Discovery Gaming Community

Good day,

so as I was seeing a few threads where people've been rising concerns about the current mercenary\bounty hunting system that led me to idea of starting this thread to discuss the possible ways of improving the situation.

There will, for sure, rise some side themes such as:

- Trade ship balance
- Trading\Mining balance
- Piracy rework
- POBs
- NPCs

Those might be mention but I'd ask not to concentration on them because there already enough being said in that regard in all threads around. Limit to few words.

So to begin with - it's a complex problem that is built up from many factors. However it's good that the problem began to be recognized even if approach to solution differs.

Here is my idea of total rebalance to the merc system as a whole in form of the list of theses:

Almost all bounty hunting is to move under the table. Which means that only lawful boards remains are a house boards run by local police (not military) + specific of the house added on top of that.

Lawful board system:

Bretonia bounty board - regular rules
Kusari bounty board - regular rules
Liberty bounty board - more freedom, bigger paychecks, more allolances (Liberty is merc state) Liberty can employ merc lawfully to take part in their wars.
Rheinland bounty board - restrictive rules. Rheinland is not favoring random bunters running around and restrict own board.

Thus we have some character of the houses towards that activity. Other bounty boards must be illegal - house lawful logic must forbid anyone except them to hold the power on shooting things. It's basically the house authority main power - to decide on who to shoot and who do not.

Each house must have a laws according illegal mercenary business. Police must have right to order a pilot to stop an unlawful activity and to pay a 2 million fine (not big so if you pull some unnoticed contracts and pay a fine for one you're still in positive margin). So doing merc job is not a big offence and you're not to be shot on sight with battleships for doing it except if it's an offence on navy\police\big corporate vessel.

All factions except Navy and Police must have an ability to run own underground bounty boards where deals like assassinations, sabotages, espionage, etc must be ran secretly.

Corporate factions must be able to build own hire-gun armies but they must be limited in actions to outside of house space - they must avoid being spotted in house space by police or a fine to corporation can be issued in form of 10-50 millions (so it's worth hiding your fleet).

House space must be limited to the Capital system and systems that surrounds it directly. All the other are border worlds. Mercing is only unlawful in the House Space. What is going on in border worlds is outside of house jurisdiction - house police\navy can only attack the hunters if they are spot on sight with blood on hands. If police\navy have not witnessed the assault then it's considered a closed case and mercs get away with their bloody money.

Any BHG vessel must have a privilege of auto-registration on LAWFUL boards. They must also be able to take an unlawful contracts and then deal with consequences if their activity becomes known to law enforcement units (if spotted in house space - then more serious problems, if in border worlds then less serious - limiting to just demands of breaking with unlawful activities or being attacked by law enforcements).

What is going on in border worlds or even edge worlds must be outside of house jurisdiction - it's a place where hireguns, pirates, spies and corporate private armies are fighting.

Monitoring merc activity is a police and secret service job - navy must be very limited in reactions on unlawful mercs. Navy can't issue fines and can only ask to spot unlawful actions against itself, police or corporations of the same house of origin as the navy.

Under "corporations" I mean huge corporations with own IDs.

That's my idea in general. I'll try to fix it into something more readable once I'm at home.

I'm having some trouble following what exactly you intend to change here and especially why.

What you're proposing is some strange mixture of oorp rules regarding the bounties, and inrp rules regarding bounties and fines.
All houses already have laws in place against attacking lawful and civilian targets. Why exactly would they limit bounty hunters (in the sense of people hunting for bounties, not necessarily the BHG) when they target unlawfuls?

Why should BHG be auto-registered on boards, without the board financiers having a say in it?

What corporate hired guns are you talking about here? And if you mean corporate security ships themselves, using the corporate ID, why would they be limited to beyond house space? NPC corp ships attack pirates after all, as they should.

What you're asking for here seems to involve changing server rules, lawful and corporate factions changing their inrp behavior, and other things I don't quite understand. It also seems to encourage further restrictions to the bounty hunting system, which is already hardly in use these days.

I do agree with the general premise of houses taking less responsibility outside of their core worlds, but aside from that I'm rather perplexed by all this.

All that aside, Kusari, not Rheinland is the house that's unfriendly towards mercenaries.

Why open another thread when theres already two about the same topic? And why would you want to stray so much from vanilla Freelancer?

Well,

easy question goes first. I placed a Rheinland as BHG-Unfriendly because it lacks a BHG station. Liberty is a mother of merc movement and Kusari + Bretonia both got a BHG station sitting in their core space. This leaves only Rheinland for that place. Also Vanilla is not exactly clear on how the merc system work, in fact, there are just BHG NPCs running around attacking red ships and various news articles about mercs\freelancers doing mess here and there.

I understand that my approach on explaining the idea is extremely bad but I'll try to make it more clear. What I try is to propose a rather new system of relations between BHG \ Mercenaries and other factions and groups.

Current system is:

BHG is a corporation that employ a waste number of hireguns and ex convicts to hunt the other criminals around for payments that are coming from lawful forces of houses, lawful corporations. BHG only shoot unlawful targets and do not get involved into lawful vs lawful conflicts and keep status quo in between the Houses. BHG here is just a restricted version of House Police but with ZOI covering all the Houses.

Mercs\Freelancers are more free in that regard since they are not bound to any big corporation such as BHG and can swap flags on the fly. Take any work - be it lawful or unlawful.

BHG system works in a way where anyone can hire a merc\bhg to kill another person w\o having any problem with the law.

My proposal is to change it a bit.

First - corporations need to stop being able to run own fleets. I think law enforcers would be against such thing as private armies on corporate paycheck. For example - in Liberty the corporations are using the LSF to forcefully drive their interests, or LPI which is a private corporation in Freelancer (which is of cause fund by the huge corporations which of cause lead to result where police is just securing corporate business instead of doing boring job of securing peace of regular folk).

So, corporations are to lose abilities to form own military - of cause some might find it to be sad but one of the main problems of discovery is that there is a lot of faction that can compliment each others and have lesser and lesser need in cooperation with other groups.

90% of merc business then turns into the underwater part of the iceberg. Corporations still can have their own military but in form of hired freelancers via illegal channels. Those freelancers must have to avoid being found doing unlawful mercjob by house police - but when in border\edge worlds they are free to do their part in securing corporate efforts which employed them. Most profitable mining fields must get into border\edge worlds so corporations that are meant to fight with each others for markets and resources could do so there, far from house eyes, using their their private hireguns.

BHG can take part in that as well, but as a huge corporation they must have some privileges and limitations.

In short I meant this.

, why not? Everyone do that so do I.

Rheinland lacks BHG station? Check Saar I am sure you will find it quite fast. Also Rheinland is the only place where Sear Serpent and Hammerhead are sold. In lore wise Planet Houston is the BHG base in liberty BUT it is owned by the police. So liberty is the only House that doesn't have BHG station and a place where you can buy the BHG ID from. Even Kusari has Deshima.

I suggest you move to that other thread as I am sure half the forum is too lazy to write same things twice....

(07-11-2014, 07:59 AM)Sonoshee Wrote: [ -> ], why not? Everyone do that so do I.

I guess that's a valid reason to do it. But your lore knowledge needs to improve before posting improvement suggestions in my opinion. Of course everyone else is posting suggestions left and right without knowing what they are talking about like you said. Even devs, so yeah, whatever.

(07-11-2014, 07:59 AM)Sonoshee Wrote: [ -> ]easy question goes first. I placed a Rheinland as BHG-Unfriendly because it lacks a BHG station. Liberty is a mother of merc movement and Kusari + Bretonia both got a BHG station sitting in their core space. This leaves only Rheinland for that place.

The presence or absence of a BHG base doesn't necessarily equate the relations of a house with the Guild. Deshima used to be the only place foreigners were allowed at all, it's more or less a "coincidence" that it houses mainly BHG today (and thus displays their IFF). Bounty Hunters in Kusari were for years limited to Shikoku south of Deshima, and even today are limited to Shikoku, New Tokyo, and Honshu.
Rheinland has always been pretty open to bounty hunters, especially after the nomad war left its military in tatters.

Quote:First - corporations need to stop being able to run own fleets. I think law enforcers would be against such thing as private armies on corporate paycheck. For example - in Liberty the corporations are using the LSF to forcefully drive their interests, or LPI which is a private corporation in Freelancer (which is of cause fund by the huge corporations which of cause lead to result where police is just securing corporate business instead of doing boring job of securing peace of regular folk).

So, corporations are to lose abilities to form own military - of cause some might find it to be sad but one of the main problems of discovery is that there is a lot of faction that can compliment each others and have lesser and lesser need in cooperation with other groups.

Frankly, this is a terrible idea. Going back to vanilla lore, all corporations employ escort pilots with military-grade hardware. Why? Because the freelancer universe is a dystopia; the governments do not have the resources to keep even their capital systems truly safe. Corporations defend themselves, because they simply cannot rely only on the police to do so.
It's also in the interest of the house governments for corporations to field their own security wings, because they increase overall lawful presence and can assist them against criminal elements.
It makes no sense at all inrp for corporations to cease doing this, and oorp'ly, it's not fair to corporations to tell them to stop flying combat ships.

Quote:90% of merc business then turns into the underwater part of the iceberg. Corporations still can have their own military but in form of hired freelancers via illegal channels. Those freelancers must have to avoid being found doing unlawful mercjob by house police - but when in border\edge worlds they are free to do their part in securing corporate efforts which employed them. Most profitable mining fields must get into border\edge worlds so corporations that are meant to fight with each others for markets and resources could do so there, far from house eyes, using their their private hireguns.

Again, it makes no sense for house governments to object to mercenaries doing lawful work. Why on earth would the Liberty government object to a freelancer shooting Rogues?
Government forces do not get paid to hunt criminals, so they have no reason to stop people from lightening their workload.

I understand what you want to change, but I can see neither an in-lore, nor an oorp justification for doing so.

(07-11-2014, 11:35 AM)Karst Wrote: [ -> ]The presence or absence of a BHG base doesn't necessarily equate the relations of a house with the Guild. Deshima used to be the only place foreigners were allowed at all, it's more or less a "coincidence" that it houses mainly BHG today (and thus displays their IFF). Bounty Hunters in Kusari were for years limited to Shikoku south of Deshima, and even today are limited to Shikoku, New Tokyo, and Honshu.
Rheinland has always been pretty open to bounty hunters, especially after the nomad war left its military in tatters.

Waaaait, how comes? And what about all the other NPC and even a whole none-Kusari stations being further inside then Deshima? As I remember well there is no infocards in vanilla clearly station so.

(07-11-2014, 05:43 PM)Curios Wrote: [ -> ]

(07-11-2014, 11:35 AM)Karst Wrote: [ -> ]The presence or absence of a BHG base doesn't necessarily equate the relations of a house with the Guild. Deshima used to be the only place foreigners were allowed at all, it's more or less a "coincidence" that it houses mainly BHG today (and thus displays their IFF). Bounty Hunters in Kusari were for years limited to Shikoku south of Deshima, and even today are limited to Shikoku, New Tokyo, and Honshu.
Rheinland has always been pretty open to bounty hunters, especially after the nomad war left its military in tatters.

Waaaait, how comes? And what about all the other NPC and even a whole none-Kusari stations being further inside then Deshima? As I remember well there is no infocards in vanilla clearly station so.

Everything Karst said is correct, i don't see why you're surprised.

It's correct for how we live in disco while I was talking about vanilla.