In the previous post, I outlined a comprehensive plan for evening out the gap between PVP-low and PVP-high areas, so that transitioning between them would not look like jumping off a cliff into a pool of sharks with lasers on their heads. A plan that, while it stands very little chance of ever being implemented due to both the public opposition and risks involved, is at least interesting to think about.
Well, this blog has always been about thinking, so an intellectual exercise is par for the course.
I’ve had some new clever ideas since, first few on that front in quite a while. This post is by necessity sort of a mishmash of them.
Crime and Punishment
— Raskolnikov! How could you?! Killing a granny over 20 kopecks!?!
— Yeah? Well, five of those make a rouble!1
First, some observations. In other contexts where the concept of crime comes up, the goal of criminal justice system is to prevent crime, as defined by law, and protect the victims of same. At the same time, all the tools available for the purpose are limited — they typically cannot be employed until the crime is at the very least in progress, for the very same reasons.2 Nevertheless, the idea of crime prevention is not abandoned, and the law’s stated purpose is never revenge for the crime. While it is impossible to determine if a crime was actually prevented or not, assuming that if no preventive measures occurred, the crime rate would be more or less even, allows one to indirectly see, by the reducing rates of crime, the effects of preventive measures.
There are multiple avenues through which law enforcement considers itself working for preventing crime. However, for our purposes two are the most important:
- The inevitability of punishment is seen as a deterrent, that is, it is believed that if the criminal justice system is sufficiently effective in punishing criminals, crime rate decreases. While not necessarily correct, this logic is usually acceptable.
- Statistically, the most common source of crime are repeat offenders.3 While jailhouse environment does not really work to rehabilitate people and prevent them from reoffending,4 long prison terms serve as a measure to prevent, or at least significantly delay crime, by isolating the incarcerated where they can’t do much harm, except maybe to each other.
Every criminal justice system is only aware of how well are they doing at inevitability to a certain degree, as there’s always an unknown number of unreported5 and undiscovered crime, unsolved crime, and other nonsense, but every prisoner behind bars is a clear indication that he isn’t actually committing a crime right now, rehabilitation be damned. This is why the practice is actually perpetuated, no matter how imperfect it is — it works, for suitably small quantities of ‘works’.
That "suitably small" is generally sufficient to provide an environment where law-abiding citizens can go about their law-abiding business without cushioning for risks too much, which was the whole point. What Eve needs is a smooth progression between such an environment and total lawlessness.
Meanwhile, in New Eden
In Eve, both of these avenues of crime prevention are actually implemented, that is, have mechanics meant for them. The discourse on the topic, however, very rarely mentions anything except CONCORD, which is the #1 avenue of crime prevention — inevitability of punishment. CONCORD has the inevitability part down pat, it is inevitable like death and taxes, where it is in effect, it will always happen. If you somehow make it fail to happen, you’re screwed even more because you’re engaging in an exploit, committing an affront directly against God. But what, exactly, is CONCORD protection actually doing?
- It destroys the offender’s ship. It does not destroy their pod.
- It effects a time limit on how long the crime can be in progress — the gap between the first shot and the moment CONCORD arrives.
- It reduces the offender’s security status, which is currently mostly a nonsense number. (But more on that below.)
#1 on that list is essentially a tax on committing crime, both in ISK required to purchase a new ship and the time the player requires to reship. #2 is a minimum limit on how much DPS one needs to bring to commit their crime successfully. Indirectly, that creates, for some of the more typical crime like suicide ganking miners and haulers, the minimum amount of profit one needs to make the crime pay off.
Structurally, #1+#2 are completely equivalent to being fined the total cost of the ship (barring the mess with the loot fairy) and having weapons deactivated after a certain delay (in seconds, until CONCORD arrives) for a certain period (minutes until you can reship). But despite that structural equivalence, there’s one thing that is different in application possibilities: CONCORD "protection" that is expressed as a fleet jumping in to shoot the offender dead can only be toggled on and off. The only variance that can be had is in the time domain — i.e. time before arrival, and possibly, time when it is and when it is not available. But expressing it as a monetary tax allows variance in amount of said tax instead, which can be as granular as needed.
What’s essentially missing in Eve is #3, though — the long term effect of security status which would actually prevent a highly criminal character from committing further crime in protected areas.6 I.e. the equivalent of incarceration’s effect on crime prevention. Nevertheless, it does have a mechanic for it, it’s just that it’s not working terribly well: Faction navy.
Technically, the role of faction navy is to prevent you from entering space if your security status is too low to be in there. However, seeing as it how never actually scrams anyone,7 that never really happens, and it does not prevent you from being active in that space once you have entered.
Making Slightly More Sense
Once you consider this, the obvious outcome is that a roaming DED fleet mechanic is actually unnecessary to get a smooth scale of experienced safety, just like CONCORD itself is unnecessary, and something much simpler and more predictable can be done. Here’s how it could work in the context of Plan 9:
- When a character acquires a criminal flag anywhere in space claimed by an entity that is part of the CONCORD agreement, regardless of system security level, the following things happen:
- The character immediately pays a fine. In a 1.0 system, the fine is equal to X*M, where M is the total cost of the offender’s ship and cargo, and X is an appropriate multiplier based on system security level. It is reduced proportionally to system security status, so that it becomes equal to 0 somewhere around 0.1 security status or thereabout.8 If the player’s wallet is insufficient to pay the fine, however small it might be, a CONCORD fleet actually spawns immediately, and destroys their ship just like it would do now.
- If you want to be nice, part of the the fine collected goes to the wallet of the injured party, while the remainder becomes a bounty on the offender’s head, split in any desired proportion. More bounties on people is good.
- At this moment, the criminal’s faction standings are negatively modified as described previously, for the act of committing a crime in faction space. Positive standings are modified further than negative ones.
- For a while, nothing happens, and the crime continues. After a delay dependent on the security status of the system, the criminal’s drone bandwidth is reduced to 0, weapons are deactivated, number of lockable targets is reduced to 0. I.e. the battle is momentarily interrupted. After a further delay dependent on system security status these effects go away, so the battle can continue if the victim is still here, but the safety selector is forced to green.9 The selector remains forced to green for a further period of minutes, depending on the security status of the system the crime occurred in, regardless of where the criminal goes afterwards.10
That’s the "inevitable punishment" part.
- The duty of actually preventing crime, by preventing potential repeat offenders from entering until they are rehabilitated, i.e. raise faction standing, remains with the suitably boosted faction navy, which treats people with negative faction standings11 just like it treats enemy faction warfare players — i.e. scrams them, follows them around safe spots, and spawns in quantities dependent on both the system security status and the faction standings of the offender.12
Looks like such a mechanic would work a lot smoother than randomly roaming fleets.
Further Variations
There’s a few ways Plan 9 can be tweaked which I did not previously detail.
- The list of player activities that can be used to affect system security that I can think of is:
- Units/costs of materials extracted from the environment.
- NPC ships destroyed and/or NPC bounties earned.
- Units of materials used to manufacture items or units of items manufactured and their costs.
- Units of ME and PE researched.
- Units or prices of items bought and sold.
- Jumps through gates.
Of these, the ones actually too easy to game are jumps and items bought and sold. However, both can be rephrased to count not unit jumps or units/ISK of items, but number of individual characters participating in either, regardless of how much individual jumps or individual purchases they make. That would require much more effort to deliberately game. Using everything on that list to affect system security would make for a considerably better reflection of actual usage as well as reduce the effects on long-distance trade routes.
- Criminal acts committed in a system could also reduce it’s security status over time, thus making the pendulum swing both ways and reducing the concerns about highsec systems being permanently stuck at high.13
- The constant sec drain applied to a system does not have to be the same for every system. In fact, in one of the comments on Plan 9, NeVrain suggested a very clever variation based on heat transfer equations and NPC pirate faction ‘population’ centers, which is probably the most advanced way to keep the world highly dynamic in detail but generally predictable as a whole.
- With the fine+faction navy mechanic, experienced security can be smoothly (and computationally cheaply) varied within a system, thus making certain places in it less secure than others — by distance from key spots like stations or gates, for example, which is harder to do with a DED fleet mechanic.
Oh, and one thing I actually noticed only much later: Implementing Plan 9 in this fashion would allow the reuse of the ideas from the A-Life based design I had for a completely different project that failed to materialise. I already mentioned that an artificial life engine has been a major intended component of Ultima Online, which was removed because players just killed everything too fast. But that’s a failure of the implementation, certainly not the concept itself. An ecosystem properly adjusted for the biggest predator, i.e. the human players, would not have such a problem.
Not to mention that I suspect this might be the only way towards practical procedural story generation. :)
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A joke from the 90s. Seeing as how that’s the only joke mentioning Dostoyevsky’s book that I remember, you can see that the book’s not terribly popular, at least compared to "17 moments of spring".↩
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Unless you live in a universe where reliable prediction of crime exists, or where the ideas of law derived from Roman Empire have had no influence. Thankfully, either is rare outside fiction these days.↩
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In the US, 53% of all males convicted go on to repeat offense.↩
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Amusingly, if it did, the rate of repeat offenses would go down, so there would be less point to incarcerate people so… It would stabilise somewhere again.↩
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Certain types of crime are particularly likely to go unreported for cultural reasons.↩
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What it instead prevents a criminal character from is doing non-criminal activities, like shopping. Shooting players is not hindered much.↩
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Unless you’re an enemy Faction Warfare player. Then they don’t just scram you eventually, but also follow you around, which is far more effective. That still didn’t stop GalMil from raiding war targets in Jita, though…↩
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Thus addressing concerns that this would completely destroy the Fight Club. Reducing the amount of space reserved for pure Fight Club activity would actually make encounters in it much more frequent, by the way.↩
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Limited engagement flag would actually remain — so that if the victim actually fought back, the battle could be legally concluded. But with the safety selector at green, no further crime can be committed until it is released, which is the point.↩
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Lorewise, that would mean that forcing everyone to have safety selectors on their ships actually gave CONCORD an opportunity to police space far cheaper than it previously could manage.↩
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Incurred by committing crimes within faction space more likely than not.↩
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Severely negative faction standings could also deny docking in the faction’s space, by the way. The equations setting how much faction navy a single persona non grata merits where, depending on their faction standing, how hard it is to run away from them, and how much faction navy needs to die before the NPCs back down and leave them free to operate in a particular system need a lot of thinking with actual data at hand, which I obviously don’t have. These equations would need to be adjusted to produce a smooth scale of experienced security as derived from a smooth scale of opportunity to profitably commit crime. Just how much opportunity is acceptable where is a matter of much debate, far beyond the scope of this post — I only aim to show that sufficient flexibility is possible with such a mechanic to accommodate any play style in any desired quantity.↩
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Imagine the Burn Jita operation actually succeeding in driving Jita to 0.5 for a few days. Then imagine a sufficiently big group dedicating time and effort to disrupt a highsec system on the Jita-Amarr route, otherwise pushed upwards by constant player traffic…↩
I think from a psychology/immersion perspective being shot by the Feds has a very different feel to Pay To Gank. I’m not sure switching to a Pay To Gank system would improve Eve particularly as there are so many rich old players who have effectively infinite cash. (Aryth, leader of the Goon finance team, mentioned recently he had 20 000 fit Thrashers lying around that he wasn’t doing anything with). I do very much like the granularity of including security status in the algorithm.
Next I think there are a couple of economic loopholes but those could be ironed out if this system were to be implemented and firmed up. Except this one – automatic bounties. I have two objections. 1) It opens the door to insurance fraud as when two years ago people would build hundreds of battleships and sd them to collect the plat insurance. 2) it dilutes the personal nature of punishing someone by putting a bounty on him. The player base has embraced the bounty system as a punishment mechanic, a form of player policing. That goes away if career criminals get huge bounties anyway as a side effect of game mechanics.
Next people reship from neutral orcas. They can do this pretty quickly. Do you envisage your boosted faction navy being fast enough to get to someone instantly? If not then as long as pods can travel freely irrespective of sec status you aren’t preventing crime, you’re just perpetuating Malcanis’ law by raising the logistical requirements for criminals so that it better suits rich old players.
Finally I retain grave misgivings about sacrificing predictability. Particularly as your system is gameable. It seems I could, eventually, push an entire system such as Delve to 1.0 just by sitting in a safe place and doiing region range marketeering on a succession of alts. Just as richer older players have effectively infinite isk they also have effective infinite alts as isk=alts.
Yes, psychologically, being shot does have a different feel, which I don’t think could well be replaced, but economically, a pay-to-gank system would be perfectly equivalent precisely because someone already has all those 20000 pre-fit Thrashers – so they aren’t even losing time reshipping. Notice that holding the safety selector would actually guarantee the loss of time before the next crime can be committed regardless of whether you reship or not.
I don’t actually see how assigning bounties by taking the money from offender’s own pocket could possibly create an opportunity for fraud, with the current 20% bounty limit — there’s over 100% losses all over whichever way I try to arrange it. Perhaps, if you would describe it in greater detail? I already described what I think about bounties themselves, “punishment” by placing a bounty on someone is more of an illusion.
How exactly to boost the faction navy is a very complex question. But for an example, I suggest you go to the test server, join Faction Warfare, and try to navigate opposing faction’s highsec space in something battlecruiser-sized to get a feel for faction navy people actually lose ships to. You can move, but the moment you stop to shoot, you’d better be able to tank it — and the more people come with you, the more navy comes at you. It is quite possible to attack someone in these conditions even in 1.0, but it takes some fairly complex tactics and coordination to do. The loophole we were using was mostly, yes, travel by pods and purchasing ships locally or hauling them around with alts. I’m not sure how this can possibly be plugged even if the navy also attacks pods, as in general, you can’t do anything about alts. Perhaps someone else has an idea?
Here’s what I came up with when I looked at profiting from suiciding. It assumes I’m self-ganking with an alt and that both characters are in opposing militia:
Cost = mineral cost + manufacturing line cost + ammo cost + insurance cost
Reward = insurance payout + salvage value + faction war ship kill LP + 20% of ship value in bounty
With both salvage and LP on the rise it’s possible that suiciding might become economically viable again especially if ship prices become volatile or if a rarely used ship type can be set to an unreasonably high average by self-sales. I haven’t run the numbers though.
It should be noted that many griefing activities can raise sandbox finance. Both miner bumping and pod ganking attract investments on the MD forum and Goonswarm reimburses ships used for highsec ganking. Eve can be considered a zero sum economic game where someone else losing money means you gain it so what we have been discussing as criminal can also be seen as self-serving economic warfare.
Regarding ganking out of orcas I think the only solution is if the faction navy pursues pods. What is the justification for criminals being allowed to fly around in their pods anyway? It’s possibly the wrong message to be sending that you can become safer when in a pod. (Not least because there’s a new fashion for ganking random pods).
Let’s check the numbers. Mineral cost = X. Manufacturing line cost is negligible. Ammo cost at suicide gank rates is also negligible. Insurance cost is based on a fixed Y payout, which is currently something like 0.8 X tops, I’m not sure — probably a lot less, someone should correct me if so. If we assume platinum insurance, the cost itself is 0.3 of that Y. That makes total costs 1.24X.
Insurance payout is the same Y, salvage value can be very random, but I don’t think it ever approaches more than 0.1X. Ship kill LP and bounty value are based of cross-Eve price, which is nowhere close to X — let’s call this value M. Manipulation of M through self-sales is officially an exploit, which is unlikely to pass unnoticed now that the Goon Cabal made such a public use of it, so I wouldn’t worry about that. Then, LP are awarded at a rate of 0.0001M. The best possible LP rate at the moment is something like 1000 ISK per LP, i.e. the LP payout comes out to 0.1M, though it usually comes out to considerably less than that. The bounty payout is 0.2M. That comes out to 0.9X+0.3M.
I.e. 0.34X vs. 0.3M. That doesn’t look very enticing, but if it somehow is, the real loophole here is actually the insurance payout and pricing, not the bounty.
Did some quick checking. Platinum insurance, after paying the premium gives about 60% of ship value. Bounty adds 20%. So it’s 80% recoup + LP + salvage. Frigate FW kill is 25lp so let’s call that 25000 isk. A Burst is 69k at Jita so that should be in the black even before salvage.
Some of the cheaper cruisers should be very close to parity too. Cheapest is about 5m, you’d get 4m from insurance and bounty plus 100 LP + salvage.
The first part of Plan 9 was just bitchin. Absolutely hit that one out of the ballpark.
Then this. :-/
Firstly, I respect that your degree program is sociology of some form, or obviously includes it heavily in the curricula. I also see from the opening of this post, that general sociology programs/classes are extremely weak when it comes to criminology and criminal justice/procedure (which was MY first degree).
The concept of “justice” is not one of prevention, excepting INDIRECTLY by “potential consequences” — you got the words right, but you put the cart before the mule, called the mule a stallion, and named it “Mustang”. After all, it’s called “criminal justice”, not “criminal deterrence” — the idea being primarily to identify and prosecute those who have already committed crimes, secondarily to apprehend those in the process of committing a crime, and tertiarily to detect those colluding and planning to commit a crime (“conspiracy to commit”).
“Pre-Crime”, a la Minority Report, is nothing more than a fantasy.
As for the effect of fines vs incarceration vs corporal or capital punishment, well, if fines were so effective, why do we incarcerate so many people? Why do some of the lowest-crime nations on the planet have corporal punishment statutes? Also, you are nothing short of dead wrong about people in prison no longer committing crimes. Crimes ranging from simple assault, to rape, drug offenses, and murder occur _every day_ within the walls of prisons in Murrica and abroad, and are arranged to take place OUTSIDE the prison as well. In fact, in certain prisons, you are more likely to be the victim of crime than in a lowsec urban ghetto.
Respectfully suggest you take a couple of classes in criminology and the criminal justice system’s workings, principles, and procedures, then revisit this post.
I agree that faction navies should “assist” those being unlawfully attacked, esp that the speed and magnitude of response vary with not only the sec level of the system, but proximity to stations or other facilities, and I definitely like your idea of having “criminal” status differing depending on what Empire you happen to be in. You may be a notorious Amarrian gang lord, “perma-flashy” and KOS to the Amarr govt, but come to Gallente space and while law enforcement may watch you like a hawk, unless you commit a crime here, you’re free to go about your business unmolested. “I’m a wanted man in all 4 Empires,” definitely sounds more fun than “derp, i’m perma-flashy, hurr-durr.”
No, criminology wasn’t much of my curriculum. I can’t know everything, and I also admit I was quite lazy in politology, municipal government, marketing-related courses and semi-nonsense subjects like that which was named “social ecology” but only had a tenuous relation to either. (In Russian university programs, you didn’t get to choose your courses at the time. You’d pick a major, which determined your curriculum completely for the first three years, upon which you would pick a “specialisation” within that major, which would determine the rest. Mine was sociology of culture, and inevitably I view the rest of the world through that lens.) I wasn’t an exemplary student by far, preferring to hang out with old professors instead. :) But, I’m pretty sure I got the gist of that one right. It might be a national peculiarity though. The words that can be used to translate “justice” in Russian bear no connotation of revenge. (“cправедливость” is connected more to piety (q.v. “праведный”) and bears no relation to justice system of any kind, while “правосудие” explicitly means “a correct decision”) Sapir-Worf strikes again, I guess. It’s a bit too late to take classes though, I’d look far too silly. Name a good book or dozen?
I must also say that I meant no comparison whatsoever between relative effectiveness of fines vs. incarceration in a wider context of society as a whole, or any specific ethical judgement of either, and I don’t quite get where you’re coming from. (If more interesting means of criminal punishment were practical, I dare say we’d see them used somewhere, but we’re bumping into problems even when imagining them.) What I meant to say that within New Eden, the punishment of CONCORD is perfectly equivalent to a fine, and eventual denial of high security space is the closest thing to incarceration Eve has. This is what I said, wasn’t it?
Why not use bounties to make it easier to find and apprehend people that the law is either extremely unlikely to catch, or flat-out unable to catch?
If you commit a crime, your standing with that faction goes down (and why not have it affect your standings with the other empires the way faction missions do? raising hell in the Amarr Empire might make you something of a hero to the Minmatar). The faction (or even NPC corporation) police come for you. If they catch you and blow you up, then mission accomplished. If you elude them, they put a bounty on your head. Empire bounties could come in the form of LP, in which case you could just lift the factional warfare LP payout system, which is already balanced for the case of players having alts in opposing militias. The difficulty in collecting an Empire bounty would vary by location: blowing up a criminal wanted by the Amarr in Amarr space would be a freebie; blowing them up in Gallente or Minmatar space would probably make you a criminal as well.
If Jester is right and the forthcoming summer expansion will allow players to join the pirate factions and join factional warfare on their side, the pirate factions could join in on the fun.
As an added bonus, LP payouts are a net ISK sink, so the problem of having the empires introduce ISK into the game would be obviated.
Using LP for Empire assigned bounties might actually work, though there’s always that annoying issue of new resource faucets. LP payouts are indeed a net ISK sink, however, they don’t just sink ISK but also generate other resources, which might cause some unpleasant unintended consequences.
But alts, argh. :)