Bug Homebase of faction vs personal protection permission

[StormWing0]

Not sure if this is a bug or not but some people have been mentioning things about this and how some people are shutting down factions by setting the base to personal. Not sure what is going on but it is worth looking into since being able to lockout a whole faction from their base shouldn't happen. Could be they set the ability to set permissions too low or there might be some fixing in order for this.

 

[Jaaskinal]

Well yes, to lock out a homebase you need to have sufficient permissions to put down a faction permission module. After you do so though, you have free reign to own the station outright. If you trust someone to build a small section onto your homebase, they can completely lock you out.

 

[Morphius42]

Here at TBAA a 17 man faction has come across and am the first to report that this issue has shut down our faction ,on accident our new defense Minister(found the worst faction breach in the history of starmade first day on the job) pushed the P in the faction block in turn giving him ownership of all of Home base and everything attached to it and I mean everything so far we have gained 1/3 of our base back and 1/3 of our fleet and mining ships only with the help of our new Defense Minister thank god it was him and some help from server admin by respawn saved ships other than that we are struggling to hold on to the faction which by the way is a multi Billion dollar industry.And by the way putting a faction permissions block beside the core doesn't work on Homebase since you can get into faction block though the inity structure tab.Goes for ships too.

 

[AndyP]

thats a mean member you have in your factions there,
however you are not lost.

Get another station in a different sector, and make it your faction home.
This way the player station looses the homebase protection status.
If he is still in the faction, make sure you "uncheck" the flag "kick on friendly fire" for your current rank.
Now just shoot down the faction module.
With knowing the location of it, you should be able to take it down without too much collateral damage.
Or use the "torch" to burn your way into the station.
Once the faction module is removed, you can place a new one, and take the station back.

To prevent this in the future, make sure the homebase has restricted build-permissions.
Usually the best way to handle this, is by creating a "base engineer" rank (use the one below founder for this), and setting all infrastructure parts of your faction to this rank.
This leaves 3 ranks free for other permissions, but the without being in the base engineer rank, you cannot alter any vital structure.

As altering/editing also includes:
- removing the faction module
- (as a result or on purpose) loosing homebase status
- dismantle the homebase/any station
- creating a new faction after unfactioning the base and totally taking it over (out of your control)

You were lucky the player most likely did not know enough about game mechanics,
the damage to the faction could have been a lot higher.

So I see no problem here, the member was in the position to totally dismantle and destruct the faction home, as you did not set up permissions, how is it an exploit if there is a way to restrict that and you do not use it?

By the way:
The overwriting of inherited/docked entities is stopped, when the dock has a permission module of any type. (It should work from ship side too, but did not test that yet.)

- Andy

 

[Morphius42]

thats a mean member you have in your factions there,
however you are not lost.

Get another station in a different sector, and make it your faction home.
This way the player station looses the homebase protection status.
If he is still in the faction, make sure you "uncheck" the flag "kick on friendly fire" for your current rank.
Now just shoot down the faction module.
With knowing the location of it, you should be able to take it down without too much collateral damage.
Or use the "torch" to burn your way into the station.
Once the faction module is removed, you can place a new one, and take the station back.

To prevent this in the future, make sure the homebase has restricted build-permissions.
Usually the best way to handle this, is by creating a "base engineer" rank (use the one below founder for this), and setting all infrastructure parts of your faction to this rank.
This leaves 3 ranks free for other permissions, but the without being in the base engineer rank, you cannot alter any vital structure.

As altering/editing also includes:
- removing the faction module
- (as a result or on purpose) loosing homebase status
- dismantle the homebase/any station
- creating a new faction after unfactioning the base and totally taking it over (out of your control)

You were lucky the player most likely did not know enough about game mechanics,
the damage to the faction could have been a lot higher.

So I see no problem here, the member was in the position to totally dismantle and destruct the faction home, as you did not set up permissions, how is it an exploit if there is a way to restrict that and you do not use it?

By the way:
The overwriting of inherited/docked entities is stopped, when the dock has a permission module of any type. (It should work from ship side too, but did not test that yet.)

- Andy

So thanks for the info but of no use this issue needs to be settled though Founder privileges otherwise you risk enemy infiltration ,now that being said reminder of big factions based on member attendance ,now with out cheating I have brought over 100 peoples in this game and revived some veteran players ,point being love playing multiplayer and want a huge faction this was an accident not a bad guy in our faction it caused what I consider griefing and I do not play that way so it is a game killer to me if our faction is affected this way again I will disband faction for good and maybe if issue is fixed ,and if all the other games out there don't spark my interest ill come back and play and start recruiting people to buy your game and play in our faction again . Thanks for all the hard work!!!!!

 

[AndyP]

Nope, this cant be covered by founder privileges.

We did initiate the "personal" permission, to allow a player to join a faction without having to entrust everything to the faction leader/owner.
With adding a "bypass" to the personal permissions, players will stay "one-man-factions" without ever considering to join a big party.
Its a requirement to have an option for a personal retreat, where "you are the owner of" not the faction.

This way a wealthy player can actually join a faction without having a 'checkbox in the faction' make the faction rip off all stuff from that.
If you as faction owner never cared for the security settings and "everyone could do and edit everything" you had an open faction with equal trust for all members, if they now turn against you and rip off parts of the faction to their own, the initial trust given to them was too lightly, and you should have restricted the homebase or vital points before.

I see the point in the demand for having the faction override the personal permission, but until this release,
the faction owner had access to everything and "want to join my faction" meant like: do you want to entrust the last xx weeks of work to my faction?
This is not an option, and was one of the major critique points for our faction system, that the 5 ranks are good, but as its a inheritance tree, every higher level had access to all lower levels.

Example on the homebase layout:

You as owner, define the rank that can build on the homebase, and for example use the top 2 ranks for this. Founder and BaseBuilder, now set the homebase to this rank.
With the new faction-permission-modules, you can allow "any member of the faction" to use parts of the homebase, like storage, factory, or doors and have a fine controlled access to what exactly can be operated by what member.

For the player quarters and possibly even rank specific areas:
Create an empty room for them, enclosed by blocks, and place a rail with a faction permission module in the room.
Now your members can spawn a ship, add a raildocker + faction module to it, and dock to the quarter dock.
They can immediately set it to "personal" and "build" within the physical limits you defined for them.
However, they do not have to worry about other members stealing their stuff, and thus players can finally have their "private stash" with homebase protection.

If they leave the faction in a hurry or anything, you can undock their quarter and push it out for them for pick it up.
Same would work for a faction change, you can "hand them out their personal area" without any risk.

Yes this will alter some homebase designs,
but also open a whole new way for factions to interact.
You can even start a multi-faction home, by altering the design to use "public permission modules" for the player quarters and a server could create a faction diplomacy center with a outpost/section for each faction.

- Andy

 

[StormWing0]

I think having a override for the personal permission level after a certain amount of time or in the case of someone setting a homebase to personal might be needed. Maybe just prevent someone from setting the homebase of a faction to personal permission? Also you could make it so there could be several people having the same entity set to personal for them? This way someone could assign something to a group of people in a faction maybe. XD

 

[AndyP]

Permission by namelist maybe something for later,
however faction levels are meant for this type of "grouping" and limiting.
This would require a lot concept work.
Like: Would those groups be "above" or "below" faction level?
Both answers have their pros and cons, so we left that for a later finer grained rework.
For example being in multiple factions, or creating subfactions for permission sharing only.
However, nothing in that direction is a fixed plan yet, but for now the system does the job way better than before, and with "global factions" on our long term plan, this will need some alterations and additions anyway.

And about personal-homebase:
See guide above on how to revert that. (move homebase, remove FM, retake)

- Andy