<insert house intelligence/Order faction here> Black Op operator that trades some of the benefits of its mother-ID while forcing Unknown/Freelancer IFF and being allowed somewhat bit more combat freedom than a regular Freelancer? Extra drawbacks of not able to use allied technology, your own native would be limited to possibly just weapons, civilian/generic gear and couple of faction cells associated with black market (think AK47 being found everywhere).
It would be good idea, if not the fact that IDs are still visible inside roleplay, @Omicron. That's the very main issue with making any form of espionage roleplay without using Freelancer ID.
This little bird went to sleep forever. So long.
Thank you for everything.
I was more concerned about being able to blend into environment easier and not being exactly tied to overt face of your mother-faction. False flag operators, illegal black ops. For full-on infiltrators you would use FL instead
(07-12-2018, 05:54 PM)Sciamach Wrote: Outcast slavery is actually far better for the victim than the corporate slavery and crime-less imprisonment of the Houses down in places like Liberty Rheinland and Bretonia
SORRY ABOUT THE WALL OF TEXT, IF YOU WANT THE TL : DR JUST GO READ BELOW THE DIVIDING LINE.
Most of my main characters are spies. I've modeled my spy RP based on how spying is in real life, with a few fictional takes to make things interesting. I've also taken a history of modern espionage course and a course in international relations & security at the university of toronto when I was studying there at 2015 so I think I'm qualified to make a comment regarding spying RP in Disco.
In general, there are two types of spies. Registered Foreign Agents (also generally called Intelligence Officers) and Illegals (which may or may not necessarily be Intelligence Officers.
The tl:dr of Registered Foreign Agents is when a foreign country e.g. Russia, sends an intelligence officer to the USA, they must register this intelligence officer with the USA meaning the American government will know that it this person is a Russian spy. In return, they are subject to relevant espionage laws but given diplomatic immunity for everything else. It's kind of like having an IFF/ID scanned I'd say.
The tl:dr on Illegals on the other hand are spies sent undercover and illegally to a foreign country. If Russia sends an illegal spy to the USA and the USA captures him or her/finds out that that person is spying, then the USA can charge that person for spying and throw them in jail where, given infinite amount of time, the spy will eventually reveal information to the Americans that the Russians do not want them to know. These individuals may be intelligence officers or intelligence assets (will explain below).
Intelligence Officers, almost always a registered foreign agent, generally go to foreign countries and recruit locals to be spies. It is costly for a Russian spy to infiltrate the CIA since you have to create false identities etc. etc. BUT it is cheap and easy for a registered foreign agent to recruit a local who already works at the CIA (and is probably American born).
An Intelligence Asset on the other hand is generally a local who is recruited for a foreign intelligence officer to pass on information/intelligence (e.g. kind of like an informant). They are not intelligence officers, they are not usually nationals of the foreign country but rather nationals of the local country (in most cases anyway).
Another reason why Intelligence Officers (spymasters?) recruit intelligence assets/locals to spy for them, is because creating a false identity nowadays is extremely difficult. You have to have complete records of your life from the moment you're born, falsifying these records in the digital age is nearly impossible. You have to have things like credit card histories, medical records etc. Also, with metadata, your phone basically knows you better than you do since it can tell your exact whereabouts at the exact time which reveals a lot of information about yourself. Intelligence agencies have access to this data and as such it is difficult to create a fake ID, or at least very expensive. As such, intelligence agencies send spymasters to recruits locals to be their spies instead, because it is more efficient.
In return, the Intelligence officers are registered, which then allows the local government to send their counter intelligence officers to conduct surveillance/spy back on the registered foreign agents. This creates a safe environment for spying, because it makes the cost of failure too high. If Russia tries to send a intelligence officer to recruit a local nuclear engineer to steal and American nuclear bomb, the FBI WILL know about it. As such, Russia wouldn't try to do something as crazy as that. But, maybe there's a few terrorists that Russia wants to keep track of, so they send their officers to go keep track of them (by recruiting the friends of said terrorists for example). If the Americans find out about that, they might let it pass, since its not such a big deal in terms of violating American national security. In fact, they might even work with the Russians to stop said terrorists. So the purpose of this is to stop countries from trying to spy on each other too hard by making the cost of getting caught red handed way-too-high.
Now, with regard to Freelancer, I would say that someone with a intelligence ID and IFF is probably just an overt, registered foreign agent. If you want to go undercover and spy on the Hessians, you can always create a Hessian indie or a LWB indie and RP spying on the Hessians that way.
Alternatively, you can find a person RP'ing a Hessian indie, and recruit them to be an intelligence asset/spy for your intelligence agency (which is what I do most of the time).
I find that this system for the most part works. The only thing I don't like is how Intel ID's are forced to de-cloak before collecting intelligence for inRP purposes, which is basically allowing the person being spied upon to know that they are being spied upon, which is dumb. It reduces the intel ID into a military-recon unit, which is completely different from intelligence or human intelligence RP.
But for all intents and purposes, if you want to be undercover, you can just create a new character with a new ID/IFF and go with that.
Well, this is fine for most parts because real world examples taken are highly developed environments where states are actively cooperating and formally writing down the code of conduct between each others to create a fail-safe barrier for epic shitstoms that may lead to nukethrowing.
But Freelancer, on the other hand, is:
1. A game.
2. A game about the much lesser developed environment (even for a house space) which mostly remind of 16 century Caribbeans full of random people.
3. Particular server (i.e. Discovery) have set of rules that prevent you from doing something off your ID. And let me tell you - using, for example, Rogue ID\IFF ship to gather 'intel' on Liberty Navy is very edgy way since it can lead to metagaming claims and other sanctions - and it had the cases of such reaction in the past.
In short I'm fine with having an ID - you still can avoid being scanned in most cases since radar ranges are longer then that of cargo scanners.
Also rules are not clearly (still) defining the RP or OORP status of IDs so it's mostly the player's choice of either to use ID installed as an excuse for his further actions or to play along. Most of good quality Wild RP was based on that and I was a part of it (on the end of deceived party) and it was fine. Tho most of it was ruined by people who simply scans, scream 'engagung wild' and that's it.
So, in my opinion, spy RP is a grey area of discovery which had a lot of changes and screwings to it and still it is fails to work well. Current IDs are fine I believe but other limitations are simply makes these factions into another kinds of Navy but weaker. It's like why Police factions always were half-dead (or just dead) - they weren't given anything above what regular Navy faction has minus a good share of toys. Same with Spy factions in most cases. At least an ability to fake flags (IFFs) would be a good add.
So I'm simply voting for removal of any kinds of default rephacks from intel IDs so they can develop their repsheet in accordance to the RP process and needs minus, obviously, faction applied rep\dock bans on individual characters.