So I've been thinking recently about another aspect of the faction system. One which I've seen people complain about but that I find is actually working as intended, to an extent.

Outside of the issue with certain factions not currently being mutually exclusive, there has also been the perceived issue of people exploiting high faction standing. What I end up reminding myself is that no player, group, or guild is an official representative of any faction. In lieu of perhaps more aggressive NPC enforcement of monitored space, many players have taken up, or attempted to take up, the mantle of security or police, only to be ultimately thwarted by players with high faction standing.

What then should the proper response be to infractions of the law within a faction's monitored space? Part of what I've seen and even engaged in to some extent, is attacking other players who are perceived enemies within monitored space in attempts to goad them to fight back, potentially losing standing, or just cause them to have to pay potentially exorbitant repair bills.

Let's revisit my earlier statement, "No player, group, or guild is an official representative of any faction." With this in mind, anyone who attacks (N)PCs within the protected areas is breaking the law. Anyone with high enough faction is welcomed to the sector by the faction, and no matter what any other players think, they should not be denied this merely on the basis of a disagreement. There is already temporary KOS applied to such criminals, but it's not nearly the deterrent it could be.

This doesn't mean I support sweeping changes to temp KOS or any other faction loss mechanism. I believe that people should be able to engage in aggressive actions within monitored space without fear of permanent damage to their faction. Call it vigilantism, or a crime of passion, or whatever, it should be allowed, within reason.

My proposal is two-fold. Increase the effort necessary to attain higher levels of faction standing and impose graduated penalties over time by extending the temporary KOS system.

One of the nice things about Vendetta Online is that there is very little barrier to entry. Licenses are only a small roadblock to attaining ships or addons. Faction, on the other hand is far too easy to attain for what it provides, near immunity of attack from those that care about their own faction standing.

The temporary KOS system doesn't really stop those that would engage in the behaviors I described above. The change I recommend to the temporary KOS system is relatively simple in concept. Each time that a player commits an infraction, this infraction is logged with a time-stamp. After an arbitrary number of infractions within a specified period of time, the player will no longer have their KOS standing reverted immediately upon jumping out. At this point their temporary status will persist for an even longer time-frame (eg. five minutes).

+1

It's a step in the right direction but it isn't severe enough. I think before this is even considered, they should (at the least) add two zeros to the amount of all the trade missions.

+1 for part 1. Trade missions should only take faction standing so far. POS or high admired status should be the result of a blend of activities including trade, mining and combat. And possibly some heroics via a difficult mission tree.

For part 2, I don't think I've really engaged the temp KOS system enough to comment on your suggestion.

I agree about Temp KoS. I've actually written about the expansion of Temp KoS to deal with a lot of common situations in some of the past mega-threads, but that was some time back. I will definitely be employing that, as it allows a mechanic that lets you "train" someone about the negative ramifications of their choices, without crushing them with a totally insane amount of grind to come back. It also keeps accidental issues from having excessive long-term ramifications.

The other point is also a good one, and yes, is basically planned with scaled Temp KoS as a solution for the near term.

Anyway, I welcome ongoing feedback on this, since we're.. actually in the middle of working on it.

At minimum, there should be a lasting effect for breaching a NFZ. You should definitely be made KOS for the next few hours with that faction, depending on the standing of the other pilot or somesuch measurement. So yeah. I agree with all of draugath's suggestions.

1+

Please create a new thread for your suggestion. I'd like to see this stay on topic so that Incarnate can hopefully gain some insight into this specific matter.

Done and Done.

TheRedSpy +99999
"At minimum, there should be a lasting effect for breaching a NFZ. You should definitely be made KOS for the next few hours with that faction, depending on the standing of the other pilot or somesuch measurement."

Death Fluffy -99999
" Trade missions should only take faction standing so far. POS or high admired status should be the result of a blend of activities including trade, mining and combat. And possibly some heroics via a difficult mission tree.

draugath +999999

I'd like to point out here that the base game install (no plugins) offers no way for players to check the standing of other players with any of the minor sub-factions without being in-sector with them in space monitored by the faction in question and shooting them once. This doesn't necessarily mean violating the NFZ though it does matter when you start assigning longer/harsher penalties to "infractions" like this.

I personally think that the harsher penalties should start kicking in somewhere after 3 to 10 infractions. Even with that, I don't think it should jump right to an hour or more. Something around 5 to 15 minutes initially. This is meant to deter mostly law-abiding citizens. If someone persists in this behavior too much before the statute of limitations runs out, then perhaps the faction loss could be made permenant until regained.

Since the NFZ is a station-local law, shouldn't the effects of violating it be exclusive to that station, and not necessarily faction-wide? Because someone threw you out of the Dau Senate sector for violating the local NFZ laws, doesn't necessarily mean you should have strike forces dispatched throughout UIT monitored space and meet your end to the border turrets while you try to go somewhere else for the duration of your extended temp-KOS.

Personally, I don't see shooting someone in the NFZ as being a per station offense. Kind of like shooting someone in front of the supermarket isn't a per supermarket offense. It would be cool if there was some way to be blacklisted from individual stations though.

No I agree with ARF (for once). It should be a local thing. It's enough of a deterrent not being able to use that station for the next few hours to make people think twice about breaching it, but not so game destroying that people are going to want to log off completely if they have the infraction. If you get banned from all faction stations for 2 hours and you only came online to do stuff in uit space your game session is ruined.

Well, don't persistently do so many naughty things that you get banned for hours if you intend to actually use the stations during that session.

This is also why I recommended graduated penalties and not a 2x4-across-the-forehead, 2-hour ban after the first infraction. There needs to be an allowance for people to get the kill after a long chase without ruining their night. Keep in mind that the people whose night this would ruin would likely get the hint after they get hit with a 5 minute ban. The people who live for shooting people in the NFZ are already KOS anyway, or proficient enough at dodging that it won't really matter to them.

In a point of reference, there may be value in reading my 2007 RFC, which touches on many of these topics (please do not revive or post on that thread, but it's worth reading as part of this discussion).