Hmm. I think Nya13 and roguelazer both have a point in this thread: http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/11923 . How about a combination of the two?

All FF restrictions can be done away with. If you shoot and kill anyone, anywhere, you lose 1/10 of that player's FS with EVERY faction. If you shoot and kill anyone in any monitored sector, you lose 1/5 of that player's FS with the monitoring faction. However, Corvus treats ALL standings as negative for this purpose (even its own).

For example, I am at an Itani station and have +100 Itani, -100 Serco, and +50 Corvus. I am killed. My assailant will lose 20 Itani FS, and gain 10 Serco FS and 5 Corvus FS.

This would deal with pirates (their nation is ignored in favor of current nation standings) and newb-killing (you cannot pop too many newbs at -120 FS each), and somewhat enhance nation-defense (a great new way to gain FS will be to kill neg-FS people inside your nation's space).

Short, sweet, simple. This does not need to be a permanent fixture, but I would be happy to see it ASAP as some duct tape until the Devs' Faction Future arrives.

Also, although it would be more work, it might be nice if FS loss was doubled if the killed character's highest license level is =< 3.

ah yes an interesting idea indeed seems to me to be reasomable, except that it would kinda suck casue soon everyone would be KOS everywhere except corvus

Well, what about just the nations then? I was sort of hoping that there would then be more duels (no faction losses for those!), more side-picking (Serco v.s. Itani), and that this would also separate the traders/miners from the PvPers.

Think about it this way. The Red Cross is usually acceptable everywhere. So is Starbucks. Neither of these kill anyone and both have a strict pacifist policy. Killing people is generally frowned upon by everyone, except if those people were better off dead (read: enemies, murderers, pirates...). Nations also generally frown upon their military killing traders, even when those traders cross borders into enemy territory.

It would mean that the truly indiscriminant pirates would HAVE to ally themselves with Corvus because no one else would put up with them. Also, PvPers who simply fought each-other indiscriminately, but stayed away from traders, would end up as true neutrals 0 FS + Corvus.

I think then that this would only happen in monitored sectors.

Because, if there's no one else around to see it, who would know that you did anything?

I _so_ agree with Leber.
If someone plays nice in monitored space, but is a pirate when nobody is watching, that player should not loose any faction anywhere.

Also, another thing...
What if someone kills a convoymoth, but not all of them. The rest of the convoy live to tell the tale. Would that impact faction standing at all, even when the kill was in gray space?

grey space is dangerous? and it has a lot of pirates? since when? what miracle brought this change forth?

LOL terjekv! :) Seriously though, I was not intending this to necessarily be totally realistic. We also die and reappear at a station - can't I tell people then who killed me? More to the point, does this sound like a good TEMPORARY fix to the faction standing and friendly-fire "problem"? * In short, does this sound like something that would make the game better?

Demonen: I once proposed that everyone who witnesses a kill gets an evidence cargo widget. He can then choose to blackmail the killer with it, or hand it over to the 'law' so the killer gets a faction hit.
found it: http://vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/10089?page=2

Noid, I loved that idea and I still do. =)

"Monitored sectors" are however a different story, I like to think of them as sectors that have beacons (or somesuch thingy) that actually check actions in the sector. Making those beacons boomable would be nice, but before you could boom it, it would probably tell it's supervisor that you fired upon it...

of course, you could hire someone to temporarily disable the monitoring in the sector for you...

Haha that's an awesome idea, Noid. And the monitoring beacon as well. Heh. Cool.

No, no, no. Those are off-topic ideas people. This has to be a SIMPLE solution/change; otherwise, it will take far too much development time and guarantee that the Devs will not use the suggestion, at least anytime soon. These ideas are not bad, just far too complicated. What I suggested would take like half a day to implement. One would simply need to go to the death faction change function (whatever it is called), comment out the location check (or not, if FS changes will still only be in monitored sectors), and add one line of code for each faction. This would take about half an hour to an hour for the initial write, and I cannot explain why it would take half a day to finish unless you already know enough programming and understand why.

yes Nya, we add some magic to dump standings. eh, no. remove friendly fire. all of it. John has said he thinks it's the future, and less magic is good. if you shoot at someone, fine, not much happens, if you *kill* someone, that's a different matter. you don't *kill* people by accident.

if you do, flying a spaceship might not be your cup of tea.

unmonitored space killings shouldn't cause standing loss. other than that I like it.

if unmonitored space hit you with this too, any multiplayer battles would soon end in many people losing a lot of faction with their favorite indie nations... this is a bad thing.

Good note, Cunjo. Okay - monitored space only = one less code bit to change. :)