What mechanics are you talking about? Do you mean that all alliances participating in a fleet running an ice heist should merge into a single corporation?
Is that the mechanic that’s supposed to be used?
What’s so complicated about splitting fleets into two types?
What’s so complicated about giving players a filter that allows or prevents them from joining those fleets?
You haven’t provided a single abuse scenario for the proposal that emerged during this discussion.
You’re talking about existing mechanics, but mechanics from nullsec have already been introduced into lowsec, and new content (pirate insurgencies) has been added targeting FW players, which requires revisiting existing mechanics to restore balance.
Where previously neutral fleets had little reason to interact with FW players and drone ships were less common, now this happens frequently.
We still have the same old smartbomb mechanics. You’re saying we should rely on existing mechanics—but I’m saying that using them properly requires changes. They don’t work effectively as-is.
You mentioned the old “lofty” scam. That scenario relied on one key thing: players being unknowingly placed into a situation where friendly fire was possible.
My proposal explicitly prevents that.
- A fleet must be created with friendly fire enabled from the start
- It cannot be switched afterward
- A pilot must explicitly allow joining such fleets via a personal setting
This setting should be disabled by default
Without that setting enabled, joining such fleets is impossible
This means you cannot trick players into a fleet and then enable friendly fire, nor can you bring in unaware participants at all.
So the original abuse scenario is not applicable here.
At the same time, I do see a potential abuse scenario in highsec related to suspect timers when leaving such fleets, and I am explicitly proposing a way to prevent it.
In lowsec (and below), a pilot who leaves a fleet with friendly fire enabled — or disconnects — would receive a 30-second suspect timer. This prevents situations where someone leaves the fleet and is accidentally hit by smartbombs, causing unintended standings or legal consequences for the rest of the fleet.
In highsec, no suspect timer would be applied on leaving the fleet.
This removes the possibility of abuse in highsec while still addressing the actual problem in environments where these mechanics are relevant.
What abuse scenarios do you see, given a split between fleets with friendly fire enabled and disabled, along with a player-side toggle that determines whether they can join friendly-fire fleets?
What existing mechanics already allow full use of smartbombs within fleets, considering their demand in updated faction warfare and in inter-alliance faction fleets, which are now the norm? What exactly do you mean?
I believe it would be possible to create two subclasses from the existing fleet class and add properties like “friendly fire on” and “friendly fire off.” It would also make sense to add a property to the character that is checked before joining a fleet, as well as a flag indicating how the character left the fleet within the last 30 seconds.
Of course, developers write code with future changes and extensions in mind. They use interfaces to work with entities in an abstract way.
These kinds of changes don’t seem particularly complex to me.