POB Change Suggestions

[Grumblesaur]

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Critique
Suggestion Addressed: @Sniper's Mandatory offers of surrender

Problem Summary

• The suggestion relies on the assumption that factions hostile to the owners of a POB desire to capture the POB.
  
• This also implicitly operates on the premise that bases ought to be preserved for their own sake, and only come to destruction by a means of inactivity or neglect, which is plainly opposed to the current intention as the game mechanics imply.
  

Amendment

• Raise the standards of roleplay, or the wait time, but do not mandate the option for surrender.
  

Further Discussion

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For in-character reasons, a faction may have no desire to capture a base at all. Bases are a liability -- an asset that needs regular supply and protection. A faction attempting to project power or improve security will succeed at neither if it must commit more resources to an installation it does not even want. Such a faction would only capture the base to destroy it immediately after. Players themselves, outside of the trappings of roleplay, may have no desire to commit the time and credits toward maintaining a captured base, at which point, the base would wither and die anyway. In either case, this is a pointless extra step.

It is also not clear how much discussion must take place in the surrender negotiations, nor is it clear whether the defenders ever have a chance to lose their base outright. If the defenders are too greedy or recalcitrant in the negotiations, must surrender still be accepted, or shall destruction commence? Without addressing these points, this suggestion only serves to prevent POBs from ever being destroyed in sieges, and more rule language involving the term "reasonable" will be hard to understand and interpret by staff and players alike.

Better still would be to clearly delineate what the purpose of siege-related roleplay is, as some players have the notion that it's for inducing negotiations, and other players have the notion that it's for binding their actions to a paper trail to create an account of the siege events and provide a warning to the defenders.

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If by "capturing" a base the attackers do not literally gain control (i.e. they are assigned a password for admin access and the old one is deleted), and this is merely a means of forcing the base to change IFF and docking permissions while the base is still operated by the original players, it is little more than a token gesture. As long as the original players control the base, then any changes requested by the conquering players are irrelevant, as they can be quietly reverted. The conquering faction would be hard-pressed to prove that all of their policies were respected. Correctly implementing a mechanic for vassalization would require adding complexity to the POB plugin in order to allow for this mediated form of ownership, or adding complexity to the rules, where players whose base is vassalized face punishment for breaking contract.

Then it must be decided whether the vassalized base's original players are allowed to stage a coup (break their contract and retaliate with force), or if they must be liberated by some third party.

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A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,
brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.