I was busily abusing the /explode exploit to move x1's from Jallik to Edras, when I thought to myself, this has to stop. People, particularly myself use this option for everything from a quick way back to their favorite haunts (ie. b8), to halving the trip on proc missions.

My opinion is that the option either needs to be taken out of the game, or made to have a significant cost to the user. When I brought this up on 100, among the suggestions were that it could cost around -200 faction points for the dominant faction of the system if in an unmonitored area or the same for the monitoring faction.

Until then, I will happily continue to abuse the system. Oh, and another suggestion: Add common VO words and expressions to the spell check.

Terribly ill-considered suggestion. What if I instead home where I wish to be, travel elsewhere, and then gently tap a station guard with my blaster?

You cannot prevent people from abusing the home system without making all death costly, or eliminating the ability to home in any station. End of debate.

Valid points, however, I do not believe it is the 'end of debate'.

A simple solution would be to not have the station guards or strike force respond unless a player is attacked or a station guard has been killed. This leaves the following options as I see them.

1. Attack another player- which may not be an available option.
2. Kill a station guard- which automatically incurs significant faction loss.
3. Attack an incoming voy- which may not be an available option.
4. Start a voy and attack it. This one is probably the most tricky to deal with, but it can be done.
5. Hit a roid at full turbo until dead. This option I do not have an answer for.

As I said, I use this option all the time to ease my way through the game. If there is a reason that the dev's feel it is important to have this feature available, so be it. I see it as an exploit that undermines the work / reward aspect of the game. If that is the purpose, then the dev's should go the full route, and give us the ability to home at multiple stations.

And while on the subject of home stations, I would suggest a fee for homing at any station that is not a players nation. Or rather, I'd go further and suggest a fee even for home nation stations that are not Capitol or Commercial. I think the added expense would go well with the increased ship prices.

I for one use explode a lot ever since i started but I rarely do it now. I take some flares get close too the station and fire while i'm really close. Since my weopens do double (or more damage) i am dead quickly. /explode is to slow i can be dead in a few secs my way. I don't think you will be able to stop that.

I see no reason why explode shouldn't work. The universe is big. We should have 2 or more home stations and be given a choice:)

Edit:
i don't mind a fee as long as its reasonable. And don't just give a fee for what we can do for free now. Maybe have a fee if someone wants to have more then one "home". And reasonable is less then 10K.

There are many, many more than 5 options, one of which JB just listed. Destroying your own ship is nearly impossible to prevent, and your suggestion that the station guards not fire back until one has been killed is a very amusing fix for what is a rather minor problem.

Would you make the turrets only shoot back once one was killed? I'd love that fix!

Well, perhaps Lecter was right, and the debate is over. I certainly can't come up with an answer for Bess's method. Though at least he isn't getting a completely free ride. :)

Never mind then.

Actually, I won't let this go just yet. My problem with /explode is that it amounts to 'magic' or a free ride.

Death should cost more than a new ship. I would suggest some sort of cost be put in place for using the 'home station' feature. Whether it is a set fee for each faction or station type. Or a services rendered fee. I prefer the services rendered option as I think the distance from the home station should play a role. Same system should be fairly cheap, say around 5,000cr. However a recovery from 8 wh's away should cost a minimum of 100,000cr. Inability to pay should cause the player to re-spawn in their native capital. Or if that is not an option due to standing, the Corvus capital.

Edit: Perhaps for the sake of activities like botting ,hive skirmish, pvp and the like, same system deaths should have no charge. The only other exemption could be for players homed in Geira doing BP or BS.

Here's a simpler idea that won't take up any valuable development resources either:

If you don't like /explode, don't use it!

I clearly like it because it gives me an in game shortcut that I use almost daily.

My concern is that the shortcut amounts to a freeby. I'd like to see some sort of cost attached.

My two biggest complaints before the dev's started the economy changes were that 1) credits were too easy to get and 2) there was no cost to anything. Little did I realize the dramatic changes that were being worked on.

It is now much harder to make credits, or will be once the voys are nerfed again. And costs have gone up at least in terms of ship prices and extra storage space.

It is simply my opinion, right or wrong, that every thing we do within the game should have a cost attached to it whether it be in credits or labor. I just happened to realize this evening that this is one aspect that does not appear to have any cost associated when compared to the benefit.

And if I am completely honest, my hope is if the dev's agree and at some point in the future implement some form of this discussion, that it will encourage people to do more traveling. Which would be very good for my business.

We could just stop giving away free ships once your assets exceed some arbitrary threshold, which puts at least a non-zero financial cost on /explode. But it sounds like most people /explode in the ship they already have anyway, as the ships still cost far less than you would make doing the procurement mission.

I really like alk0n's idea. There really is no reason for the government to give unlimited free ships to people. At the very least I think the free ships should be limited to 1 per log in or 1 per day for any player with stats higher than 4/4/4/4/4.

Well, I normally just buy free ships to transport me to the place I'm buying "whatever" ship to stock up at a station that doesn't have them.

As far as the /explode command goes, I personally rarely use it, but I think there should be a cost involved if I'm pirating someone and they just log. This is annoying, but hey.. what do I know.

alkOn's idea would be good also btw.

but...even if /explode is eliminated or free ships go away, I suspect people who make use of this short cut will just go and buy some of the cheaper ships that cost a few hundred.

Not to mention that such a measure would (unjustly) penalize those who use busses to travel, and apparently that number is not zero (vskye and me, for two). But then again, we could just buy the cheap ships.

Using /explode for quick travel is an exploit and a hole in the system.

I would agree with a moderate faction hit when used in a monitored sector if /explode is used - blowing up your ship in heavily trafficked areas poses just as much a danger to others as firing weapons (if a justification is needed).

This wouldn't prevent all abuses of /explode but it would translate into a cost in time that is cumulative whether it is the time needed to recover lost faction standing or the time taken to avoid the faction loss by jumping to an unmonitored sector. Using it a few times may be worth it every now and then but using it repetitively would add up quickly.

P.S. All costs should ultimately be based on time whether it be the time needed to earn a certain amount of credits or the time needed to complete a particular task - it's the universal finite resource of gaming.

blowing up your ship in heavily trafficked areas poses just as much a danger to others as firing weapons

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Whew, that's a good one. VO is just SWIMMING in other pilots.

Oh, you were serious? Why waste the Dev time when they'll just jump to an empty sector and go pop? Or shoot a guard/NPC and go pop? Or flare themselves in a docking port and go pop? Or any of the other fast and easy ways to kill yourself and go pop?

If you want to fix this, penalize the 1/0 act of dying. Otherwise, just drop it already.

"If you want to fix this, penalize the 1/0 act of dying."

Your suggestion for doing so then? Flaming without also providing a better solution is masturbatory.

EDIT: I should have posted before "... an RP justification... ". Sorry for the lack of clarity.

I preface this with the following disclaimer: the Devs have repeatedly said they're against any sort of significant "Death Penalty" (I don't agree, but it's not my game); however, the only sure and (relatively) simple way to prevent the "home station" function from being exploited for quick A->B travel is to institute such a penalty.

QED, this exploit cannot be patched because the fix is worse than the problem to the game's decision makers. Hence my earlier point--this is a dumb suggestion because the only sure fix has already been rejected as too undesirable.

That said, if they wanted to add a Death Penalty, I'd implement it in the following manner:

After getting to level 4 in any skill, the character receives an alert that it is henceforth subject to a Death Penalty of 50,000 credits per occurance. Each successive level above 4 will add 50,0000 credits to the 50,0000 base penalty.

So, for a character 6/5/5/3/3, death would only cost 150,000 credits; but, at 12/11/12/6/1, a single death would cost 450,000 credits.

This (credit amounts and start level for penalty are debatable) avoids penalizing n00bs, while making death something more experienced characters wish to avoid. It also has the significant side benefit of making credits much more important--the days of people playing space quake and never giving a fig for respawn costs would be over.

A less complete fix that doesn't involve a death penalty be to restrict homing to the four capital systems: Sol II, Itan, Dau, Odia. The problem is that I have no idea how complex such a change would be to implement, and it would still be exploited for huge jumps across the universe.

Finally, you're an idiot: "flaming" without providing a "better solution" is an argument for not changing what the moron OP claims was "broken." Sometimes, leaving well enough alone is the best course of action.

I could live with that solution very well, Lecter, especially with the cap of 450k which the penalty reaches within short time. It keeps new people off the hook, but penalizes those careless or wanton enough to die very often.

I'm guessing that you meant for the balance of the individual player, if it were not sufficient to pay the penalty, to simply go down to zero.

Who says it's a cap? You get to combat 16, you pay 650k per death.