ID Thoughts - Speak now

[eyvind]

That's an interesting discussion. One that I've been back and forth on. What I have in place right now is a system which allows corporations to accept in-house payments.

In other words, Universal pilots can collect on Universal bounties.

But, after putting it in, it felt a tad cumbersome and has the duel effect of making those persons whom collect on bounties for a living somewhat redundant. So I'm still back and forth on that one.

I think it was Blodo who argued that those corps would hire thugs to take care of their business... But if they would why would they be house corporate blokes and not freelancers/mercs/bounty hunters.

In-universe, I think employees fulfilling bounty contracts would not get paid the reward. Instead, I think the corporation itself would be paid. I think that would follow quite logically from today's employment laws, and the nature of employment itself. The employee is hired and paid by the corporation to carry out whatever duties the corporation decides, while the employee is employed (working hours or through the entire period of employment, depending on context) the corporation owns the product or service the employee provides.

(Implementing this with game mechanics would be impractical and harmful to game-play, in my opinion, but I think it illustrates my point. How the money is handled by the player and any applicable faction should be up to them. As an aside, though, having the faction take all the reward is probably not such a good idea.)

People who offer bounties do so in order to get the people or ships in question destroyed or captured. They generally don't care how or who does it (though they sometimes have some reasonable restrictions).

On the other side of the table, corporations generally pay their employees in order to make a greater profit, directly or indirectly. Therefore, it makes little sense for corporations to prohibit their employees from accepting bounties on ships they destroy while working.

Employees of corporations are allowed to hunt (a controversial term, but have it mean whatever it should) pirates within certain boundaries. This, I feel, is a reasonable rule-based restriction; it is a compromise, but not too restrictive. Prohibiting (by server rules) the profiting by corporations of such activity is much too restrictive on role-play possibilities.

Corporations of Sirius are massive. They are veritably enormous and proverbially imposing. They sprawl horizontally and vertically with countless branches, divisions, and subsidiaries. Let's assume, for the sake of exemplifying, that one of these subsidiaries is some form of security company. This company would be as reliant on payment from their customers as any other company, and their customers would generally be people who want other people dead, captured, or neutralized for whatever reason. It makes perfect sense to me that a company like this would fulfill bounty contracts day in and day out. It also makes perfect sense to me that employees of a company such as this would use the ID of their parent corporation, since that would be the closest fit in determining their role (the supposed purpose of IDs).

I hope I have made my position clear.


EDIT post Benjamin's post:

Reciprocally, I am also one of Ben's peers in that I largely share the opinions he just posted.

---

<span style="font-family:Agency FB">Good Morning!</span>