Yeah sure, but that doesn’t seem to change the discussion at all.
If the implication is they use PLEX instead of subscription, then in a pure $ term that would be a worse outcome for CCP if they stopped playing.
But, Goons were just an example. Not really worth getting hung up on that.
The whole mass “PLEX for subs” thing is, and forever will be, utterly irrelevant to CCP in terms of real world finances. Whether a player (or even a massive bloc of players) pays for their subscriptions directly or by PLEX, CCP is getting paid because someone had to buy those PLEX from CCP.
ISK inflation/manipulation is still an issue obviously, but as long as people still need to pay X dollars for Y amount of PLEX to keep a subscription running (and enough people keep playing as Omegas), CCP’s bottom line is just fine.
(Emphasis mine)
This is the fundamental flaw in your thinking. You choose to not do anything about it, but you certainly have options. Wardec? Shoot -5s in hisec? Suicide gank the non-criminal support (bumpers/haulers) yourself? All of the tools that the criminals use are available to you. You’re simply choosing to ignore them because you’re either too cheap to pay for a wardec or value your sec status too much to take the law into your own hands.
EvE isn’t about handing retribution to players on a silver platter. If you want to dish it out, you have to work for it.
As for the rest of your replies to my post, all I will say is that as someone who, in a past life, made a career out of manipulating mechanics like this in the ways I described, I assure you that others absolutely would do the things I described, and otherwise innocent players and corps would suffer unnecessary losses from it.
Try to war dec a corp that has no structures. Furthermore, I do not see why I should pay 500M + 100M each weak to hunt criminals or organizations that house criminals.
Read above. The criminal offenders are docked most of the time and only come out of their NPC station hiding when they strike.
That is an option but then I have to invest hundreds of millions again to hunt criminals and organizations that house criminals. Not to mention that those organizations can easily replace the loss of a Machariel or Typhoon or Stabber, while I have much higher expenses to hunt the criminals.
Everything you suggested protects criminals more than it helps those who want to hunt them. That is your fundamentally flawed approach to the matter.
That flag is not handing retribution on a silver platter either. It simply makes retribution and hunting professions possible in the first place. And it requires a choice – something that used to be held in high regard in EVE in the past – from corps: Do you want to be the bad guy then live with the consequences, or do you want to oust the bad apples in your group?
With all due respect to your assurance but how about providing a specific example? How would you manipulate this feature? All I hear is abuse, abuse, abuse, but not a single time has someone come up with a specific example of an abuse that I have not proven wrong with already laid out provisions. You cannot just join a corp and go on a criminal rampage unnoticed. That’s what the thresholds are there for. You cannot stay in a corp forever if the CEO/directors/other officers respond to your criminal actions and flag you to be kicked on the next possible opportunity. You can setup your corp so that you cannot even begin to engage in criminal activity if the FF toggle is applied properly.
Recycling alts is a thing but that is not relevant for this feature because literally everything breaks with recycling of alts. Want to hide your affiliation to hostile factions to join your war opponents as a spy? New alt. Want to go back into FW to murder your fellow soldiers? New alt. Want to spy on your war dec opponents or make the war targets engage something so that you can attack them? Nurture an alt in the respective groups. Want to lure newbies into a corp in a specific area that you then war dec and farm the newbies for a few hours until they don’t log in anymore. Want to manipulate markets in null sec? Alts. Farm in your enemies’ territory while they fight you? Alts. Alts are not an argument against this feature.
You are also way too focused on ganking in high sec. This another flaw in your argument and that of that other person. It is only one aspect of many applications of this feature. Another aspect that you keep forgetting about are groups like Seven-Sins, Siege Green, Pen is out and many other low sec dwellers that would be much easier to engage as well, both in high sec and in low sec.
If the people you want to shoot are perpetually docked in stations…how would your proposed changes make it any easier to shoot them? If one of your main reasons to want this change totally undermines your change, you may want to rethink things.
(Side note, many of the top criminal corps and alliances, .CODE. in particular, do rely on anchored structures in hisec, so they’re wide open to being wardecced. Chances are that they’d actually enjoy it.)
Your provisions assume a perfect and immediate response by a CEO or a director. And even then, your provisions are flawed.
As a former CEO and director, I can tell you that this is rarely the case.
Let me further break down the examples that I already provided, and you discounted out of hand, so you better understand what I’m talking about:
In the first example, you are CEO running a corporation that is criminally flagged under your new system. You go about inviting unsuspecting players, preferably new-ish mission runners in PvE-fit battleships, to join your corp. The moment they join, they are subject to destruction in hisec from anyone. It doesn’t matter if Friendly Fire is disabled in your corporation. You’re not shooting your mark because they’re in your corporation, you’re shooting your mark because they are now suddenly a permanent criminal because they are in your corporation. (In fact, having Friendly Fire disabled would likely help lure in unsuspecting players.) To make things even worse, if you set your corporation up properly, you could immediately (and safely) promote them to the rank of director so that they are trapped in your corporation for 24 hours. Variations of this approach are referred to as a “Reverse Safari”: recruiting players into your corp specifically to get free kills against them. They were quite common in the days before disabling “Friendly Fire” was an option. (The original “Safari” is joining a corp before “Friendly Fire” could be disabled, or in corps where it is enabled, and blasting the hell out of your new corpmates.)
In the second example it’s an even more straightforward affair. You and four of your alts, all miners, haulers, and/or industrialists with no killboard presence to speak of, decide to join a corporation. This is a pretty common event, especially among PvE-oriented corporations. In less than three hours, you and your alts can commit 50 criminal acts (10 acts per account, at 15 minutes per act) to get the entire corporation flagged as criminal for some period of time. Finding a three hour window where the CEO/directors of a corporation are all offline is not all that hard to do. Depending on the timing, you could either shut down a corporation until the corp-wide criminal flag wore off, or cause expensive losses of ships flown by unaware pilots. This only takes two accounts (they don’t even have to be paid accounts) and a little planning; a trivial amount of effort for a lone player. A small team of players could do the same to an entire alliance in the same amount of time or less.
In general, when someone who’s been playing EvE for more than 10 years says that some mechanic can be abused, you should trust them because it’s very likely because they’ve already seen a similar mechanic abused in that way.
(DISCLAIMER: I’m using “abuse” in this context in the sense of unintended, emergent gameplay behavior arising from game mechanics, not violating CCP’s TOS regarding abusing other players or taking advantage of declared exploits.)
What does your post change about it being emergent social content? Nothing at all. Go suck a duck, you embarrassingly fluid hamster stool.
It shows that you have not read the suggestion. Please go to the first post and read it again. I have explained what this features is supposed to do. The criminals themselves are not the primary target.
The provisions do not require a direct, immediate response. You cannot get 50 criminal acts in a few minutes. You have to go criminal again and again for at least 12.5 hours. Each criminal timer runs 15 minutes, remember.
That is not an abuse that is unknown to EVE. You can already do that with wars. People see if this flag is active or not. If they still join, it is their own choice. You can read about this flag and what it does and allows other people to do and why this corp/alliance is flagged like this. That is not a specific thing against this feature and it anything but an abuse.
That is patently false. You can quit your corp immediately into an NPC corp regardless of roles.
And that was bad? If I remember, EVE thrived much more back in those days than it does now.
That is still 3 hours in which a CEO/director/other officer can flag you for a corp kick and the flag still does not go into effect immediately but after a waiting time similar to wars, as outlined in the first post. Furthermore, doing that kind of shrewd tactic is something that used to be cherished in the past when people lauded corp thieves and other mischievous people for their acts. What you describe is not different at all. It simply puts a bit of risk into corps again that do not setup their corp properly with the available tools to prevent accidents.
Good. Maybe these alliances learn to setup their organization better in the future.
If your assertions only where anything but avoidable. You still have not shown an abuse that was not already thought about and countered with some mechanics. You still have not shown something that is not already possible with other activities (wars, for instance) or not avoidable with the outlined countermeasures.
Considering how badly you comprehend the suggestion and how wrong you are about basic gameplay features surrounding corp mechanics, I do not see a good reason why I should “trust someone who has played EVE for 10 years with their assumptions”. 
But I am still genuinely interested in a true abuse of specifically this suggested feature. The more I know about possible abuses, the better I can come up with countermeasures.
How about a warning before you join a criminal corporation, just like for taking gates into low security space, or going through a wormhole?
15 minutes per act? Two and a half hours. If the ‘minimum standings’ threshold was set to 0 or greater, they’re getting auto kicked pretty swiftly if the standings loss is proportionate to the ISK involved.
This is all stuff CCP can fix, if they choose to. Choose not to fix all of the required ‘glue’ and of course, the whole mechanic and intent falls to the floor.
True, yet even CCP ignored the many veterans who pointed out entosis would lead to trollceptors and as predicted they were a thing for a long time.
Your first post is, quite frankly, rather vague. It mentions people committing criminal acts being hard to engage (which isn’t true incidentally, they’re no harder to engage than non-criminals avoiding getting caught by other players), but nothing about certain people remaining docked and wanting to fight them. It seems like you have one idea in your head (which I’d love to see you fully articulate), but your original post doesn’t seem to be reflecting that. You say that you want to get more fights (which, incidentally, I totally support), but you don’t explain how your changes will actually do that since you can already shoot criminals, and non-criminals in these corps will just move to another non-criminal corp to keep supporting their former corp-mates.
EDIT: Some other unresolved issues in your original post:
What would happen to any structures owned by such a criminally-flagged corp/alliance? Would they be open season for anyone in hisec, or would you still need to wardec them in order to attack?
You mention “criminal activity” in hisec and losec counting towards the limit. As per my earlier comment, does attacking another ship in losec (not a pod) count as a criminal activity or not? It does lower your security status, but it’s hardly the same response as getting CONCORDOKEN.
So…you’re acknowledging that your changes would present unintended risks to corporations and alliances? And if that’s the case, then everything I’m saying is true.
You’re not doing a particularly good job of making your point here…
Quoting this for posterity. I was a loud and vocal opponent to the original Entosis mechanics for precisely that reason.
It seems that you can do 8 criminal acts in 15 minutes by flying in a destroyer into any busy place in highsec, targeting 8 people and attacking each of them. Or this counts as one offense?
That’s a really good question. You get the security status hit from each hostile act, but you only get criminally flagged once.
But why stop there? Plop a smartbombing battleship along a warp vector to a gate on a busy trade route. Who knows how many you’d get? Heck, if you time it right, you could get all 50 at one go.
I’m pretty sure you can get criminal flagged in low sec. Pod kills I believe used to do it? Of course it does nothing, but you could rack up criminal flags in no time that way, Since there is no cool down period.
The first post is absolutely crystal clear about what I want to achieve with this feature:
There is no ambiguity in this sentence. I want to see a corp and/or alliance to be freely engageable if that corp/alliance houses people that committed enough criminal activities to warrant the flag. It doesn’t matter if the high sec gankers stay docked. I want to make people who live with gankers or other criminals to experience consequences for the actions their group endeavors in. There is no vagueness.
They cannot do that in the same alliance if this feature were introduced. They’d have to be in different alliances or mechanics-wise unrelated corps. No one in CONDI or TEST or another big ganker group will leave their alliance just because some portions of their alliance mates keep podding people in low sec or gank in high sec. And even if they did change corps to stay unflagged, that would be a good consequence.
If that structure belonged to a flagged corp, it would be open season.
I have answered that question already. Attacking a ship in low sec is not a criminal activity and thus does not count towards the flag status. As stated above, only actual criminal actions matter.
This is also one of the main goals of this feature: make more people available to shoot in low sec without screwing up your security status all the time. Why should you lose security status for shooting someone from Pen is out or Siege Green or other notorious low sec groups when lots of people in their groups have committed tons of criminal acts? That’s my main aim for this feature.
I do not acknowledge that. What I wrote above requires the same diligence as it does now with structures and war eligibility and the current iteration of the FF toggle. There are no different unintended risks to corps or alliances than with wars.
The criminal flag is 15 minutes long. A criminal act towards the flag status would only count with every new criminal flag after a previous flag ran out. If you keep smartbombing, the same criminal flag renews and no new flag is created. I mentioned above (#47) already that you need new flags to increase the flag counter and you even used the same timer as basis for your post #45.
Podding is, however.
That is correct and it is intentional that podding as a criminal flagged activity counts towards the flag status.
(Emphasis added)
Okay, so you’ve expanded from simple hisec gankers and single players abusing this mechanic to the nullsec blocs and hisec structures. Which is great for proving my point actually
Remember that scenario I described previously, where a single player with two accounts could get a small corporation criminally flagged in under three hours? It’s not too hard to imagine that a large nullsec bloc (Goonswarm^ in particular comes to mind, they’re excellent at gaming mechanics like this) using the same tactic to get a corporation or alliance flagged instantly, with no recourse on the part of the target corporation. Over time, put the necessary number of alts into the target corporation, each with an active player, and simultaneously commit as many criminal acts as necessary to flag a corporation. It would be as simple as placing the 50 alts on top of each other in space and having them all activate a single smartbomb at the same time. With the thousands of players CONDI has, and their proven ability to coordinate mass player actions like this, such a move would be trivial.
Why bother wardec a large opponent (making yourself vulnerable in the process) to destroy one of their valuable hisec structures when you can just make it open season for literally anyone who wants to shoot it?
Your safeguards are worthless, and the consequences are sweeping. Players, either single or in groups, will bypass them and do untold damage to corporations large and small. I keep pointing out how to you, and you keep disregarding my examples. I don’t know what else I can do to make you understand just how fundamentally broken this idea is.
^ I listed Goonswarm as an example because you mentioned them in your last post, but do you think for a second that .CODE. wouldn’t do the exact same thing to make a juicy target available? This would be the ultimate suicide ganking tool; using suicide ganking to enable a structure to be destroyed.
Yes totally agree, though that also completely misses the point of what I wrote.
You glossed over my post that said the corporation would have 24 hours notice to boot out the offenders before the criminality was applied, just like how corporations that loose standings in fw get a grace period before being dropped from fw
Factional war is not a good comparison, since in it hostility is lost after grace period, and in this proposal it is gained.
War declaration is better. Basically, it is a free war declaration, yes.