House, Military, Police and Intelligence IDs

[Thyrzul]

I feel sorry for you for the false accusations, Garrett, and while I dunno much about the PR stuff, I apologize for my part in the disconnect accusations. It really seemed to be your (Admin Team's) own idea, given the player who submitted the request left you behind to take all the blame. But there are still things that I'm baffled with.

The reason behind the changes was the fact that House Govt's have too strong an influence over quasi-lawful factions. Corporate piracy is essentially stopped in its tracks, because all a corporation has to do is report the offender to the House Government and the quasi lawful faction faces 500 million credit fines, demands for access to their POB's, and even in extreme cases, FR5's. The House Governments effectively stop quasi lawful factions from being quasi lawful. The faction is forced into lawfulness because they can't afford to get caught doing illegal activities. Inside house space, this might be reasonable. Strict enforcement of house laws outside house space is too much power for House military and police factions to wield. This is not balanced, and it has to stop. This was the reasoning behind the change, and although it would have proved effective, admittedly there are less extreme ways to go about it. We are voting on that now.

How I see it, quasi-lawfulness means an extended array of opportunities of which you cannot exploit fully at a given time. You can swing from one side to the other, or keep sticking to the bordering line between the two, but for example, you cannot act unlawfully in front of lawfuls... without consequences. If a faction intends to keep its legal status, then tit needs to keep their public image clean, they need to put effort to it and not just expect it to exist by default (like Zoner neutrality, earn it, not expect/demand). If you want to look/smell clean then you either don't get dirty, or if you do, you make sure nobody notices that until you clean yourself, but getting mad because you are called dirty right after you jumped into the mud is just silly. That responsibility is the cost of all the rewards coming with quasi-lawfulness, but it seems not everybody wants to accept the responsibilities, only the rewards.

Zed summed it up quite well, but also went further than that and proposed inRP solutions on what can quasi-lawful factions do to keep their legal image and still being able to conduct less lawful shenanigans, expanding on one of his points I thought out two specific reasons on either why it would be bad to report rival to government or how can the reported come out of the situation better:

The problem with people avoiding this coveted "corporate piracy" is that they want it both ways - harassing, robbing, and shooting their competitors without the possible RP consequence of that corporation's house wanting to protect their interests, just flying past that same faction's bases in their house space as if nothing happened.

If you're deathly afraid you'll maybe get a little red stain on your crisp green repsheet from shooting someone with connections, perhaps it's more a matter of hardening up and facing potential in-game consequences than seeking admin intervention to implement a broad restriction on RP distress calls and a response by law enforcement when that makes perfect sense as well. Not all house law enforcement chooses to pursue it, which is nice and can make for some underhanded fun when all parties consent, but when they don't consent, what were you expecting from robbing and killing people? It's a diplomatic risk that you've got to account for as a smart corporation with an image to maintain and relationships to foster in your cost-benefit analysis. Players criticize factions that are friendly/neutral to a majority of Sirius all the time despite their actions, so why are they trying to get the same treatment?

Pretty much what I've been trying to suggest, but of course there will always be stubborn elements in this community.

Get creative if it's too much for your delicate repsheet to handle: attack them by proxies and stir up more factions' activity, make keeping their mouth shut part of the demand, give kickbacks to corrupt cops, make your services to that house more vital than their own corps' in some way. There are countless possibilities. Also, if people were friendlier with each other OORP, they could come to better general agreements to piracy (without being too pitched and artificial) without anyone crying, but there are far too many egos invested in pixels.

Actually one of these got me some ideas. There can be a lot of reasons thought of quite easily why would an FR5 be detrimental for either the house or the corporations.

In the case of corporations rivaling from the same house, by constantly destroying eachother's assets, they are both harming house economy, thus both would have to face the same negative consequences should their rivalry become revealed. -> No reports at all.

In the case of corporations rivaling from different houses, appeals could be made towards the sanctioning house, because if you harm their economy, but pay them back part of it, it's somewhat of a compensation. Arbitrary hypothetical scenario: IMG keeps dominating Kruger over a field but sells 1/3 of that ore to Rheinland for discount price, or for cheaper than Kruger would, that could be a reason for Rheinland to ignore Kruger's qq. -> No FR5s in the end.

Bamm, you don't have to fear from FR5s, because somebody else thought it out for you how to avoid them, and now everybody's happy... except those who suffer from these ID changes now because some others couldn't think for themselves before...

These are thoughts not incorporating the ID change, but trying to solve the issue without hurting roleplay... actually encouraging it for some other parties. I've yet to see responses trying to counter these arguements, and can't think of anything possible, maybe except that having to put some effort into keeping up their legal image might easily be less convenient for quasi-lawful factions and corporations than ID changes like this one.

But thinking a bit further, corporate rivalry, even if done outside of the jurisdiction of house laws, results in damage of corporate property, which directly/indirectly damages the economy of the respective house. What would be the reason for a house not to take punitive measures on the offending corporation, or rather, a corporation which directly/indirectly damaged the house's economy? That it happened outside of jurisdiction of house laws? But wait, the action has it's effects, no matter where it happened, why should consequences be affected by the location then? What would forbid house authorities to decide and ban a foreign corporation from house space as a punitive measure in such cases? Divine intervention?

I'm not entirely convinced that ID changes solve the above issue, but I'm more sure about that if corporations try to stay a bit more diplomatic, and make appeals towards the government for compensation of loss, they can minimize the effects of scenarios such as the above.

And most importantly, if factions cannot maintain their quasi-lawful status, or just don't give a damn about trying to, they shouldn't be quasi-lawful: stay completely clean not to get slapped and be lawful, or feel free to do your dirty fetish as an unlawful and get ready to be slapped by lawfuls, or at least them trying to. As far as I know Admins/Devs take player driven lore development into account now.

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