 30 ores of X material. But, come on, standing 2 hours of guard duty, 1 day a week and getting paid some, is not the worst of Daily Quests. That would be that frigging quest in The Burning Crusade expansion in WoW, where you went around in nethestorm, gathering dragon eggs in the mines to grind reputation. Those mines were a death trap. I would know, I played a ret paladin and kept dunking silly rogues trying to stop me from getting the eggs.

 

 

So yeah, as far as a job system, it can work. I mean, in planetside, I usually got the bomber crew I run with and we make fun of people's names as we keep farming them. Can you imagine standing on guard duty, with 5 other guys in a city's entrance and poking fun at names people come up with. "Megadeath" , "Aligarathor" and so on :P You know you could do this :P

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Trading hours guard duty only. On a rotation, for a good pay. It's the exact same as putting an order for materials in EVE. You are essentially making a quest for other players. Same could go for a jobs system. Perhaps the employee of the month could get a PLEX for such a job (if he let's say catches an assasin sneaking a gun into the city. 

 

 

And with the same logic, why would a guy, in an organisation, go and mine asteroids. It's a boring thing to do in my perspective, but being a team player and playing guard while I have a second sreen open, watching a movie, or having a chat with the other guys in the guard post over teamspeak, is a fun thing to do.

 

 

Same goes for guys working LUA scripts. I am a programmer and I find such a thing tedious. I would not want to do my job in a game. But there are some guys who want to build a sixteen legged spider mecha. It's all about what kind of player you are.

 

 

And at last, with your point of view, why would people wanna play merchants? Nobody wants to play a pack mule, but still, people in such games seek that, because it's something unique and rare. It's not like WoW, where there are a bajillion rogues. This is why Star Wars Galaxies was a good game (before NGE update that ruined it), because you could be a literal comedian, dancing around in a game and earning experience by giving buffs to other players, while throwing silly jokes around on the chat.

 

 

As I said, the prospect is there. If it's not your slice of beef, then sure, you won't be a guard-duty kind of player. But I as a person, always liked playing carebear police, even in my WoW pvp server, I used to fly around and picking messages on LocalDefense chat by people being attacked by the enemy faction. And I liked that, it even became sort of a profession in the game to bodyguard PvE players who just couldn't figure out PvP to pay gold for me to act as a bodyguard. 

 

 

And that good sir, is emergent gameplay. Players build cities, cities become rich, rich attracts raiders, raiders need to deterred. Usually by the grace of our Lord and Savior, the 12-gage Shotgun.

 

I can't see that ever working. Mining, trading, scripting, and all the stuff you mentioned, requires some sort of interaction with the game. While you play as a guard, you do nothing most of the time. I'm not saying that some kind of police would never work, it may actually, they would walk around in the city, talk to people, maybe patrol with a ship between planets, etc.... I just don't believe in guards sticking at the entrance of you city. To make people want to do that, the amount you pay them should be higher than any other gain they could make in other activities. And if they'll be there 1-2 hours, this means that your city will be closed for the other 22 hours, or that you'll need 5-6 different people to at least run it for half the day. It would be extremely expensive, compared to the amount of money you're likely going to make from it. And ofc, this would require you to trust all those people, that could easily trick you. 

 

Since this is so hard to have, devs are probably going to add another way, to make tcu safe for trading or whatever (i.e. scanner elements). When this will happen, playing guards will not have a reason to exist. 

 

Still, patrolling, and playing as a policeman, is something that could easily exist, on a bigger scale maybe

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I can't see that ever working. Mining, trading, scripting, and all the stuff you mentioned, requires some sort of interaction with the game. While you play as a guard, you do nothing most of the time. I'm not saying that some kind of police would never work, it may actually, they would walk around in the city, talk to people, maybe patrol with a ship between planets, etc.... I just don't believe in guards sticking at the entrance of you city. To make people want to do that, the amount you pay them should be higher than any other gain they could make in other activities. And if they'll be there 1-2 hours, this means that your city will be closed for the other 22 hours, or that you'll need 5-6 different people to at least run it for half the day. It would be extremely expensive, compared to the amount of money you're likely going to make from it. And ofc, this would require you to trust all those people, that could easily trick you. 

 

Since this is so hard to have, devs are probably going to add another way, to make tcu safe for trading or whatever (i.e. scanner elements). When this will happen, playing guards will not have a reason to exist. 

 

Still, patrolling, and playing as a policeman, is something that could easily exist, on a bigger scale maybe

Ofc the pay would be high to deter bribes. And I mentioned a PLEX reward for dedicated guards for, let's say, two weeks in a row. I mean, say what you will, them PLEX are worth a month of free gameplay. And given a city with stacks of money in the bank, a PLEX wouldn't be such a problem. It's all about insentive good sir. Ain't nobody doing anything for free after all.

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Ofc the pay would be high to deter bribes. And I mentioned a PLEX reward for dedicated guards for, let's say, two weeks in a row. I mean, say what you will, them PLEX are worth a month of free gameplay. And given a city with stacks of money in the bank, a PLEX wouldn't be such a problem. It's all about insentive good sir. Ain't nobody doing anything for free after all.

 

Yes, and I'm saying that paying multiple people with plexes every 2 weeks, to just guard 1 entrance, would probably mean bankruptcy for your city :D

I'm just realistic.

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Yes, and I'm saying that paying multiple people with plexes every 2 weeks, to just guard 1 entrance, would probably mean bankruptcy for your city :D

I'm just realistic.

Well, I merely made a suggestion. Make it an Employees of the Month situation, for the top 3 guys who put the most hours in Guard Duty. That would be fair and would breed healthy (hopefully) competition.

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