/confiscate command

[sovereign]

Regardless of abuse potential, this will not do anything.

You can't take what has already been sold. It takes maybe ten seconds to go to the commodity trader and unload your load of cardi if you go straight for it. How many people can type out "/confiscate {(&^@absurdforeignname cardamine" in ten seconds? I'm a fast typer, and that took me longer than it would for me to sell my cargo. I don't think I need to explain the horrific abuse potential of a command that removes credits from other people's ships, especially if lag occurs and multiple policemen enter it at roughly the same time.

I've an idea that is A) less open to abuse and B) might actually work. A command wherein you, a Police ID'd player, set it such that if your target tries to dock within the next thirty seconds their illegal cargo is confiscated. It will, of course, notify them. Such a thing would represent the police red-flagging a transport to be caught by customs officers or something.

This would solve the issue of people simply ignoring dock orders while under fire from police players- without completely destroying their chance to talk their way out of it. Unfortunately... I haven't thought of a set of conditions wherein it isn't possible to "snipe" people who may or may not have already negotiated/paid fines/etc. You do your talking and enter dock animations thinking you're safe, suddenly you get the message after you can't exit the docking animation and lose all of your cargo. I wish I could say that people wouldn't be so capricious as to have pleasant interactions with their fellow players and then nail them after they think everything went well, but certain recent events make that a naive opinion.

Any technical thoughts on how you might get around the "sniping" problem with such a system?

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