I came up with a proposal similar to the Suspect Timer proposal that addresses a lot of the issues I felt the original proposal had. It also co-exists nicely with the Warp Jam proposal I’ve advocated thus far; I feel both should be implemented.
First, let me highlight ways in which the original Suspect Timer proposal can be exploited: suppose that Alice is flying Bowhead and Bob is her fleetmate. Bob is attacked by Charlie (who is not a legal target for Alice). The idea behind the proposal is that if at some point Bob deposits/swaps his ship into Alice’s Bowhead then Alice gets suspect timer
- What if David comes along to attack Bob alongside Charlie. If Alice cannot legally attack Charlie but can legally attack David - would her support to Bob make her suspect since Bob is engaged with both a legal target (David) and non-legal target (Charlie)?
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If Alice should go suspect, we have an exploit: if you want to prevent Bob from using Alice’s Bowhead to prevent Alice from going suspect/force Bob to use Alice’s Bowhead and make her suspect, simply bring a neutral ship to the fight and fire at Bob. Whereas the threat of suspect might not have existed previously, Bob can’t reship now that he is engaged with an entity legally neutral to Alice. The neutral ship would be CONCORDed, but losing a Velator is worth making a Bowhead go flashy or at least preventing Bob from reshipping to prevent the Bowhead going flashy. Limited engagement timers take a while to drop, after all. (Technically the ship need only be neutral to Alice, not Bob.)
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If Alice should not go suspect, we have an exploit: a third fleetmate could legally engage both Alice and Bob, thereby guaranteeing Bob is able to use Alice’s Bowhead regardless of who else Alice and Bob are engaged with.
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The existence of both these exploits in both directions highlights one reason why it is inherently flawed to assign a suspect timer to a Bowhead in mixed-fleet engagement. Another reason is that since no direct action was take by Alice, a suspect timer should not be imposed on her due to the actions of a fleetmate (at least with getting suspect via killright activation, you were directly responsible for earning it). This is similar to how your faction standings aren’t being dropped just because your fleetmates are killing rats or failing/double-declining missions. A third reason is that the suspect timer itself is disproportionately harsh of a penalty to Alice’s passive support of Bob, which itself is not necessarily criminal in nature. This is especially true in the context of Orca supporting barges in mining operations that come under fire from ANY entity regardless of legality. An Orca defending their fleet should not go suspect just because the legalities of combat vary from each pair of individuals between the mining fleet and the attacking fleet. There are yet more reasons.
There may be a compromise however (if this was previously mentioned in this thread, then major oversight on my part): what if, instead of being assigned a suspect timer, Alice inherited all of Bob’s limited engagement timers at the time of the deposit/swap? this would eliminate both exploit issues because it literally wouldn’t matter who the combatants were or what their relation with Alice is since the outcome is the same in both cases, and would enable relevant combatants to engage Alice without the threat of Alice becoming global. This is particularly relevant to mining fleet: Orcas should not go global just because Hulks managed to park before neutral suicide ganking Catalysts killed them. Otherwise a single Catalyst needs to make a feint against a Hulk, and once they take the bait then the rest would gank the Orca once its suspect, which is stupid. The more targets that engaged Bob before he reshipped, the more limited engagement timers Alice inherits from Bob, and the more liable she and her Bowhead/Orca is to be ganked by those targets in Hisec - this is directly proportional the the scale of the engagement, but not excessively so since she does not receive a global suspect timer.
The only real concern with this proposal: should there be a toggle setting, set by the mothership pilot, to prohibit fleetmates who have active limited engagements from reshipping? Since this is not something that could be disabled via Green Safety as was the case in the Suspect Timer proposal, I feel this toggle setting would be necessary. If enabled, only fleetmates with no active limited engagement times would be able to reship (thereby preventing you from getting attacked due your fleetmates reshipping), and when disabled then any fleetmate can reship at any time, thereby incurring whatever their limited engagement timers are at that given time (guaranteed to be less severe than global suspect). There currently exists a toggle for whether or not to permit fleetmates to reship - instead of adding a second toggle on top of that (which would be confusing and unnecessarily complex), the existing switch could simply be updated to a three setting switch: Allow all reshipping, allow safe reshipping only, and do not allow any reshipping.
Note that the Inherited Limited Engagement Timers proposal can be combined with the Warp Jam proposal to penalize both Alice (neutral mothership) and Bob (coward), though Alice only gets penalized if Bob succeeds to reship before being warp jammed:
- Warp Jam proposal: If Bob is warp jammed, he cannot reship at mothership. This inhibits Bob’s cowardly intentions. By itself, this proposal does not enable the mothership to be attackable - a mothership will not be penalized for something it was present for but didn’t actually do (offer reshipping). The same warp jam criteria would be used that determines whether a player can dock/tether to a POS. (I don’t remember if you can dock/tether if you are scrammed specifically but core strength remains non-negative - either way, the conditions should be consistent between the two).
- Inherited Limited Engagement Timers proposal (modification of Suspect Timer proposal): Alice inherits all of Bob’s limited engagement timers at the time of reship (if he manages to do so because he was not warp jammed per previous proposal), thereby making Alice liable to die, just in a less drastic manner as a suspect timer would (otherwise Orcas would cease to exist in HS mining ops). This proposal permits continued use of neutral Bowheads in HS (which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing), but they’ll need more defensive support since, unlike the way things are now, they can actually be killed by non-neutrals AFTER fleetmates reship via inherited limited engagement timers…
I feel both proposals should be implemented.