Since they were warp scrambled, they couldn’t dock into the structure. The simple solution would be to apply that same mechanic to storing ships into other ships. Not possible if pointed.
It is just troublesome because being the “mothership” is passive. Couldn’t we just put a 60 second weapons timer on any ship that lets somebody use its bay or fitting service? That seems consistent with the fleet boosts.
I have said, for years, that we need “incident reports” instead of just kill/loss mails so non-combatant roles can have a record of survivability.
Buuuuuuutttttt. No. Hurr durr PVP sanbox murr murr murr.
Like when you guys started screaming for wreck HP increase the day we started popping them?
Don’t be such a gamma. Not everybody lives purely on lies.
You are very dramatic. Please continue.
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Why? It won’t elevate your status.
Because it entertains me.
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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.
Would that logically follow to DSTs receiving loot, then getting a flag?
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I said weapons timer, not flag.
Why make the distinction, others earlier in the thread wanted to treat PIRAT and miner ships differently.
If a ship with a ship maintenance bay or fleet hold can get a weapons timer from having ships deposited in it by players with weapon timers, then why wouldn’t CCP apply the same logic regarding loot from players with suspect flags?
I am indifferent to the subject. I thought this was just a completely stupid whine thread. It turns out that I just didn’t understand what the problem was. It seems like there is a real problem… I leave it to others to shadow-box for their favorite game change. What difference does it make what we write here? CCP doesn’t seem to read it.
Reply #21:
CCP is reading this one 
It is a very favorable and very intelligent game mechanic, to which I am in favor of this. If CCP wants to do something about it, they should chase the pods and destroy them, not the ships.
I don’t like her - she ignored our thread about the sun glare problem.
You could have saved a lot of writing and gone with this proposal as a highsec only restriction under crimewatch:
- Characters with a limited engagement timer cannot stow ships
It already applies to an aggression timer, so it just needs to be switched to a different timer.
That gives the OP 5 minutes to kill them, rather than the 1 minute for them to wait out the aggression timer and he can have a chance of CCP helping him to not be out smarted and he can get his kills.
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This not NOT what I am proposing, though perhaps I am at fault for being unclear, and I will go back and revise my post to clarify what I meant.
What I meant was a toggle setting for the mothership to make that determination as to whether or not they want to enable fleetmates with limited engagement timers active to deposit/swap ships into the mothership they are piloting at that given time.
If you, on the other hand, are suggesting the “Inherited Limited Engagement Timers” proposal be replaced with “Characters with a limited engagement timer cannot stow ships”… this is more of an alternative to the warp jam proposal than the suspect timer proposal. A ship need only be fired upon from 200km and be unable to reship - doesn’t even need to be warp jammed… that’s a bit nonsensical. It also does not enable the mothership to be attacked under any circumstance. With what I proposed, we have more reasonable reship restriction (without the absurdity of “damn I’m being shot at from 200km away so I can’t reship”) along with an limited but proportional opportunity to attack the mothership.
There is already an attribute on ships that allows access for fleet members.
Simple thing would be to turn it off, however then the whinges and whines will come from the miners who will be impacted by a change due to an issue that is totally not a problem for them.
Otherwise, they then have 2 toggles to switch and that will confuse them and in the end, still not stop the exploits you listed (and a couple of others), because mining fleet orcas, totally not looking for PVP have legitimate reasons to allow ships to be stowed in them, and this can be exploited.
If this thread wasn’t started due to a whine from a guy who was out smarted, none of this discussion would be occurring.
That is, this isn’t a problem, widely experienced across the community that requires proposals to fix. It’s one guy who has whined and now the proposals are to add more attributes to ships and open up new exploitable mechanics that will just cause more whining.
One guy who couldn’t a killmail. He should just get over it and learn to play smarter (eg. bump the bowhead more than 2500 m from the Battleships (problem solved).
He has 60 seconds to be able to do that and his fleet just needs to be smarter to notice when the other guys stop firing while a bowhead is on grid, and/or warps in. Bump it and keep killing the battleships.
I neglected to mention, and will update my original post, that instead of 2x2 toggles (where one combination is invalid), it would just be a single three level switch: allow all reshipping, allow safe reshipping only, and no reshipping
To my knowledge, the exploits are addressed, but I invite you to point out ones you feel would remain as a result of implementing the two proposals.
The worst part is now CCP knows there’s a problem. Guess where this will go from in a year.