Ram Kills continue. Players will shoot another player to about 4%, them ram them until it causes a collision kill. Basically a way of cheating and getting around the faction standing hit.

Easy fix by making ship-to-ship collisions not lower your health to less than 2%.

Keep ship-to-roid/station collisions the same.

:D

Ram kills are rather difficult to execute and very risky. It's not hard to hire an escort or a gunner to cover you, making it nearly impossible for someone to pull this off without getting killed. Even if they do kill you, your escort can guard or retrieve the cargo.

Your "solution" wouldn't help anyways since this almost always happens near stations and someone could just bash your moth into the station repeatedly and do the same thing. The "solution" to that would be to make it impossible to die from a collision which is even more stupid.

These are surprisingly easy to execute against a laden XC in open space. Experimenting to find an energy rig that consistently drops the target to 1-2% hull in a set number of shots is key, or you'll be out there playing mothball for 5-10 minutes.

Ram kills are awesome.

If you're dumb enough to fly an XC loaded with cargo with no fighter escort in places where someone is trying to kill you, you've probably got it coming...

If you're dumb enough to fly an XC loaded with cargo with no fighter escort in places [like Dau, Nyrius, Arta C, Itan, and Sol II] where someone is trying to kill you, you've probably got it coming...

Couldn't agree more.

The game mechanic is there to prevent someone from taking their near-dead ship and goin' all kamikaze on the person whose standing they wish to tank. The general populace might whine a little over getting ram-killed a few times, but imagine how much cheese we'd need for all the whine if in 2 suicide attacks, an unscrupulous character tanked your Nation POS standing to KOS?

This suggestion would make it so that if I were doing PVP and nearly dead and accidentally crashed into the enemy ship, I would not die. That would be retarded. Leave it how it is.

Ram-killers are no worse than a people who just sit there sucking on a pirate's blaster thinking "hehe I'll let him kill me and tank his faction". Both of those are cases of people twisting the game mechanics. If they beat you at your own game, either get better or go home.

I really, really miss doing that to people - bringing it back would be a-ok by me.

Well, I guess what you say does make a little sense... just a little...

How about including collision kills in the faction standing algo? Ok to ram-kill, but still holds the repercussions of normal kills... That would work.

No it wouldn't. Read what Conflict Diamond wrote. Basically, what would happen then is instead of killing you, I could kill myself by crashing into you, and then you would get the penalty.

Before you suggest having it only penalize a person for a ram-kill if they are moving fast, so that a suicide attack against a stationary moth would fail, consider this: I could simply wait until you are moving and then get in your way and stop so that you crash into me instead of me crashing into you. And that would work either way - I could damage you and then get you to crash into me so that you die and I don't get penalized, or (this is the easier option) I could damage myself until nearly dead, then get in your way so that you kill me and give you the faction penalty.

The way it is now is the least exploitable way to do it without removing the possibility of death via ship-to-ship collision. And if you removed that, you might as well just remove all death, because some trader might die somehow.

I think what Lisa means is [FR] most of the time is if you are in a NFZ getting ready to dock, they ram kill you but you take the faction hit not them and most of the time the strike force goes after you NOT them, so I say +1 to Lisa

I still think the best way to solve it is to not allow deaths due to collisions with other ships... stations yes...
As far as someone ramming me into a station... good luck with that...

Imagine someone ramming you over and over, only to have both ships end up at 2%... Who cares... we both go repair... No need to even talk about faction standing...

ret369, you are mistaken. Neither party takes an actual faction hit during a ram-kill. What you are describing sounds like a known bug - when a person dies (whether by ram, blaster, rocket, whatever), if his explosion hits another ship in the NFZ and the person is homed in the station, he gets flagged as temporary KOS when he undocks until he either leaves the sector or dies without harming anybody with his explosion. That is completely unrelated to this thread.

"Imagine someone ramming you over and over, only to have both ships end up at 2%... Who cares"

I do. I care. You are only considering ram-kills in the context of evading a faction penalty. You are not considering their relevance to pure unmonitored PVP. Ramming the other ship is a valid, if difficult, tactic in PVP, particularly if you are out of ammo. It is also a hazard - in my case, I like to fight up close, much closer than most people are comfortable fighting. But if I am severely damaged, that becomes very dangerous because I have a real risk of bumping into them or getting my wings tangled in theirs. I have lost fights due to that. It is fun.

What you are asking is to take this fun thing and destroy it because it can potentially be used in a way you don't like. Like banning baseball bats because somebody could use one to crack your head open, despite their primary use being as a tool in a game enjoyed by millions (billions?) of people.

"As far as someone ramming me into a station... good luck with that.."

been there, done that, found a better way, concatapult them into the station. That's what I used to do against afk miners.

*ram killing exploit* /me laugh