Bounty Board Registration Requirements

[Silver]

I agree with rp consequences. Thing is, Liberty is cut and dry when it comes to mercenaries. They do not see them as tools, they see them as allies or enemies. Which counters the very definition of 'mercenary'. Loyalty to the contract and nothing more. Although it does tickle me silly the terrorist bit.

But yes. Your roleplay has consequences.

$_$

<3

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[8:32:45 PM] Dusty Lens: Oh no, let me get that. Hello? Oh it's my grandma. She says to be roleplay.
[12:12:00] Traxit: this is smut stop

[t0l]

NP, I'll just pull a BAF.

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[McNeo]

Yeah, they require you to be red to enemies - which you can do with a disruptor.

To the NPCs, not the player, pls Connor. The color of the player in question remains the same and reflects your reputation, while NPCs and bases may go red. It's why you can't get freelancers to be red on your freelancer when you engage them.

I suppose this is a valid point, although with bounties against those with faction tags or bounties on specific individuals, you probably dont need a screenshot of you engaging them. In fact, you can even get a targets ship/ID/cargo without revealing on your screens whether they're red or not, since their name in the interface will be yellow due to scanning - then you just gotta keep them off your screen.

As back towards the reputation problem - you're putting your inRP requirements for something you claim is ooRP broken and not working properly, while also claiming it's not your fault you demand so much from a system that's not meant to do what you want from it.

I didn't claim it was ooRP, I claimed it wasn't designed to be used in conjunction with bounty boards and yet remains the only way to see some detail about the person you're employing. Given how untrustworthy characters in disco are, and how easy lying is, you cannot seriously expect bounty board owners to just accept this as a fact of life.

As for checking if someone worked for your enemy - if it's bounties a simply google search with the following would work "site:discoverygc.com <playershipname>". You'll find that unless the person did a ton of roleplay you'll have bounty boards as first hits. And if you claim 'what about on the spot hiring?' - well those don't need you to be properly repped, nor does anyone check your rep before hiring you so it's a moot point.

That's called metagaming. It's like looking in a roleplay comms thread between the GRN and the KNF or something, just because it was on google. As for on-the-spot hiring, Im not sure how it's a moot point. This kind of hiring is for people in sticky situations or when they require a bit of extra help. There are pragmatic concerns here that governments do not need to abide by. But again, the easiest way of solving this problem is to leave standing orders that no mercenaries are to be hired outside of the bounty board... again, something that nobody wants.

EDIT because of your edit:
I see, so what you're saying is you made it so hard so people won't bother unless they really want to claim for Liberty. And then everyone says all mercs are unlawful in Liberty, I wonder why? But I guess it's your board and all, I'm just voicing my concern about how I feel things are.

The vast majority of mercs have been unlawful in Liberty since before there were bounty boards or even real laws. That argument doesn't wash with anybody who's been around in Liberty that long, I'm afraid.

[Backo]

Yeah, they require you to be red to enemies - which you can do with a disruptor.

To the NPCs, not the player, pls Connor. The color of the player in question remains the same and reflects your reputation, while NPCs and bases may go red. It's why you can't get freelancers to be red on your freelancer when you engage them.

I suppose this is a valid point, although with bounties against those with faction tags or bounties on specific individuals, you probably dont need a screenshot of you engaging them. In fact, you can even get a targets ship/ID/cargo without revealing on your screens whether they're red or not, since their name in the interface will be yellow due to scanning - then you just gotta keep them off your screen.

Fair point.

As back towards the reputation problem - you're putting your inRP requirements for something you claim is ooRP broken and not working properly, while also claiming it's not your fault you demand so much from a system that's not meant to do what you want from it.

I didn't claim it was ooRP, I claimed it wasn't designed to be used in conjunction with bounty boards and yet remains the only way to see some detail about the person you're employing. Given how untrustworthy characters in disco are, and how easy lying is, you cannot seriously expect bounty board owners to just accept this as a fact of life.

I'm fairly certain it's easy to spot when a reputation is just neutral because it's unattended and when it's full green in the top 3-4. Don't know why you gotta be picky about accidentals like the Hessian/Unioner issue which were obviously at /restart levels.

As for checking if someone worked for your enemy - if it's bounties a simply google search with the following would work "site:discoverygc.com <playershipname>". You'll find that unless the person did a ton of roleplay you'll have bounty boards as first hits. And if you claim 'what about on the spot hiring?' - well those don't need you to be properly repped, nor does anyone check your rep before hiring you so it's a moot point.

That's called metagaming. It's like looking in a roleplay comms thread between the GRN and the KNF or something, just because it was on google. As for on-the-spot hiring, Im not sure how it's a moot point. This kind of hiring is for people in sticky situations or when they require a bit of extra help. There are pragmatic concerns here that governments do not need to abide by. But again, the easiest way of solving this problem is to leave standing orders that no mercenaries are to be hired outside of the bounty board... again, something that nobody wants.

I agree the google example was metagaming, but I wanted to point out that if you -REALLY- wanted to make sure you don't get double mercs there are other ways.

As for the on the spot - you misunderstood the whole thing. What I meant was that on the spot hiring does not change a player's rep sheet at all. So if he was on the spot hired to kill navy, it won't be reflected in the repsheet.

EDIT because of your edit:
I see, so what you're saying is you made it so hard so people won't bother unless they really want to claim for Liberty. And then everyone says all mercs are unlawful in Liberty, I wonder why? But I guess it's your board and all, I'm just voicing my concern about how I feel things are.

The vast majority of mercs have been unlawful in Liberty since before there were bounty boards or even real laws. That argument doesn't wash with anybody who's been around in Liberty that long, I'm afraid.

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Republic of the Sword and Sun

[McNeo]

*moved the below from an edit in my previous post to a new post here.

Okay turns out Im not done yet.

Consider if the changes you want to see were made:

1. Average payout per kill going from 1.5m to 6-10m.
2. More relaxed signup requirements

Problems:

1. Why fly my [LN]/LN indie/LSF/whatever ship to shoot people for free, when I can fly my merc ship and get paid? I already know it happens with somebody in [LN] flying a DSE escort ship to claim on their quite generous internal faction bounty board, rather than helping me on their [LN] ship.

2. Assuming the amount of claims per time period stays the same, expenditure goes up by 4-6x. Now, my prediction would be that the amount of claims would actually go up because kills are more lucrative, and there are more people on the bounty board who can claim. Liberty is a very rich target environment, so comparing the Liberty Bounty Board to other boards isn't really fair.

Those two problems themselves bring up some serious issues. Firstly, where do we get the money from to pay? [LN] aren't traders, and I can't see the corporate factions footing the bill because it would be pretty expensive as well as require somebody to maintain a set of accounts. Base taxation legislation helps, but it wont be able to fill that gap. Secondly, in addition to paying generous bounties which would themselves be taxing on the financial resources these factions have in the long term, in order to stop members of lawful combat factions ([LN], =LSF=, LPI- or whatever their tag is), we'd also have to pay an internal wage. I once did wage calculations based on an hourly rate. At the time I did this, an [LN] member somehow managed to have 21 days of activity in a month - and believe me he wasn't idling. For a faction that, while I was in its HC, maintained an activity rate of 25-40 days per month, even a small rate of pay of, say, 100k/hour, results in a frankly eyewatering monthly wage bill.

There's lots of problems to solve, caused mostly by conditions unique to Liberty - that it's the centre of activity. In many ways, that's a good thing despite the sometimes questionable quality of interactions. But it is, at best, a mixed blessing.

[Backo]

Perhaps why not make a "you can't have your cake and eat it" exception? where only one of the two changes actually happens? I personally pointed both things, because they are the two things that bring merc attention - ease of use and payment. Didn't mean both should happen, in fact just one would be enough to bring a bit more mercenaries on Liberty's side in my opinion instead of scaring them away into the Reavers/LH/Rogg bounty boards.

Now that I'm actually registered on the Lib board I couldn't really care less for myself, I never played for the money and the paperwork is already done to some extent, I just need to post all the pew every once in a while and get a paycheck. Though others aren't like that, some actually merc for the money and considering how there's a bigger abundance of lawfuls than unlawfuls in Liberty, grouped with the annoying requirements of keeping a ton of different warring factions hostile and low pay, might just send them to the rogue board for hunting ln newbies.

Also I'll leave you an example of the flaws of requiring all the factions hostile:

Killing OC, Rogue, Unioner, Hacker, raises Xeno rep
Killing Xeno raises OC, Rogue, Unioner, Hacker rep
Killing Gallics raises Outcast rep and vice versa
Killing RM/BDM/etc raises Unioner, Hessian rep
Killing Hessians/Unioners raises RM/BDM rep

And as much as I try I keep having the xeno rep popping into neutral. As well as that I have given up on keeping the GRN hostile (shooting depots and NPCs) as it'll get the outcasts neutral again and that means the xenos will be neutral again once I shoot at Cali Base enough.

Now while most (maybe just not the lawfuls) are easy to keep at bay for a BHG ID that has rep adjustments, the FL ID is a free for all on any and all reputations.

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Republic of the Sword and Sun

[McNeo]

I would think that if only one of those two things were to be done, the other would become more difficult. For example if pay were to go up, the guys running the BB might really make it more difficult to register. If the registration became easier, the prices might even go down if they could. It's important to maintain this balance. The problems of increasing cost significantly have already been explained, but also having a lot of mercs "on your side" prowling around creates other issues. Firstly, a lot of mercs are difficult to direct and organise, and they end up competing with each other for kills. There's also the issue of "fair fights" if you can call it that. Getting piled on by Liberty Navy is already not fun, I dont think it's any better to be piled on by mercs as well. And then, if there are so many that they all do your job for you, what would make you fly your LN character?

I also appreciate that maintaining reps is really quite difficult, when you dont have an ID that locks them in for you. However that's not a new problem. It should be possible, perhaps even by equipping an ID that has the rephacks you want, then switching back to an FL ID and not shooting NPCs anymore. In fact that's easy now, in the past I remember seeing an almost fully neutral repsheet belonging to one of the IND guys, gained solely through shooting just the right amount of things all across Sirius.

Yeah, they require you to be red to enemies - which you can do with a disruptor.

To the NPCs, not the player, pls Connor. The color of the player in question remains the same and reflects your reputation, while NPCs and bases may go red. It's why you can't get freelancers to be red on your freelancer when you engage them.

I suppose this is a valid point, although with bounties against those with faction tags or bounties on specific individuals, you probably dont need a screenshot of you engaging them. In fact, you can even get a targets ship/ID/cargo without revealing on your screens whether they're red or not, since their name in the interface will be yellow due to scanning - then you just gotta keep them off your screen.

Fair point.

As back towards the reputation problem - you're putting your inRP requirements for something you claim is ooRP broken and not working properly, while also claiming it's not your fault you demand so much from a system that's not meant to do what you want from it.

I didn't claim it was ooRP, I claimed it wasn't designed to be used in conjunction with bounty boards and yet remains the only way to see some detail about the person you're employing. Given how untrustworthy characters in disco are, and how easy lying is, you cannot seriously expect bounty board owners to just accept this as a fact of life.

I'm fairly certain it's easy to spot when a reputation is just neutral because it's unattended and when it's full green in the top 3-4. Don't know why you gotta be picky about accidentals like the Hessian/Unioner issue which were obviously at /restart levels.

Unfortunately I don't really use /restarts so I wouldn't generally know what restart levels look like. But let's put it this way - if we accept it as an accidental, the mercenary in question could later decide that he wanted to sign up to the Hessian board in Rheinland as well. He can still do it now, but probably not with the same ship while maintaining a neutral rep to Liberty. It takes a good deal of effort to correctly balance a repsheet.

You might argue that, in this particular instance, signing up to the Hessian BB is inconsequential to Liberty, since it might even help Liberty's ends in damaging Rheinland. However, evidently the Hessians' interests run contrary to the interests of Liberty, so serving both can be seen as counterproductive. The Hessians might be fine with that, but whether Liberty is or not is decided by them.

I also remembered that Hessians have fought Liberty in Hudson - we had an event there where if the RHA won, they would get a Lib forward gun to help explain the presence of the forward gun on the Hessian battleship. The drama surrounding that is another matter however. As you will note, Bering and Hudson have now more or less been occupied by Liberty, after Rheinland conceded them by blowing up the gates.

As for checking if someone worked for your enemy - if it's bounties a simply google search with the following would work "site:discoverygc.com <playershipname>". You'll find that unless the person did a ton of roleplay you'll have bounty boards as first hits. And if you claim 'what about on the spot hiring?' - well those don't need you to be properly repped, nor does anyone check your rep before hiring you so it's a moot point.

That's called metagaming. It's like looking in a roleplay comms thread between the GRN and the KNF or something, just because it was on google. As for on-the-spot hiring, Im not sure how it's a moot point. This kind of hiring is for people in sticky situations or when they require a bit of extra help. There are pragmatic concerns here that governments do not need to abide by. But again, the easiest way of solving this problem is to leave standing orders that no mercenaries are to be hired outside of the bounty board... again, something that nobody wants.

I agree the google example was metagaming, but I wanted to point out that if you -REALLY- wanted to make sure you don't get double mercs there are other ways.

As for the on the spot - you misunderstood the whole thing. What I meant was that on the spot hiring does not change a player's rep sheet at all. So if he was on the spot hired to kill navy, it won't be reflected in the repsheet.

Nobody should resort to metagaming to decide on somebody's inRP employment as a merc. If I wanted to find out, I could doing it like how you said, but if we did, we'd not be really obeying the spirit of discovery as a roleplaying server.

That's true - but if you shot at somebody important, you'll definitely be remembered. I'm sure somebody's tried it on before. That said, the general way to get around this is using the renameme command, which incidentally is also why lists of criminals dont work.

EDIT because of your edit:
I see, so what you're saying is you made it so hard so people won't bother unless they really want to claim for Liberty. And then everyone says all mercs are unlawful in Liberty, I wonder why? But I guess it's your board and all, I'm just voicing my concern about how I feel things are.

The vast majority of mercs have been unlawful in Liberty since before there were bounty boards or even real laws. That argument doesn't wash with anybody who's been around in Liberty that long, I'm afraid.

I agree with rp consequences. Thing is, Liberty is cut and dry when it comes to mercenaries. They do not see them as tools, they see them as allies or enemies. Which counters the very definition of 'mercenary'. Loyalty to the contract and nothing more. Although it does tickle me silly the terrorist bit.

But yes. Your roleplay has consequences.

$_$

<3

I played Tom Clancy's Hawx once. The mercenary the main character played didn't seem to care so much about the contract once it told him to shoot at the country he used to serve (and got made redundant by). There are many different kinds of mercenaries - what you describe as the 'definition' is actually just a type of mercenary. A type that most people like to roleplay because they're not tied down by family, friends, nationality or anything else. It's actually very one-dimensional because of this - this kind of character has no emotional weakness, so you can be a badass 100% of the time without consequence. Unfortunately, that's not how people really work.

[Silver]

There are consequences no doubt. But to the point of the word 'mercenary', you go by the definition. I can be a teary eye merc that does not kill for cash. Not a mercenary in the true form. More like a kid that didn't got a carreer interview when getting out of high school.

The example you mentioned is what i call a Mando, an ally or basically your run of the mill loyal helper. Tied to their root contracts, loyalties and agreements. I'm sorry, but that isn't a mercenary.

And instead of pulling an example out of a game that we can barely relate to in this roleplay server, i will pull an example from here, that happened in roleplay and that is the very example of a mercenary.

Kaze Dagon.

Yep.

Shooting good ol' Liberty Lawfuls during the Merc Wars caused by Mara's (Ench) 1 Billion contract, making a killing (in both aspects, money wise and blue wise).
Until Fleet Admiral David Hale hired her (Yeeeeep) to go scout Gallia for some nifty bonuses.
Which she did. Without a problem. It was business.
And thinking outside of the Liberty Government box.

Now that is a mercenary. Working for the highest bidder.

And the really bad people do work like that, didn't you knew?

<3

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[8:32:45 PM] Dusty Lens: Oh no, let me get that. Hello? Oh it's my grandma. She says to be roleplay.
[12:12:00] Traxit: this is smut stop

[McNeo]

I would imagine that mercenaries that take work against a house are not seen as mercenaries by that house, but as terrorists. People seem to have short memories of folks who work against them - their prerogative I guess.

GK Sierra comes to mind.
Oh me and my big mouth.

<3

Im afraid you're the one who pulled the example. I pulled one in response. At least mine is fiction, like FL.

Here's the wikipedia entry on mercenaries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercenary

Quite a list of irrelevant criteria - the only thing related to your point is that they do it for "private gain". That could include money, but doesn't need to - and that is to say nothing about salaries that real servicemen get paid.

Your definition is incomplete and oversimplified.

[Silver]

I would imagine that mercenaries that take work against a house are not seen as mercenaries by that house, but as terrorists. People seem to have short memories of folks who work against them - their prerogative I guess.

GK Sierra comes to mind.
Oh me and my big mouth.

<3

Im afraid you're the one who pulled the example. I pulled one in response. At least mine is fiction, like FL.

Here's the wikipedia entry on mercenaries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercenary

Quite a list of irrelevant criteria - the only thing related to your point is that they do it for "private gain". That could include money, but doesn't need to - and that is to say nothing about salaries that real servicemen get paid.

Your definition is incomplete and oversimplified.

At least i pulled a real life example. Not a fairy tale where you control shadow ninja that can kill 5000 armed assailants/security/bosses that try to sideswipe governments with epic doomsday device / Illuminati like group going all heathens on earth, and still have 80% reliable intel on the enemy.

Cute.

Like your badass without feelings quote.

My point of view is of a mercenary being paid to what they do, you know, that personal gain (after all, humans are all greedy). The government point of view is using tools to get rid of problems.
Liberty does not do that.

<3

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[8:32:45 PM] Dusty Lens: Oh no, let me get that. Hello? Oh it's my grandma. She says to be roleplay.
[12:12:00] Traxit: this is smut stop