Elite:Dangerous Lore. Crime and Punishment

If a crime is only reported by the victim, it is classed as “undetected”. In this case, a number of police vessels will be dispatched to the area and scan ships for criminal behaviour. If any is detected, they will attack. Reinforcements will be called in should the threat be large enough to require it.

Crime response is generally carried out by Faulcon de Lacy Viper Mk IIs. It is effective, but not instantaneous. The size and timing of the response is based on the security level of the jurisdiction you are in and the danger level posed by the offender (both bounty level and ship threat).

No-fire zones around star ports stations will become more meaningful in Beta 1, too. The no-fire zone represents the reach of the starport, both in terms of safety and detection, and any crimes committed within the zone are detected. This does NOT include crimes that need a scan to be detected, such as carrying illegal cargo.

Once a crime is detected, if the starport’s own security detail isn’t close enough to respond, then fast response units are dispatched to rain vengeance on any criminal elements in the area!

Fines are also being introduced, to give the authorities a proportionate level of response rather than shooting to kill regardless of the severity of a crime. Minor crimes and non-threatening infractions will incur a fine, which can be paid off to your local space station authority representative.

If you don’t pay off your fines, they will initially attract compound interest and then, once the authorities lose patience with your tardiness they will be converted into a bounty, and lead to you being hunted down.

Response to crimes

Authority response to crimes that have been detected has always been on the cards, and it actually provides two benefits:

It offers some limited protection to non/less combat oriented commanders, and it generates interesting game play for villainous commanders. I say limited because the response is not immediate and potentially can be defeated (and definitely escaped).

The bit about generating game play is really quite important. I mean, what's the point of being a pirate scourge if there are no additional challenges? Authority response does not prevent a commander from committing crimes; it simply adds a contextual risk element to the activity.

It's also something that will be more or less prevalent depending on the status of the system, which helps to create a kind of space geography.

Safe and dangerous districts

Just like there is the perception of "safer" and "more dangerous" districts in most big cities, we want to create geography of safer and more dangerous systems and system clusters.

In fact, I would argue that at the moment we have a bigger problem with the moment to moment actions of say, piracy, where it can be very difficult to get hold of cargo without vaporising the target (don't worry too much though, we've got a raft of ideas to try and help this).

No fire zone

As an aside, the ability to sit outside the "no fire zone" and take pot shots at folk inside is a bit rubbish. Yes, bounties are accrued, but without authority response (or some other deterrent...) this is probably the closest thing to "griefing" that I am aware of.

Private and all group

Now, it's completely possible that I have the wrong end of the stick, and you are more worried about players having the option to use private groups to avoid player versus player activity. whilst this concern is valid (we are always considering the ramifications at the office), The obvious counter is: if you force player versus player, potentially these folk will not play the game at all. You really can't force people to all enjoy the same thing – private groups are a way of keeping more people playing the game. And the more people play the game, the more chance there is that they will decide to give the full multiplayer experience a go.

So this is an interesting dilemma we're dealing with. It's my current opinion that if we totally separated all private group avatars from the "all player" environment, we would reduce the incentive to "dip in".

As an aside, I believe the first implementation of of private groups will require a commander to log out and log back in with the new setting. We're still investigating the final rules that should govern such multiplayer changes, as these will obviously impact on a player's decision making process.

Bounties

As for "Pilot Federation Bounties" these are something that we're going to experiment with. They should (obviously) have some kind of chilling effect on player versus player action (well, random player versus player action – and that's kind of the point), but without testing them, we can't be sure how big an effect this is going to be. They certainly don't stop players from attacking each other; they simply add a contextual game play risk.

The bottom line is that we don't advocate senseless violence. We certainly don't prevent it either though – we simply say: "there are consequences". And in our opinion, these consequences are reasonable and entertaining (assuming we get the balance right).

And now time for the obligitary caveat: we reserve the right to change stuff when we get it wrong, or when we realise we can make it better! That's one of the cool things about pre-release testing. With useful feedback, we *can* make it better!

Authority response time

Some points to remember:

– Authority response is not instant (there is a delay based on several factors)

– Authority response is not indestructible (you can shoot them down)

– Authority response is not inevitable (not all systems will be able to must a response)

– Authority response is not inescapable (you can get away)

– Authority response is not infallible (they need to successfully find you)

– Authority response is jurisdictional (You are not wanted by everyone)

The response time is based on system security level and bounty level of detected crime.

The strength of the response is based on a "power" rating for your ship and the bounty level of the detected crime.

When you attack a ship, if you are in a jurisdiction, the target vessel "squawks" so it is always detected (not all crimes are against ships though, these can be undetected).

We're keeping the concept of "witnessing" aggressive crime simple; when we started playing with the notion of being able to attack in a jurisdiction and have no witnesses the complexity ballooned dramatically, whilst the gain seemed minimal.

Obviously, outside of a jurisdiction, no crime can be logged – doing anything to anyone is fair game. This will change once we add Pilot's Federation bounties, and it will be very interesting (and hopefully very insightful) to see what happens.

Authority response can escalate, and those buddies helping out would also be accruing bounties for joining in. However, I can foresee tactics that could increase the chance of achieving a specific goal, (such as destroying a particular ship). There would always be costs though.

Information in galaxy map

We're hopefully going to integrate information about laws into the galaxy and system map interfaces, so everyone can make informed decisions as they plot their routes.

Nothing will stop pirate

There seems to me to be *absolutely nothing* stopping the romance of the lone pirate roaming the popular trade routes.

What we're saying is that such a concept includes (and to be fair, this is true in most romanticised fictions of such villainy!) the challenge of dealing with the authorities.

Wanted and legal

This last one I suspect gets forgotten a lot, but what it means is that you can be villainous and wanted in some systems and totally legal in others – the only thing you'll need to look out for in such safe systems are bounty hunters that are willing to commit crimes to collect on you. I really think it's a pretty cool concept.

And then you can add the point that I've already stated we are looking into ways to help pirates have a more enjoyable moment to moment flow of getting booty and making a decent profit from it.

So, whilst I can't claim that we have everything perfectly sorted, I do hope that you can see that we're trying to cover all the angles in a reasonably equitable manner.