Admin Feedback Thread (Archived)

[Cashew]

"3.1 An attack is any hostile action that drains shields to less than 50%. Saying "Engaging" is not sufficient and aggressors are not allowed to destroy a ship before allowing sufficient time to respond. If a player is attacked he has the right to defend himself regardless of who is attacking. Trading nanobots, shieldbatteries or other ammo and equipment during a fight is also considered taking an active role in the engagement."

"aggressors are not allowed to destroy a ship before allowing sufficient time to respond"

That 10 second ruling there isn't mentioned anywhere in the rules, and surely isn't even relevant considering the sanctioned player did roleplay beforehand. If the RP was conducted while cloaked prior to the attack, surely this satisfies every clause the rules require?

No where in the rules does it explicitly say that there has to be 10 seconds between an attack, yes. 10 seconds is merely a guideline for the player to go by for the future which I recommended. I'm happy to go back and re-phrase what I wrote to be more precise in what I meant. Rule 3.1 is quite clear in the way it asks for the aggressor to allow sufficient time for the player to respond to an attack. Regardless of the fact the aggressor gives RP within the encounter there is no reason to not give a player some time to acknowledge he/she is about to be attacked. In this current scenario there was absolutely zero time for the player to acknowledge they were going to be attacked, thus the rule is broken.

it seems to be the height of poor judgement to enforce a sanction when it's based on an incredibly questionable non-standard interpretation of a rule that's never been used this way in the past.

Ironically it's "questionable" because you don't have access to the information which you so desperately desire. There have been several sanctions practically identical to this one in the past which have gone through without any objections or complaints.

Doesn't this effectively render using cloaks for ambush attacks against the rules?

An ambush attack is clearly still viable. If a battleship vessel has a cloaking device and it is about to attack another battleship, bearing in mind that both can travel at 80m/s, the battleship being attacked will not be (theoretically) out of range of the aggressor. Now, taking into other factors, the aggressor might have a CDer with them. This means that the victim cannot cruise away which essentially secures the surprise attack if played out correctly. If there is no CDer and the victim decides to cruise away, there is nothing the aggressor can do to stop them. A battleship cannot destroy another battleship, and its nanobots, within the time it takes to cruise. So, surprise attacks are still completely viable, eventhough there is now a cloaking sound.

There is nothing in the rules about giving 10 seconds and up until now people have been freely dropping their RP while cloaked and shooting once they decloak. From what I've seen, as long as there is a long enough (undefined) gap between the engagement notice and firing, the cloak is irrelevant. It could be in this sanction that the engagement notice was given and the player instantly decloaked after it and opened fire. It could be that there was a gap between RP and decloaking and the sanction is instead for shooting directly after decloak.

Can an Admin do anything about that if it's not reported? No.
You got it spot on here: "It could be in this sanction that the engagement notice was given and the player instantly decloaked after it and opened fire."

Simply clarifying to me privately doesn't actually help very much, because while it certainly means I now know what's going on, no-one else does. Having a system where rules are arbitrarily enforced because the general majority weren't copied in to a PM isn't exactly desirable.

What's there to clarify about giving sufficient time before firing?



All in all:
If the Admin team were to assign a set time for a player to wait before attacking then you'd all be outraged and throw your toys out the pram. It simply means "be nice, give them a few seconds to finish sipping their tea".


I hope this clarifies this incident, I will now go and re-phrase my sanction notice to accommodate this.