Ship Cripple on Death

[McNeo]

I guess when you put out a good argument, most people just put their fingers in their ears and talk like broken records.

I guess my point is that I can see this change limiting as much good RP as it creates. What if someone plays a suicidal or thoughtless character that is supposed to engage anything he sees. The SCRA SCUD squads were pretty fun to encounter, why should we punish that with the bill for repairing their nova launchers? I've had one or two positive responses to my Marauder Hegemon (inspired and adapted from the Reavers in Firefly), which if it came across a battleship would very clearly attempt to pirate it and attack (unsuccessfully I'm sure).

That's great. It's also completely stupid behaviour. Idiots tend to get punished with death, and that's something that out here, beyond the pixels, you don't come back from.

What is the basis for you having a suicidal character, or for there to be a suicide squad? RP? That's RP? Actually, to people who want to be immersed in the games they play, suicidal characters who somehow don't die are completely game-breaking. I'm not too familliar with the SCRA's policies, but I am very familliar indeed with the Hellfire Legion's tendancy to take their pair of battleships into New York, sit on top of manhattan and wait to get swarmed. Sure, it's "fun", but to deal with something like that every day? Same goes in reverse too, how can Liberty really prevent three of their dreadnoughts driving up to New Berlin, or Jarek in his great big RMBS visiting New York every four hours? In both cases, FR5s or disciplinary action ensued, but the only thing that stopped it is that they got bored. Can you really say that's right?

There needs to be a mechanism to stop rash, stupid fleet movements that make no sense. The motivation to avoid those out here is death. The motivation ingame is currently what?

However, in RP the captain of the capital ship doesn't pay for it, the state does.

So you've seen a problem. Sit on it a while and come up with an idea on how to solve it. I've got a pretty good idea knocking around in my head but I doubt those who would be required to do the leg work would see it as a neccessary idea. Suffice to say, it involves an as yet uncreated FLhook plugin that measures commodity purchases and sales in an area that a government owns, generates a new body of credits based on "taxes" of trade (without impacting the sale/purchase price of the commodities), tallying it up and directing the credits to an account that a government can draw upon. That's the basic framework, which encourages governments to promote trade and such. Contraband would have a negative impact on that figure if they reached the point of sale.

In the end, it's not about being realistic. This, plainly, isn't a realistic policy; if it was, we'd be arguing about ship loss. This is about providing an incentive to stop people being stupid and cutting themselves off from safe harbour, or isolating themselves to die. That makes this game less about hopping into your ship to drive around to your enemy's base and shoot their stuff, and more about making people think about what they're going to do, and how it's going to cost them.

Right now, I can and I do pay next to nothing to fly around in hostile territory. It doesn't scare me to do it, and it is, I hate to say, just as cheap in a battleship as it is in a fighter. I've got 400 million from scraping together everything I had and selling some stuff I used to own. That's enough to last me a year, provided I die on three characters every day. How on earth is that even close to believable? In fact, I've survived half of that for the past two years. I haven't traded more than about six hours in that two year period. Is that supposed to be possible?

Also, bombers can kill most light caps before fighters can kill them if they have any skill at all. I don't ever fly battleships so the stubborn armor that they enjoy and that also gives them time is not available on cruisers and battle cruisers. Sure, I am positive some pilots will say olololicanhaz bomber kill in 5 seconds with 1337 pwnage get escort n00b, but if the only time you get to play is when there are 60 people on the server and 90% of the time your escort consists of new players who you are trying to help get setup, lolbombers are going to pick you apart pretty quickly.

If you don't fly around in a dangerous way, then you wont be killed, and you wont have to pay a repair bill. If you do, then it's your own bloody fault. As for escorts, as I said, Sina manages to find some very talented friends to fly with him and generally have a bit of fun, what stops you from doing the same? There's also a similar risk for bombers with such a system, as if they die, they pay for a repair bill on a supernova and/or nova, and they aren't that cheap. It encourages people to think twice, and that's the point. Plus, as I said, a scheme like this should be accompanied with a general strengthening of the capital ships (otherwise you'll get something like the barge killing club thread that Akura started, if anyone remembers that). Right now, caps are balanced to be beaten by fighters and bombers fairly easily because they're just as cheap to run. If they weren't, then it isn't unreasonable to expect that cap pilots want more bang for their buck. This would be possible and balanced as those caps would be around less.