Camera ships are oorp and are treated as oorp.
What if they are used to coordinate group fights. People have been doing it before under the pretense of filming, while in reality they are following the fight from various angles and voice-talking to warn people of crusiing up caps, priority targets, missiles and state of bbs on ships.
Should this be allowed by default within the server rules, while noting that each ''side'' may employ only one of such ships and they are not combat targets during a fight. The issue is figuring out how large the fight has to be for this to apply, as a neutral oorp camera ship used to scout out targets can easily be seen as metagaming and unfair advantage if used in any significant way outside and ongoing fight.
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According to the camera ship infocard, it is only to be used for scenic shots and such. I have seen it happening myself, though, for example when the Nomads sieged Exodite's PoB in Delta and he used a camera ship and refused to move away. Another time it happened recently during the Planet Darlington fight when someone used a camera ship on the Bretonian side. It's pretty annoying to see people making use of nice features to abuse them.
So using an oorp vessel to get an advantage in fights, nyea... Cant say this is alright. The ship is oorp for an reason and by having it do stuff like that it takes part into the rp. When caught it shuld be sanctionable and the fight declared nullified imo.
At this point the question isn't "is this unethical?" or "should this be punished?", the answer to those is an obvious yes.
At this point the question is "can this be proven well enough for a punishment?" and if the answer is no, then "should we make it legal to a certain extent?". I think that's what prompted Spazzy's idea, and this thread.
Well sory then, my bad for not fully understanding the tread.
In the later point, it always can be proven. It would require an admin being pressent at a fight and either flhook chatlogs or from that vanila game the server tool as that one has a way to read in real time whats said by everyone.
I would not recommend the camera ship to be allowed for that, agian its an oorp ship only ment to make clips and pictures it simply shuld not be allowed to talk at all or been seen in radar. If they want an person directing the fight like that its easy enough to make any ship and do that in the same way a camera ship would do this.
I do not mind someone pressent doing this but just do not use the camera ship for this as this was not the intention of that ship and by doing it ur breaking the purpose of that ship, most vets know that and newbs can read it in the ship description.
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The thing I will never understand is Camera Ships with IFFs of factions participating in the battle. Is it that hard to buy the Freelancer ID as you buy the Camera Ship and type /droprep? It's very annoying sometimes to think there's an extra friendly/hostile ship in the fight just to see it being a spectator.
Camera ships are OORP entities. PvP apart from RP, does have a RP context and consequences. If anything they do or say has any repercussion in the RP environment then it's pretty much rule breaking in my opinion.
It's a lovely grey area, but if the admiral on deck wants to RP an admiral on deck, then he needs to see things from the point of view of an admiral on deck.
Clearly the Camera ship is an ooRP element, meant to be a voice over, so it should not interfere with the inRP battle, favouring a side, not divert the PvPlayer's attention, in any way.
Also, I agree with @Antonio about the IFF. In the case it could not hide itself from the radar, it must show neutral - not friendly and not enemy.
Moreover, I suppose the Camera ship is being given special flight attributes, to handle it better and to give the video recording the best experience, then I expect strict rules for the usage. Why not keep a public book of the owners?
Or instead of making things unnecessarily complicated, just report people who are using camera ships for anything else than recording fights and doing screenshots? It's easy to see when a camera ship player is in group with the enemy. Of course proxies like TS/Discord are another thing, but honestly, I really don't want people to instrumentalize this thread to make things just more complicated without much solution - if people want to be assholes, they will find another way.