Ratline

You can only allow space for scammers and con artists if there is a way for recourse to be sought by the victims. IRL if somebody scams you there are options beyond 'suck it up'. You can go to the police, go to the courts, or go around with some very large mates and have a friendly word with the scammers kneecaps. None of these are options in this game, scamming is risk free. Even more so now that the devs have enabled people to simply scam away, hand their stuff to a mate and delete/rename their character with no loss even of xp.

Of course it's different... such a system would not exist as a recognised way of conducting such trades in the real world if it was no different from simply handing over goods/collateral to the parties involved. It's a way of formalising the agreement, placing conditions and time limits and ensuring the collateral is held by a disinterested 3rd party. It works irl and it works in games such as EVE. Saying the only two options are leave it like it is or disable trade is not encouraging.

Given that I wasn't scammed, and that from the behaviour of your members the reasonable assumption was that your clan did not care whether people behaved in this manner, I have no screenshots since they would have served no purpose. I have a swath of your clan on ignore after last night so it's no skin off my nose if you want to sweep it under the carpet. Why don't you speak to Injuring Thunder and ask him about his scamming and his behaviour in chat last night? It would be fascinating to know if he has the gall to deny it, I suspect he does.

Malakith, TRR is your clan? I have to assume you were not online last night. Injuring Thunder spent a considerable amount of time taunting players he had stolen from, saying they were idiots and how much he was enjoying the Trinc he had made from the stolen mats and running off a list of the mats he had stolen (it was considerable, amounting to mats for about 8 or 9 ships if I remember). Not operating a 'first strike and out' policy is understandable on some issues, but on something like this and with the associated behaviour I'm afraid it is just very weak and discredits your entire clan. The affected parties most likely have not contacted you because they have no idea who you are, or that you run the clan. The onus here is rather on you to repair the damage done by your members scamming their own nation and trolling about it in nation chat (not just the thieves either, but also those members stating how funny they found it). There is nothing childish about deciding that TRR are not to be trusted, but rather in burying your head in the sand and saying 'not my problem'. The fact that people are foolish to allow themselves to be scammed is neither here nor there for you when it comes to protecting the reputation of your clan. The fact that LtDean is no longer in the clan was not an obvious sign of how you treated it, given that he could easily leave of his own free will and given that the other thieves were still happily boasting of their scams while remaining members.

How about a contract system which would allow mats to be traded for collateral which could be held in escrow? Might be a little complicated to do, but would then mean you can wash your hands of the whole thing and provide us the tools to deal with it. Bounties aren't the way to go in my opinion, way too easy to use as a griefing tool and those with bounties will just let their mates farm them.

So these guys are trolling Brit chat, winding up the people they've stolen from and there is absolutely no recourse which is what is lame... and they know it. Weak of the devs to do nothing if they can't provide a mechanic to resolve such an issue through player actions. And yeah, won't touch TRR or anything to do with them with a barge pole with such members. GL to the rest of you and your rep, don't get salty with us about it, speak to your leadership. Not .elped by TRR members stating how entertaining they find the drama this caused in chat. Nice bunch,

Given that we're in EA surely this is the time for them to actually test stuff like this rather than trying to theorycraft it. Any exploits would likely be thrown up pretty quickly and thus can be fixed.

If people didn't get their panties in a twist about something as inconsequential to them as a game patch being late it wouldn't be an issue. For those of us who know how to behave it's nice having a proposed timeline, and if it isn't met we are not going to get all salty. Being informed and treated like reasonable adults is rare in gaming, the devs here really do try to do this. Sadly quite a few folks fail to reciprocate. Anyways... hope Mr Admin feels better soon

I'm sure Dickbeard seemed like an entirely sensible name at the time and you had no idea that anybody could possibly take it to be anything other than a totally innocent reference to your father's facial hair.

Still confused about this. I can't check the max price for (for example) Fir where I am since when selling a unit to port it obviously is going to somebody's contract, so at a loss as to how to find the max port sell price for any given product.

Sad how many of those I recognise from Brit national chat on pvp1. Glad you guys are stamping on this nice and hard.

No, it is not a grey area, it is quite clearly an exploit. To think otherwise is naive or exceedingly obtuse.

Typing in bolded text doesn't make your argument any more valid... It does not 'make clans useless' in the slightest, that's an absurd claim. Clans benefit from greater organisation involving shared trade and crafting resulting in easier access to good ships, more easily coordinated fleet actions (both pve and pvp) hence better gold/xp opportunities, greater ability to pool resources to buy assault flags, easier communication, camaraderie and so on. Once we get a working political system clans will benefit from the ability to block vote and control the strategic direction of their nation. Once we have resource production they will essentially control the supply flow of raw materials and ships to an even greater extent than they do now. Eventually better clan management tools, clan banks/storage/auction houses and the like will help further. Clans do not need an exclusive mission boost to be a desirable prospect or to have an important place in the game's world. This is purely a form of entitled elitism which is totally unnecessary. Stop crying about it not being fair and look at the advantages which clans already give. Edit: also to add: the idea of 'clan only missions' is bad. Other games do not have clan/guild only raids... any group can access content and that is how it should be. Anybody with the slightest experience understands the benefit of accessing such content in a clan vs a pick up group.

My point is that you can do this in a way which benefits everybody who enjoys grouping and community without excluding those who do not wish to be in a clan. When it comes to something as critical as XP and gold making the bonus clan only is not a great idea. Make it a straight group bonus, same effect for clan members, still promotes grouping. There is no need for the kind of exclusivity you are suggesting.

You can play with others, and reward that, without penalising people for not joining clans. There are a lot of folks who simply don't want the drama and bullshit ego games that clans often entail, but who are happy to group up with other players.

Yeah, you see it's people with exactly this attitude who end up rolling the wrong heads. Thanks for demonstrating precisely why banning based on hearsay and anecdotal evidence is bad. This isn't something clear cut such as exploiting, verbal abuse or racism. The reason most people are saying that banning is ill advised is not because we support griefing, or engage in this behaviour ourselves (I've never even entered another player's mission or battle, other than the furballs outside Port Royal pre-Steam)... it's because we have the experience and brains to know the shitstorm that overuse of bans can create unless you can clearly show the person punished was guilty. A far better solution is to fix the mechanics in game to make this harder, if not impossible,

If true that would seriously dent my faith in the integrity of the devs. You cannot allow people to profit to that level from an exploit, even in a testing phase. It would confer a huge advantage and really kills my desire to engage in open world pvp vs pirates. Anybody abusing an exploit, rather than reporting it and moving on, needs to have their gold and possibly xp reset. It's always far outweighed by those who go for the easy ride.

How do you guys plan to determine whether a player deserves a ban? I have seen multiple instances in national chat of a player kicking off, swearing and abusing another for 'stealing my cap' or somehow interfering with boarding. The other player invariably then puts a totally different side to the story.. player A tried to cap but failed and was sinking, player A actually opened fire on a friendly, or rammed them off the target first... and so on. If you're not in the instance yourselves, what measures are in place to make sure you are not banning people unfairly? It would be disastrous for your reputation if you started banning people who then went to Steam (and other forums) to claim they had been banned unfairly.

The point is that this will actually hurt pvp and the wider game. Many people will jump to whoever they feel is strongest, or if their nation is doing badly just abandon ship rather than fight, especially if there are ways to get around the gold and equipment wipe.

Agreed, this could be a terrible idea. A sizeable portion of the population are likely to jump to whichever is/are the perceived strongest nations. Brits are already over represented due to starting position and being labelled as 'easy' on char creation. In general I'd like to know what the devs propose to prevent the game ending up with one or two superpowers and hardly anybody playing smaller nations, especially now they're introducing this. Also would like to know how they intend to deal with people exploiting trades to keep all their ships and equipment. (tbh I'd like to see you scrap shared xp across servers altogether. If people want to play a new faction allow us to have distinct chars on each server with no crossover. Why make this overly complex?)

If you decide to base in a totally different area to your capital the teleport is worthless. IT might provide an advantage in some ways for getting ships into a combat zone, but conversely it leaves the player unable to get those ships to their capital if combat is near there *Shrug* seems like six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Did the npc disappear from the battle once the timer was up? The only time I ran over in pre-steam alpha the ship I was fighting stayed in, I sunk it and got the full xp for damage and sinking which happened after the battle had technically ended. This may well have been a bug and so fixed. The timer does prevent (if working properly) teams of little ships effectively damage farming a SOL for hours on end.

I like the idea of it being a slowdown to reload rather than total halt. Perhaps the length and severity of the shock could be randomised, so sometimes we get the full halt for 30s and other times much shorter and less dramatic effect (or any combination of length/severity). Think this would make it feel more 'real' and less gamey. I'd also have it affect accuracy/shot dispersion as well. Eventually it would be really cool to see officers and crew experience (if we ever get that) have a mitigating effect.

Multiple characters per account, 1 character per server. Best of both worlds. I have friends that will likely only play on the PvE server. I play PvP but taking away the option for me to create a PvE character to play with them from time to time would not go down well.

You can choose to translate Belle Poule as 'Beautiful Whore', no? Either way, the whole 'it will ruin my immersions' argument is a little odd given that the game is already flooded with odd names. I got in a fight with Donald J Trump last night, and there are plenty of 'Captain Ubercannon666' type characters already.