Player/Faction Reputations

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    So going forward schine has stated players will have a few different options for roleplaying and mission running, and my suggestion here is to give the game a way to track player activities more in depth, by giving them a reputation. There are three levels that need to be tracked, factions opinions of players, factions opinions of factions, and individual players public reputations.

    Factions should be able to think of other factions as:
    • Allies in potential conflicts
    • Enemies or allies in an ongoing conflict
    • Long term rivals
    • Pirate/criminal elements
    • Reliable trade partners or poor trade partners
    • Others?
    These need to be considered separately per axis of relationship and per faction, so an ally in a current conflict could still be a poor trade partner, or an enemy in a present conflict doesnt have to become a long term rival and could still be an excellent trade partner after the war. Two factions could trade frequently, while one considers the other an excellent trade partner the other could worry that the first is a frequent criminal element and mediocre trade partner.

    Factions should be able to see players as:
    • Mercenaries (will request combat missions)
    • Loyal to that faction (esp. If a member)
    • Loyal to an ally/enemy faction
    • Criminal/pirate (May attempt to kill player if in their territory or refuse to do business with them until theyve paid a fine to cover previous crimes.)
    • Scout/spy (will ask player to gather scan data or hack into enemy stations/ships.)
    • Businessman (will offer better trade deals for the player and may request certain goods)
    • Miner (will offer the player contracts to mine in their territory for a fee without risk of losing reputation with them)
    • Regular mission runner. If the faction sees you as having done a lot of work for them in the past, they wont just offer better missions when you ask, but contact you directly.
    Players get semi-permanent public reputations for these things too, like
    • As a mercenary/bounty hunter
    • Pirate or criminal
    • Businessman
    • Explorer
    • Miner/prospector
    • PvP hunter, with a kill/death ratio or something.
    These reputations can be used by factions that arent familiar with the player personally and displayed for other players to see.

    Players can get missions by speaking to representatives of a faction or traders guild shop keepers, stuff like that. For completing missions they get reputation gains, credits, item and ship rewards, and faction points to spend on their own faction. Better reputations with a faction and/or in doing a certain job could give players access to better paying contracts. There can be pirate and criminal subfactions that players can deal with to get things like smuggling or theft missions, which could harm their reputation with that faction and result in them pursuing the player. Factions could hire mercenaries or send their own fleets after players that have commited criminal acts, or even hire other players. These could be anywhere from extorting credits from the "criminal" player, acquiring or destroying property of theirs of at least a certain value to killing them or waging war on their faction.


    The rest of this concerns almost exclusively pvp, it should all be configurable by server admins and isnt necessary as part of this reputation tracking for most purposes, but i felt it could become a reasonable tie in for tracking griefing and pvp in general.

    This also opens up the possibility of giving other players contracts or missions and enforcing justice on designated illegal pvp actions like stealing property or attacking players without a declaration of war, thus offering a tangible reward to bounty hunters and players to track whose been blowing up their outpost stations. If i were to attack another player i accumulate points they could put towards getting revenge, effectively justifying their own aggressions towards me up to a certain point, hiring npc mercenaries to fight in a war against me, or adding to a bounty on my head. Each point could be worth a set credit amount, making them fungible directly for these purposes, and the player could also put their own credits towards the bounty.

    Other players could sign a contract to pursue that bounty, and either do x amount of property damage or kill the player, which doubles their pay. This of course requires hostile actions on the target players part in the first place, where that player would have had to go out of their way to hurt somebody. So it gives an element of controlling griefers without admins direct intervention, where if a griefer were to destroy or steal someones property, even if the victim was offline at the time, the server records it and gives them the option to pursue that griefer in various ways or automatically adds to the griefers bounty. Servers could get options to mark certain activities as criminal and define a bounty/multiplier, and players that have committed crimes could alternatively pay their bounty in credits, which would return the cash to players that had been injured.

    So that was a bit of a mess, but thats the gist of it.
     

    Sachys

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    This would likely lead to an end of espionage / spying.
    This would likely be exploited /abused to hell.
    This would then lead to people just logging in with more alts than previously to game the system.

    An in game bounty system would be good - though would require some reasonable restraints to not suffer the issues I already mentioned.
     

    Kraengis

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    So going forward schine has stated players will have a few different options for roleplaying and mission running, and my suggestion here is to give the game a way to track player activities more in depth, by giving them a reputation. There are three levels that need to be tracked, factions opinions of players, factions opinions of factions, and individual players public reputations.

    Factions should be able to think of other factions as:
    • Allies in potential conflicts
    • Enemies or allies in an ongoing conflict
    • Long term rivals
    • Pirate/criminal elements
    • Reliable trade partners or poor trade partners
    • Others?
    These need to be considered separately per axis of relationship and per faction, so an ally in a current conflict could still be a poor trade partner, or an enemy in a present conflict doesnt have to become a long term rival and could still be an excellent trade partner after the war. Two factions could trade frequently, while one considers the other an excellent trade partner the other could worry that the first is a frequent criminal element and mediocre trade partner.

    Factions should be able to see players as:
    • Mercenaries (will request combat missions)
    • Loyal to that faction (esp. If a member)
    • Loyal to an ally/enemy faction
    • Criminal/pirate (May attempt to kill player if in their territory or refuse to do business with them until theyve paid a fine to cover previous crimes.)
    • Scout/spy (will ask player to gather scan data or hack into enemy stations/ships.)
    • Businessman (will offer better trade deals for the player and may request certain goods)
    • Miner (will offer the player contracts to mine in their territory for a fee without risk of losing reputation with them)
    • Regular mission runner. If the faction sees you as having done a lot of work for them in the past, they wont just offer better missions when you ask, but contact you directly.
    Players get semi-permanent public reputations for these things too, like
    • As a mercenary/bounty hunter
    • Pirate or criminal
    • Businessman
    • Explorer
    • Miner/prospector
    • PvP hunter, with a kill/death ratio or something.
    These reputations can be used by factions that arent familiar with the player personally and displayed for other players to see.

    Players can get missions by speaking to representatives of a faction or traders guild shop keepers, stuff like that. For completing missions they get reputation gains, credits, item and ship rewards, and faction points to spend on their own faction. Better reputations with a faction and/or in doing a certain job could give players access to better paying contracts. There can be pirate and criminal subfactions that players can deal with to get things like smuggling or theft missions, which could harm their reputation with that faction and result in them pursuing the player. Factions could hire mercenaries or send their own fleets after players that have commited criminal acts, or even hire other players. These could be anywhere from extorting credits from the "criminal" player, acquiring or destroying property of theirs of at least a certain value to killing them or waging war on their faction.


    The rest of this concerns almost exclusively pvp, it should all be configurable by server admins and isnt necessary as part of this reputation tracking for most purposes, but i felt it could become a reasonable tie in for tracking griefing and pvp in general.

    This also opens up the possibility of giving other players contracts or missions and enforcing justice on designated illegal pvp actions like stealing property or attacking players without a declaration of war, thus offering a tangible reward to bounty hunters and players to track whose been blowing up their outpost stations. If i were to attack another player i accumulate points they could put towards getting revenge, effectively justifying their own aggressions towards me up to a certain point, hiring npc mercenaries to fight in a war against me, or adding to a bounty on my head. Each point could be worth a set credit amount, making them fungible directly for these purposes, and the player could also put their own credits towards the bounty.

    Other players could sign a contract to pursue that bounty, and either do x amount of property damage or kill the player, which doubles their pay. This of course requires hostile actions on the target players part in the first place, where that player would have had to go out of their way to hurt somebody. So it gives an element of controlling griefers without admins direct intervention, where if a griefer were to destroy or steal someones property, even if the victim was offline at the time, the server records it and gives them the option to pursue that griefer in various ways or automatically adds to the griefers bounty. Servers could get options to mark certain activities as criminal and define a bounty/multiplier, and players that have committed crimes could alternatively pay their bounty in credits, which would return the cash to players that had been injured.

    So that was a bit of a mess, but thats the gist of it.
    It could work well if Starmade was an offline/pve only game.

    As Sachys said it would most probably be exploited until there is a need to direct moderation by server's admins or something. Players to players interactions shouldn't be bound to some fixed rules since there will always be an exploit laying around unoticed until it's too late. Even a ingame bounty system would need to be controlled by an actual human to some extend, or else if it were to be just a money thing, bigs factions could just set up bounties left and right and it would be hell, especially for newer players.

    From my POV there should be at best basic infrastructures for players to use, like the council but on an ingame server and maybe something like you said but it will be setup by each player for personnal use and will stay private (or only shared in faction), like a reminder note (ex : "that guy is bad news, or need to be put under surveillance, I'll set a marker under his name in my database")
     
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    Abuses and exploits is going to be a huge problem with everything here, yeah, i kinda figured each mode of abuse would have to be considered individually during implementation. Alt character abuse isnt something id thought of at all, frankly ive never used alts and would just as soon require login credentials and limit players to one, but i guess id make a jackass admin then huh...

    So rules like faction members, allies, and alt characters tied to the same login credentials and IP addresses cant collect on any bounties, or place bounties on each other etc would need to be in place.
     
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    Sachys

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    Absolutely useless to track anybody these days.

    A system like you're suggesting would likely require third party software - more likely a DRM system.

    Thats an entire can of worms you dont really want to open.

    Of course, limiting logins from accounts could be a good thing (not sure if theres already any implementaion for that in the game), but that in turn could prevent admins from being able to seperate player and administration / mod accounts thus creating more potentiality for badmins - something the game has suffered from terribly at times.

    Edit: Now... if the game expanded its internal communications a little more allowing for mode detailed messages / logs etc in game, then some of what you suggest could be implemented - again abuse could be an issue (hell, some players are already well known for spamming mails scores of times per day when at war just to troll). I doubt many people would complain about better in game communication options though.
    Perhaps a "central message board" on each server even? It would probably require an amount of admin activity to keep it right, or some form of inbuilt filtering, but theres potential there for a feature people might want that doesnt go too way out.

    I wonder if its possible for schine to code in game mails to send to a display screen? I believe something similar is possible with them already (display to display).
     
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    Yeah i definitely wouldnt put up with third party drm software either. The pvp portion i didnt expect to fly tbh, it was more a what i would hope could be done to sanitize the griefing and piracy debate, by making the game capable of tracking and managing incidents for players to decide what to do about it.

    What about the pve contracts portion? What are your thoughts on that? I know i spend most of my time interacting with the game environment directly rather than pvp anyway so i dont have a great outsider perspective there.
     

    OfficialCoding

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    Yeah we really need this. It would add a lot of depth to the faction system