Lockdown Mode: Built-In Countermeasures Against Theft - Roadmap Lockdown Mode: Built-In Countermeasures Against Theft - Roadmap
This thread is locked. Replies are disabled.
Initially, the game wasn't fully persistent. You were expected to spend maybe a few hours on a ship, then it gets blown up and you restart. In that kind of game, I was totally fine with theft and greifing. But now users spend potentially hundreds of hours hoarding, building, and trying to obtain ultra-rare items, and I can't allow it to continue in good conscience.
I've tried to put my foot down previously, but I honestly don't have the patience to enforce the "no social manipulation" rule. I'd rather (REDACTED) than sort through whatever interpersonal issues led to most of these incidents.
Part of the problem is joint ship ownership. To be 100% clear, if you own a ship jointly and it contains items you don't want to lose, you are an idiot. This weird pseudo marriage "merge" thing is pure refined cringe and it needs to stop. It needed to stop such a long time ago.
By default, ships are in lockdown mode. In order to exit lockdown mode, it's owner, or all of it's highest ranked captains must be present in the ship. Once all co-owners are preset, there will be a short timeout before lockdown mode is disabled.
When in lockdown mode:
This should put an end to the most serious thefts, which happen while an owner is offline. Greifing and smaller thefts will still be possible, which I'm not totally happy with but overall I think are fair game. Of course players will still have ways to sabotage themselves, but I'd like to do what I can to minimize risk.
If you still want to do joint ownership, you can either A) share the same rank, which will require both of you to be present to remove rare items or B) pick one person to be the true owner, and accept any consequences.
Can you add an option to disable this?
Unlikely. If there is it's going to involve some buy-in and a giant warning message. I worry that any option to disable it would lead us back to the same situation. I take a pretty libertarian approach to the game, but there comes a point where I need to step in, and we're far past that point. I could only enable it for ships containing a sufficient number of items, but I think I prefer the simplicity of blanket coverage.
Will this break my auto-trader?
Maybe. I know I'm going to regret this, but at this point I'm willing to give you the explicit go-ahead to use anti-idle scripts to keep them loaded on the owner account. It should be clear to anyone paying attention and not inventing conspiracy theories that I never cared in the first place. But if we end up with 10 auto traders and 20 other boring ships loaded around the clock then I'm going to have to do something about it.
A ship's owner(s) no longer play or their account is lost. Will I lose items on that ship?
In cases where an account hasn't been active for several months and/or you can present compelling evidence that the owner consents, I might be willing to demote owners. This isn't perfect, and I'd rather not have to step in, but it's a small price to pay to deal with an entire severe class of bad behavior.
Replies have been disabled.