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:
Factions should be able to see players as:
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.
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?
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.
- As a mercenary/bounty hunter
- Pirate or criminal
- Businessman
- Explorer
- Miner/prospector
- PvP hunter, with a kill/death ratio or something.
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.