People have been spying very actively during caps and otherwise. Personally I don't think it's necessary to spy, you know pretty damn well where people would go and what they are going to do, but sometimes it can be disastrous to the mission, as it ruins element of surprise. I've had a quick thought over and here's ideas worth 2 cents each.

1. disallow logging in as different colour for a set period of time.
Let's assume you have three chars, two blues and one red. If you are playing as blue character and reds are attempting the capture and you want to check up on their planning or if they already have the flag and you want a free million dollars you are free to do that currently. With proposed change you will not be able to log in as different colour for, say, 20 minutes. That means you can still play your blues, but attempts to select Red would say "please wait for 20 minutes and try again".

this can potentially progress to disallow logging as different character for a set period of time (based on IP).

2. One colour per character.

It doesn't solve the problem of multiple chars under your command, but would weed out majority of spies. And who would be stupid enough to pay for spy accounts in full version?

I personally prefer first solution, but second one is probably easier to do. However, in full version, if people have more characters they would probably like them to be of different colours/race.

What do you think?

problem with that is say, like how i used to be(havent been on to play in weeks). if a red was pirating newbs heavly, I would switch colors to fight them.

also, it would make it more difficult for nation specific bus to be caught should there be one

randomize there's a third sollution as well. 3) flag capping goes away. This is the plan. Capping's only here to entertain the testers and won't be a part of the final game. Spying is annoy and it'd be nice if people didn't do it. Also neither of your suggested solutions would stop someone from creating multiple accounts and spying that way.

It's true, though, there is too much spying. We blues were planning a secret attack on gold, and were faking against red the other day. In teamchat, phoenix says "Now go to 11 and get ready to attack gold", and lo and behold, every gold suddenly converged on s11 and knew our exact plan, who was going where, everything. Turns out there were spies for both gold AND red online on blue. D'oh. Now every time we cap, we have to /msg people with the plans, which means someone has to stay behind to coordinate the msging.

Someone has to fix this, that's for sure.

I say: get rid of the 3 teams. Let people choose their home sector, but don't offer same-team protection to anyone unless they intentionally request an alliance.

The way it is now, there's no way to prevent someone you dislike from being on your team.

Alliances should be formed on the fly. Players in an alliance would appear green on each other's radars, and have no friendly fire damage. Everyone else would be red, even players that shared the same home sector.

Just wait for what the devs have in store for us, they did say after all the "teams" will be radically different from what they are now.

I think in the future the "nation" thing will be sort of like a race or affiliation in other RPG's. Each ones gets its advantages and disadvantages, special ship(s), special weapons, toys, engines, etc. Meanwhile, we will be able to join guilds and squadrons (something I am very much looking forward to.) This is just my wish list though. Who knows what the devs are planning.

colour switching has to be limited, don't you think? it's getting to the point of being silly.

How about making a non-aligned race/nation where you're a member when you start and when you're evicted from gold/red/blue?
Then you dock to the home station of a race and request membership to their nation.

Just an idea. I see the obvious downsides, but I think it's worth looking into!

bump for 3.3

Another solution not addressed in this thread is to upgrade the chat system (rather than limit accounts to a single nation). Have the ability to create private channels, sector-only messages etc.

I think as time goes on the clear boundaries between nations will become less defined. It will be more like player Joe has x faction points with red, y faction points with gold, and z faction points with blue. Heck, there probably won't even be the current Red/Blue/Gold nations in the final version, at least not as we know them.