Bounty status

[Cody]

... one planet might see piracy as a form of high spirits, worthy of a fine, but regard whistling on a Tuesday as a grotesque crime deserving instant death.

<chokes on his tea - chortles>

[Disembodied]

In general I agree, but muddiness is what you see in real life, too: compare legal systems across some countries on good old Earth and you will find plenty of examples where doing one thing here is perfectly acceptable while it might land you in jail elsewhere, give you a death penalty or just cost you a few bucks to clear...

Definitely, real life is intensely muddy! In real life you have the time to take note of these things, though: there are guidebooks, and consulates, and the chance to look and read and speak. In the game, we've really only got one button to let us interact with the world, and that one has a laser attached to it ... Things could obviously be very murky and muddy in the game if we dropped down from orbit and interacted with the locals in a variety of regions on any given planet, but here we're looking at a very stripped-down, ultra-basic law code as applicable to starship captains, with no opportunities to justify your actions or explain yourself, and where any infraction at all can result in your legal execution by anyone who happens to be passing.

[Diziet Sma]

here we're looking at a very stripped-down, ultra-basic law code as applicable to starship captains, with no opportunities to justify your actions or explain yourself, and where any infraction at all can result in your legal execution by anyone who happens to be passing.

That's a good point.. we're subject to GalCop law, not system law, so it ought to be standardised across the board. Trading is clearly a different matter, as that directly involves the economy of the planet below..

The other complications, such as time elapsed, distance from scene of the crime, a register of multiple offences, minor and serious classes of offence, etc, should combine to produce a sufficiently complex, yet still understandable situation for players.

[ClymAngus]

Bounty status? Well, the status of this bounty is: Needing to jump out of that wrapper and get in ma belly!

[cim]

I'd like to suggest that perhaps consideration should be given to incorporating the functionality of the  BountyStatus OXP into the core game

I think that, as a change on its own, it's probably better left for OXPs. The legal system looks fine so long as you don't know how it works - you get a Fugitive rating, you leave the system it falls to Offender, and eventually if you manage to avoid getting into more fights with Vipers it returns to Clean ... more likely it ends right back up at Fugitive. Putting a number on it I think makes the 8-bit simplifications in how it really works far too obvious.

Redoing the legal system so it's no longer that 8-bit simplification ... I need to go away and think about that a lot more. The ideas so far are definitely interesting, though.

[Switeck]

Anarchies OXP had a slower cooldown from fugitive status to clean again. It's simplistic enough, but I think anyone who manages to max out their bounty should see it only "decay" 10 points at most per jump instead of halving per jump.

[zdoofop]

Fine with me.

In the meantime I should OXZ that tweak. You had the embarrassment of forgetting you had it installed - it was only your post above that reminded me that it was one of my OXPs

It doesn't work for me.

[UK_Eliter]

I think the game should have 'theocracy' as a government-form. If it did, we could have the subvariant 'theocracy (cracked)' (or perhaps - depending on one's views - 'theocracy (particularly cracked'), yielding systems with some very strange legal codes. I am thinking of the Terry Pratchett novel in which a god, called Nuggan, goes mad and 'abominates' increasingly weird things (or rather increasingly normal things) including, towards the end, the colour blue . .

[Wildeblood]

I think the game should have 'theocracy' as a government-form.

By editing descriptions.plist you can have any government forms you desire. (So long as you desire no more than eight. ) There's nothing special about the default contents of descriptions.plist.

[UK_Eliter]

[quote="Wildeblood"By editing descriptions.plist you can have any government forms you desire. (So long as you desire no more than eight. ) There's nothing special about the default contents of descriptions.plist.[/quote]
I didn't know such changes were possible. I'll investigate. I think that at least one system should mention the aforementioned Nuggan.

[Fatleaf]

Fine with me.

In the meantime I should OXZ that tweak. You had the embarrassment of forgetting you had it installed - it was only your post above that reminded me that it was one of my OXPs

It doesn't work for me.

Look in your log Zdoofop, does it show any errors?

[Bogatyr]

It means that one can wipe out all record of a crime within a few short hours, just by jumping back and forth between two close systems...

That is an exploit, in my opinion - one which I've tried hard to avoid using during my long career as a contrabandista.

It definitely is an exploit, especially if players do it on one tank of fuel! It's maybe a good argument for making bounty erosion dependent on time (and distance?), rather than the number of jumps.

One player's "exploit" is another's "cool discovery." There is a constant tension between retaining original Elite's (amazingly excellent) gameplay, including "exploits" like this.

For one thing, it is ridiculously easy to tap a mousepad mistakenly and fire a shot at a station. That should not be a death sentence or change your status for hours and hours of gameplay. Being able to erase mistakes like that with a few jumps is IMO a feature.

It is also all to easy to pick up contraband containers and forget to sell them before launching. Fair enough, one should be careful, but it's also nice to have a way to erase this status. By the way, it is not necessarily easy to pull off the "lots of little jumps" technique! It depends heavily on where you are. It can be very involved and take luck and skill to erase a record with lots of jumps.

If acquiring offender status is to be a long-lasting event, there should be safeguards against inadvertent actions that gain that status accidentally. Weapons should have built-in safeguards against firing at a station that need an explicit overriding decision by the pilot to perform (and wouldn't stations insist on only "legal weapons" with such safeguards be allowed on all vessels?). There should be amnesty programs allowing a pilot to hand over contraband no questions asked upon docking or launching, and only an explicit decision bypassing this system upon launch should be seen as an illegal event.

[Nite Owl]

Bogatyr:

There should be amnesty programs allowing a pilot to hand over contraband no questions asked upon docking or launching, and only an explicit decision bypassing this system upon launch should be seen as an illegal event.

See ILLEGAL GOODS TWEAK and Undocumented Launch. Cannot find a Wiki entry for Undocumented Launch but it should be available from the in game OXZ Manager and fairly self explanatory via the author's ReadMe file. These OXZ's do, more or less, what your quote asks.

[Cholmondely]

Is this an accurate synopsis?

In the Vanilla game it seems impossible to ascertain the amount of the bounty on one's own head (although legal status is shown on the F5 screen),

and the amounts of bounty on the heads of eg pirates are not openly correlated with their legal status.