If a player with a high faction standing gets killed in a station space or wormhole space occupied by that faction(except corvus) and drops cargo, the cargo should be labelled as property of the dead player for a small amount of time(10-15 min?). During this period, anyone picking it up gets a temporary KoS until they are dead, after which they get reverted to a standing lower than their original. The owner can always pick it up.

At the end of the 10 minutes, the cargo is no longer considered anyone's property and the first to pick it up gets to claim it. This obviously requires the cargo despawn timer to be increased to account for this timer.

Most of you will instantly label this as a "carebear suggestion", but I view it as a good way to counter rampant alt abuse where people use an alt to kill someone and another to pick it up, and also a way to create newer and more interesting gameplay as combat escorts become more relevant.

EDIT : Just went through the Alt Abuse post and noticed Roda had suggested it there.

I'm going to repost my comments from the other thread:

#1




This could actually be fun. Old pirates have told me stories about how VPR and pirates used to fight over a single piece of cargo at station sectors. This kind of flag transfer could be fun if it brought back different player factions having drawn out battles over items.

There should of course be a time limit for self defense flag for the item.

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#2
I think a KOS tag is a bit excessive. Maybe the faction where the offense happens denies permission to dock with hot cargo. Though some factions just won't care (corvus). Other factions may be friendly with each other (TPG/UIT) and will honor the ban on docking with hot cargo. Still other factions (such as Axia/Valent) will be fine with it because of their inverse relationship. This way, the pirate has a chance to make off with the goods, but it is not easy peasy.

The owner might even get tracking info on the cargo (even through unmonitored space) for the entire 20 minutes or so.

+1, though I would amend "station space or wormhole space occupied by that faction" to either "guarded space" or "guarded or monitored space".

There does need to be a way to forgive people for "stealing" your cargo, though, and there should also be a way to pre-authorize people to pick it up. For convenience, there should be a per-character setting to independently control whether group and guild members are automatically pre-authorized.

When somebody is pre-authorized, the game should still notify them of the cargo's owner when they scoop it, but the penalty would be withheld.

The target info box should display the owner's name when cargo is targeted, or at least whether the cargo is owned and whether you are currently authorized to pick it up without penalty.

The flags inherited from a pirate to cargo could be verbatim, 1 for 1. If the pirate was temp kos with a faction, the cargo will inherit the timer for that temp kos, and picking the cargo will make you temp kos for the remainder of the timer.

The point is to make conspiracy to pirate carry the same penalties as the original pirate.

The cargo could display the proper owner, and the current flags with current timers.

Anyone in a /group with the owner could claim the cargo for the owner without flags.

It is also a simple system, in that we do not need to decide what the penalty should be, if we are simply using whatever penalty already exist, and extending it to picking up the cargo.

The flags persist with the cargo even after it is picked up by non owner, so multiple characters could end up suffering from it. The flags are erased when picked up by owner's group.

The original pirate would be largely immune to this whole process, because any flags he picks up from the cargo are redundant with the flags he already had to begin with.

I also suggested a /faction_honor command, so that you will not pick up flagged cargo by accident.

so i kill a noob in a station where i am hated.
Then scoop the booty, then run to a sector, a wh sector for example, here i drop the cargo and leave. Then another noob passes by, takes the cargo, goes to the station with the faction i am kos with, and gets killed by SF.
Sounds fun fer me. +1

In the suggestion for the /faction_honor command, it would be turned on by default for new characters.
A new character would not be able to pick up flagged cargo, unless they turned this setting off.

I object to the temp KoS idea as it gets in the way of honest piracy. However, I like the idea of hot / stolen property having restrictions, if it was taken in monitored space, like you can't sell it at legit stations but could use it for mfg. Also you could transfer it to another player via drops and it would become clean again.

gets in the way of honest piracy.

How dare an honest faction get in the way of honest piracy? wait... what?