The other day I was thinking, and wouldn’t it be nice if the role of punishment be given to the players?
Normally the only way to get on a criminal ship kill is to be lucky get a good target lock and at least activate some sort of aggressive module before Concord blaps the target.
My idea is simple, instead of having Concord kill a criminal ship quickly, just have them lock it down first. They can instant warp scram, jam, nuet, and web like they usually do. But instead of immediately finishing them off, you could put in say a 1 minute timer to allow any player to engage and kill the criminal ship. If no one engages the ship within 1 minute Concord goes back to normal behavior, but if someone does engage the ship or multiple parties engage the ship, Concord will hold fire for say 5-10 minutes to allow the players to get the kill. The reason I would put a timer on it is to prevent someone from taking hours in a rookie ship for example. If the timer runs out concord gives the final blow and finishes the criminal’s ship off.
This change would give new players the chance to experience first blood, allow pve centrist players to dabble in pvp and maybe change their interests, and even open up a new playstyle of punisher and executioner. It would still not make highsec too safe, and not hurt ganking too substantially.
This idea has already been addressed several times. You can play the role of Concord right now, no changes required. Simply find suspects and criminals and light them up. And how, exactly, would this introduce players to PvP? In PvP the other ship fights back, not just sitting there locked down by Concord waiting for you to end them…
Since we are not living inside the game, since we come here to play not to live, since we have real life we can’t put a regulation role to players.
Morever there are more automatic mechanisms of sanctioning required.
No. The cost imposed by the loss of a ship to CONCORD is the major, and pretty much only purpose of them at this point. Weakening them so that criminal acts don’t always have that consequences is a bad idea.
That said, changing the Faction Police to better fill a role like you describe might be a better idea. It seems that they were originally designed with being an influencer on player interactions, but as they are they are too powerful and predictable to leave much room for player police.
Making room for player police would require a lot of simultaneous changes to CrimeWatch and I’d love to see it someday, I am just not very optimistic it will happen soon if ever.