Posts: 3,564
Threads: 107
Joined: May 2012
Staff roles: Balance Dev
(05-21-2025, 01:02 PM)JadeTornado Wrote: Could you please define "PVP Sportsmanship" and "fairplay" for me? It sounds very vague and feels like a highly flexible 1.0 rule.
It's actually really easy.
Whenever you are in a fight against other players, ask yourself whether they have a chance of winning. Ask yourself whether the players on the enemy "team" are currently having fun. If they're not, wonder what you can do about it. Hold some ships back if numbers are the problem. Maybe one individual, extremely skilled player is so much better than everyone else involved in the fight that they're just impossible to contest, and maybe should be swapped out for someone worse. I'll be the first to admit that this kind of sucks to do, as very few of us log into Discovery Freelancer just to spectate a fight. However, even fewer of us enjoy being minced with zero counterplay.
If you're really logging in for PvP specifically then the best way to avoid having to sit out all the time is to try and predict which side in a fight is going to struggle the most, and log in for them. If you instead log in for the stronger side, and are a player with a lot of "agency' (a cap player with sick mechanics and even better positioning, or a snub player with super cracked aim), then I think you're kind of scamming yourself most of the time as the most sportsmanlike way to play would probably be.. not to play.
I also personally believe that with these sorts of rules we need to be careful not to hit players with sanctions because they slightly fucked up that one time and won a little bit too hard. We should look at egregious cases, where absolutely zero restraint was shown in an extremely one-sided fight, or consistent patterns over time where a player or group of players just plays to win (by a landslide) (nearly) all of the time.
