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Fleet Theft/Sales/Security: An Equity System Proposal
leviathan99
Member Posts: 7,747 Arc User
So... I was part of Caspian Division. We had a T4.5 starbase and a T2 embassy. I haven't been in game a few weeks due to a bad motherboard but I gather that one of our inactive founders' accounts was TRIBBLE and the person on the TRIBBLE account booted everyone and has claimed the base and fleet for himself. Cryptic can't or won't do anything, which is frustrating but I imagine it's the result of well meaning but inflexible policies and limited manpower. The community, I've heard, has been awesome.
However, I think this presents some real issues when people have spent thousands of hours and spent hundreds of dollars on a product that can be stolen this easily. It makes me reluctant to participate in the Fleet system again.
Thinking about this, I have a proposal for a Fleet Equity system. It's really very simple.
The game already tracks lifetime fleet credit purchases. My idea is that, based on that total, there would be a starbase XP penalty when someone leaves a fleet based on their contribution total, which may include taking base amenities offline. Ie. boot everyone and the fleet gets knocked back to T0.
If someone gets booted, the penalty takes effect. When booting a person, you can discharge them dishonorably (nobody gets anything, the fleet loses progress) or honorably (the fleet still loses progress but the person gets sent an item which can be used to provide their new fleet with direct base XP, based on lifetime fleet credit). Either way, the fleet loses progress when someone gets booted.
If someone quits a fleet, they get nothing but get a choice whether the fleet they're leaving takes a progress penalty.
The point overall is to discourage fleet migration while encouraging amicable departures... And to make the hijacking of a fleet nearly impossible.
Thoughts?
However, I think this presents some real issues when people have spent thousands of hours and spent hundreds of dollars on a product that can be stolen this easily. It makes me reluctant to participate in the Fleet system again.
Thinking about this, I have a proposal for a Fleet Equity system. It's really very simple.
The game already tracks lifetime fleet credit purchases. My idea is that, based on that total, there would be a starbase XP penalty when someone leaves a fleet based on their contribution total, which may include taking base amenities offline. Ie. boot everyone and the fleet gets knocked back to T0.
If someone gets booted, the penalty takes effect. When booting a person, you can discharge them dishonorably (nobody gets anything, the fleet loses progress) or honorably (the fleet still loses progress but the person gets sent an item which can be used to provide their new fleet with direct base XP, based on lifetime fleet credit). Either way, the fleet loses progress when someone gets booted.
If someone quits a fleet, they get nothing but get a choice whether the fleet they're leaving takes a progress penalty.
The point overall is to discourage fleet migration while encouraging amicable departures... And to make the hijacking of a fleet nearly impossible.
Thoughts?
Post edited by Unknown User on
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As far as your proposal goes, I do have one major concern with it.
As a fleet leader I've had to boot people in the past due to behavioral issues. Either they got into a fight with other members or were inappropriate or disrespectful and we decided that person had to go. In the case of your proposal, my fleet would lose progress for booting a problem member and I can't say I like that.
Edit:
Not a fan of this either. If someone quits a fleet they shouldn't get an option to decide if they give that fleet a penalty or not. That's way too open to griefing.
Edit 2: Actually after reading more I can't back this in any way. Sorry.
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I would love to help you guys recover, who do I get a hold of to make arrangements?
There would also be a situation where a large contributor, could then 'hold' his contributions over the Fleet leadership's head as it were and honestly (and this is the case in most MMOs); usually many Fleets/Guilds already have enough 'drama' as it is. The last thing the STO Fleet system needs is something like the above that would just add more unneeded 'drama' into the STO Fleet system.
you call it a "Fleet Equity System' proposal, but I fail to see the' Equity' myself.
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No, no, no.
As the above poster said, we bump people all the time. Bank thefts, bad sports, bad behavior, people who are inactive without notice. Once per month we end up dumping a slew of people to open spots for new, active members. If someone takes a break without telling us, they are subject to this rule. X number of weeks, and bye-bye, with the caveat that you're welcome back any time if you were in good standing when we bumped you. It's nothing personal, but we can't hold slots and turn new people away based on the hopes that you MIGHT come back. So now we should be expected to backslide for the need to open up space in an already limited system? 500 members is all we get, and in an active newbie recruiting fleet like ours, we stay pretty close to capped out all the time. Once a month of this nonsense would see us never reaching T5.
Sorry to hear about what happened to Caspian Division that really bites, but harming the rest of the fleets progress because someone got booted or decided to leave is a terrible idea.
Good Hunting
OP's issue, horrible as it is, would not have been solved by his proposal. (Because, let's face it, if Doofus-A hacks a leadership account, and can't get what they want from it, do you think they're going to balk at kicking everyone out and wrecking all your progress as vengeance? No.)
Fleet management needs a serious overhaul. Membership control (promotion, kicks, etc.) really needs to be its own separate tab from the roster (and not be available via right-clicking) and require an individual secondary password to access, with a 24 hour lockout after three failed attempts.
This system would only hurt you terribly if you're kicking your fleets largest contributors every month.
If that's the case and your fleets biggest contributors are leaving or being kicked in droves, then I'd have to suggest you're doing something terribly wrong.
Actually, under this proposal the rest of the fleet would be allowed to leave the fleet, taking all of their contributions with it and leaving the thief unable to sell those tasty provisions.
I think any sufficiently good system would have to be of such a degree of complexity that Cryptic wouldn't spend the time to implement it, over actual content.
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I don't know how your fleet works, but we end up dumping 20-30 people a month for inacitivty, and many of them make contributions at some point. T5 is one hell of a haul, and that's where we're headed now. Even the result of someone's 20k worth of fleet credits hurts if it's demoting us at this point.
Harming the fleet by removing members isn't the solution here. It's the ultimate form of griefing tool. The fleet management interface is a joke, and should be revamped to actually provide some sort of security to leadership beyond the account level.
That probably is going to be the more accepted option. I guess I jumped to the equity premise because I'm used to guild systems that were more focused on the individual player... And I guess my idea was that the counter to overly large fleets was not to invite people you anticipate kicking and that it's good to feel "stuck" with other people shy of pretty much a major offense. That booting people should hurt a little bit, which would discourage theft and push cohesion.
I can get that there's friction to that idea though... And I can see where the simplest solution is, like you say, leaders who can't remove one another so that if someone gets TRIBBLE and the TRIBBLE account goes on a booting spree, the other leaders could simply step in.
Well. I'm not going to absolutely push my idea if it's unpopular but you do raise a good point... And fleets could limit liability by limiting contributions from new members.
Honestly, all inactive members should be demoted, this is part of fleet management. It doesn't solve the problem of people getting TRIBBLE that are active. Cryptic has put in account guard, its quite unlikely to get truly TRIBBLE unless everything you have is compromised, the person's computer needs to be verified before proceeding, meaning their e-mail is also TRIBBLE.
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Then under this system you'd find an inactive member who contributed quite a bit to be more valuable than an active member who never donates a thing. Admittedly, this is a tricky situation to be in, but not one I'm necessarily opposed to.
In fact, the way this would force a fleet to be loyal to a contributing member even if he's decided to take a break is one of the best arguments in favor of it.
Now you're just being dramatic and silly. Sneaking into a fleet, donating time and effort into helping the fleet grow, then leaving to remove only your own time and effort, is a TRIBBLE poor griefing tool. It requires entirely too much work for too little payoff.
How much someone contributes vs how good of a fleet mate they are, has nothing to do with each other.
Bottom line is that someone could join your fleet, donate a ton of fleet marks, then know that if you try and kick them the fleet as a whole will be punished for it. This means that they have you over a barrel, and the longer you let it go, the more they can contribute, the more painful it will be to kick them.
This is, if anything a griefers dream come true, a truly captive audience. You have to put up with them, because kicking them could quite easily become more painful then putting up with them.
If you think a griefer won't put some effort into creating a situation like this, you're fooling yourself.
Any system that punishes a fleet for removing someone, for any reason what so ever, is a very, very bad idea.
How exactly can you do that? There's no setting that I know of that lets you limit how much someone can contribute to the fleet projects.
Honestly, I'm surprised that Cryptic's security measures failed. This hacker had to also know the email of your leader and get the confirmation code.
When it comes to additional security, I have the idea that if a leader tries to demote or kick an officer or co-leader from the fleet, the other officers get a message wanting to confirm. Sort of like a take on the self destruction scene in Star Trek 3.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1xdGCvNMEY
And if kicking multiple non-Officers from the fleet that's been active within the past 60 days, a flag is raised to the other officers. Where they can approve or disapprove the action.
To prevent theft with Fleet banks, while there are permissions that limit certain ranks, I also propose an item limit. So lets say that a thief was acting to be part of the fleet and waited until promotion that they could suddenly wipe out your bank, with an item limit at the next rank, they could only remove 2 items within a week. (Also with Gateway, one could look at that persons characters to see if they were gearing up as intended).
Well, while a very painful lesson, hopefully this will prompt Cryptic to start putting up serious Fleet Security measures.
Until Customer Service restores your fleet to 100%, you guys are welcome to stay at my fleet starbase.
You misunderstand. I'm not talking about silly spai activity. I'm talking about someone who gets TRIBBLE or gets angry. You needn't have a nasty motive when you start. You need only get mad, be leadership, and go on a kicking spree. Boom. Months of activity LITERALLY gone, because of a mechanic purposely designed to be destructive.
There's nothing dramatic about it. The management interface is where these things need to be solved, not by introducing some mechanic that damages the whole group for the loss of a member, regardless of the reason.
Isn't the central measure of how good a fleet mate is that they contribute... Or that you like them enough to ignore that they don't?
I mean, if lifetime contribution isn't a factor or the main one for keeping someone around, why do you even need to be in a fleet together? I'm expressing my own opinion here, not Caspian's. Which tended to be more all embracing. (Not that that's what got them TRIBBLE. The fleet founder quit the game years ago for the most part. I'm not sure he even logged in since bases were added.)
But take Havraha. He was more focused on hs own fleets and starbases. He was fun to have around and he hung out on the vent server. We encouraged him to join the fleet for efficiency's sake. But being a friend didn't necessitate him being in the fleet and it wasn't necessary to be a friend to be in the fleet either.
Fleets are units of convenience for shared resource dumps. I think gauging someone's resource dump level for the impact of booting them is the ideal measure if what fleets exist to do at a cold, rational, code level.
I's obvious that this person has never played other more guild-focused games where people will devote months or even years to an alt specifically created to do exactly this sort of thing. There are people who get more jollies crafting and enacting plans to harm others' gameplay than they ever do from the gameplay itself.
I think the problem you just described is worse under the current system.
It would be easier IMHO with no central management at all and a shareholder model where players are investors to be courted, with less emphasis on central planning, rather than allowing fleets to have central management, which lends itself more to individual whims or security issues with a single account.
No, it's how well they get along with everyone else, and what they contribute to the fleet as a whole, and not just to the fleet projects.
And again you are creating a perfect system for greifers to gain a captive audience. They could quite easily lay low and be just sort of there until they get about 100k in fleet credits... Which is by no means difficult to do with how many marks you get.
Then once they get to that point, their true nature comes forth but the fleet leadership has to consider how bad they vs how much pain the fleet would suffer for kicking the person. This creates a vicious cycle, where the longer you let it go the harder it is to get rid of them, and the more freedom they have to be a pain.
I feel for you and your fleet. Losing everything like that sucks.
But a one size fits all, hardcoded system is never the answer when dealing with social groups like fleets/guilds. No system will ever work well enough, and the more controls you put into place, the more likely you are to see innocent people harmed by it.
People need to look no farther then EVE to see this. Happens all the time there.
I used to play a game, years and years ago called Subspace. A simple little online space ship shooter type thing.
There were people in the game who enjoyed nothing more then shooting people as soon as they spawned in, or spawn campers as they're called now. These people never won a match because they got no points for those kills.
So the game dev's decided that anyone spawning in was worth -10 points, and you weren't worth anything until you picked up enough boosts. So anytime you killed someone like that you lost points. But rather then stop people from doing so, they started to brag about how high their negative scores were. They'd go out of their way to avoid killing someone with a positive score, because that would effectively lower their personal score.
When you have people who behave like that, who play a game for no other reason then to ruin the fun of others... Then you see why the OP's idea is bad, because people will use it as a way to grief others.
Of course it is, and that's what I'm talking about. Cryptic introducing the ability to take leadership from an inactive leader was a godsend, or our fleet would be something totally different. Our founder hasn't logged in an alt since pretty much before starbases were introduced. But beyond that, they really don't seem to have touched the fleet management mechanic in any significant way since.
The fleet management interface needs an overhaul. If starting a fleet needs 5 members/toons, then keeping one should require at least 5 as well. Changing leadership (whether adding or removing) should require voting of some sort, as should disbanding the fleet entirely. If someone wants to finagle a way to put 5 of their alts in charge so they can play king, so be it, but most fleets ought to end up with more than one voting player in charge under such a system.
The in-game management tab for those who have access should probably also have individual password protection, as well.
This I know. My group over there has had to deal with these sorts of attempts a couple times in the past few months.
Some of the more notable EVE awoxing is a study in social engineering, to be sure.
You have a personal starbase reputation and embassy reputation. These reputations would be on par with something like New Romulus rep. Except you'd share the gains of anyone in a fleet while in that fleet as long as you're active (ie. one contribution a month).
This would be improved whenever anyone in your fleet's starbase or embassy reputation improves.
The actual quality of your starbase or embassy would be determined by the average of all fleet members, rounding up. This favors small fleets or large fleets with established members.
The cost of items in your embassy or starbase would be determined by the size of your fleet, going down with size. This favors large fleets.
There, you have a balance between the two.
From there, personal starbase and embassy rep would decay by 8% a month for every month a player doesn't contribute anything. It would not decay at all if you contribute SOMETHING. An entire fleet inactive for a year would be back at zero. A half active fleet would take two years to slide to zero, assuming they didn't dump inactive players... And because it's an average, they'd immediately shoot back up when they did. And an inactive player in a very large fleet who contributes just one item in the month might well make more than 8% in rep due to rep sharing. So I'm inactive for a month. I lose 8% rep. The next month I contribute and the rep sharing brings me back to max rep.
Gold members' personal reps for starbase and embassy would not decay, meaning you'd need no activity quota as long as a player is Gold. Or perhaps would decay at half rate, if that were determined to be more fair. However, the quality of the base is still determined by the average rep level of players in the fleet.
on your proposal, no, i think that could cause some problems. But i agree, fleets need updates to make them more safe from stuff like what happened to your fleet.
Can't someone take ownership after 30 days of inactivity? In cases where someone might be on deployment that could be agreed upon a longer term - I have gone off before and not had access for 60/90 days - but there are few deployments nowadys where someone is away from a computer/internet for longer than that.
I think leaving this persons account in a leader position- inactve for half a year or more was the biggest issue here - and mistake.