I think we need some clarification on war and how it applies to faction rules. As far as I can tell there is no mention of war in the rules, thus it should not be a justification of hostility between factions. I bring this up because an admin (Statler) has recently used HBH’s declaration of war against us (NWT) as justification for their continued hostility towards us. If declarations of war are indeed an official part of the server, then I think this needs to be stipulated in the rules. Specifically there needs to be rules concerning how and when factions can declare war on other factions and under what conditions the war is considered over. Without these rules I feel it is far too easy for factions to hide illegal hostilities behind the guise of war. Furthermore, there should be an official means of keeping track of who is at war with who.
I think this is something we as a community need to discuss and get ironed out, and I look forward to hearing what others have to contribute to this conversation.
well regardless of the particulars of the situation between HBH and NWT, I still think this is something that needs to be discussed. Declarations of war is something often used in chat and yet it is not covered in the rules. I think that this should be a part of the gameplay on the server, however to avoid abuses there should be rules concerning it.
What do you reckon we need a Lavaworld convention on war?
There is no way to enforce anything like that in this game right now and technically war is war and what is it good for???
Sometimes war is declared by a faction who want to achieve a goal (stop you doing something like mining on a planet) and once they achieve that goal they cease hostilities and go after something else. This is good war and good for the server.
Other times you get get asshats who just want to ruin your game experience and do it with no consideration other than the lulz. This is bad war and is bad for the server.
There’s probably lots of shades in between but it will always remain a subjective topic.
I know it would be difficult to track, however something I had in mind was a system similar to the OCD and AM. Except it is a series of commands available only to faction leaders. All you have to do is enter a declare war command, perhaps like WAR:Declare:FactionName,then I imagine several things happeneing
War declarations are listed on the website under a new section
a declaration message is displayed in chat
when ever a member of a faction involved in the war signs on, they also get a notice
there is a set time during which the war lasts
There is a cool down time, during which you can not declare war on that faction again
We have rules of engagement set up for the various factions and it just seems to me that these declarations of war are being used as loopholes to get around those rules.
Rexxxus, if you are reading this. I have quite a bit of programming experience and would be more than happy to assist in getting a system like this set up.
Except - why? What does it change in the game or the gameplay? It only really has a slight effect on the meta game in that we can track when one faction is having a war with another. Other than that, what difference does it make?
I suppose on reflection it could suspend any of the faction limitations on combat i.e. a trader faction can fire first at enemies. However with the current game you don’t know which faction is coming at you until its too late sometimes
I reckon this is a good idea when there is more flexibility in the faction system and the radar/map/FoF is more advanced.
I’m a trader but I see another trader base I want to attack. Because it is a trader base, I can not just openly attack it. So I invent some imagined slight and use that as a basis for declaring war. Now I can attack the base and if anybody says anything about me breaking the rules I simply say I have declared war. With out set rules on justifiable reasons for declaring war then war can be declared for any reason. This provides a way of completely negating the established rules of engagement. So I feel that either we need to clarify how and when war can be used, not allow war to be used, or get rid of the rules of engagement because the ROE are useless if you can declare war for whatever reason you want.
used HBH’s declaration of war against us (NWT) as justification for their continued hostility towards us.
This is miss leading for the War example.
The truth is HbH and NWO had a dispute and war was mutually decided, informally, by both parties. You attacked them, they attacked you. yadda yadda. WAR.
You then switched to NWT and expected HBH to stop.
I’ve been discussing Story enforcement with RexXxus and we are working it out.
Switching factions in the middle of a conflict is something the community is going to have to decide on.
In my opinion, if there is a conflict it can’t be resolved by just changing your Faction Tag. There needs to be diplomacy.
In you example above, between traders, I would say you can’t declare war. The problem with factions is there is always an element that even the leader can’t control. One member might cause a conflict between trader factions and then the whole factions are at war. It’s just diplomacy. As an admin can I police it? not really. So yeah you could just make up a story, as many have, to declare war.
It’s not a perfect story, but it’s a start. It’s up to the community to participate or not.
Until these type of issues are nailed down we’re going to continue to see factions turn to Lawless to avoid the drama.
As far as I know, war was not mutually decided, HBH declared war on us and we had no choice but to accept it. To clarify, here is how I see the chain of events as occuring:
Bosnian decides to mine a meteor that someone else was mining. This person did not appreciate that and thus attacked Bosnian. I apologize, I can not recall who this person was so I will refer to the player as Bob for lack of a name :-). Bob decides that he is going to declare open hostility on our faction (NWO).
At this time, Bosnian, Nova, and myself were in the Discord voice channel trying to determine how to react to all of this. At this point, a member of HBH, I don’t recall who, joins the channel. He proceeds to speak with an air of assumed authority attempting to give us orders. I simply stated that I do not recognize his authority as he has none. He took offense to this and left the channel.
At this point, Nova and myself are mining a Meteor (separate from Bosnian) outside of my CV. HBH comes in and destroys our capital vessel.
We are obviously not amused by this, so we attempt to engage them as best we can, which consider how much my CV sucked at the time, was not much.
At this point, Nova allows his anger to get the best of him and he proceeds to grief HBH base(s) by ammo draining them. For the record, Nova has admitted his wrong doing here and has stated he would accept punishment for such.
Seeing as I am stuck on GF with no resources and nowhere to spawn in at, I decided to use a fresh start to get back to Phobos and rebuild from there.
During discussions with HBH, it was pointed out that they were using our lawless status as justification for their open hostility towards us. I want to point out that prior to all of this I had been discussing with Bosnian and Nova about switching to Trader faction so as to avoid the open hostility that comes with being lawless. I bring this discussion back up and we decided that if we make the switch to Trader, then HBH would no longer have the lawless justification for their hostilities.
Once we make the change to trader, we decide to operate on Homeworld to give HBH some breathing room. We had operated there for a couple of days before HBH attacks our bases without provocation.
Now, of course all of these points are simply my perspective and I realize that I may be missing some information and I would gladly welcome any corrections that need to be made.
I have always been a stickler for following the rules of this server. I realize that my faction members have not always done the same. I just feel that if there are no punishments for breaking the rules, then the rules cease to have a purpose.
Having said all of that, I acknowledge your point on diplomacy. In hindsight, after making the faction change, we should have made an attempt to end the hostilities so as to make a fresh start as we had intended. Personally, I thought our changing factions and moving to homeworld served that purpose. But I digress.
The reason I consider this matter closed is we are beating a dead horse. I can’t keep tying replies to your long posts. nova griefed them by draining ammo, they hate you and now you are on perma war. Just work it out with them.
I have seen your evidence and It’s not enough. I’m not going to look into this anymore.
tl;dr Let’s promote a community devised war policy and diplomacy.
I have been following this thread because I am interested in the discussion of a community perspective on war. I do not see it as an attempt to resolve the HbH, NWO, NWT issue, but rather use their conflict as an example case of the complexity of inter-faction relations and use of the word war. As a community member I would like to see us define war, what is it good for, and discuss potential limits to it.
I do not fully support 1-3. I think a war declaration by forum post would be sufficient, with all war talk, diplomacy, treaty, or cease fire contained in that one thread. I do think that there should be a time limit to hostilities, or at least a suggested requirement of [let’s say] a week of cease fire to follow a week of hostilities before re-engaging. Constant attacks that never give one or both sides time to cool off and rebuild sounds exhausting. Such a cease-fire cycle might also encourage diplomacy to occur, this might be surrender, peace terms, or inviting other factions to join in the conflict. If one faction is overly aggressive and spurns diplomacy, some alliances might want to make a point of taking the side of the underdog.
In the areas of war and diplomacy, I think they are a great opportunity to increase faction involvement in story. It would be up to individual factions to decide whether to get involved, keeping war-talk restricted to its designated thread would allow those uninterested entirely to avoid it, while letting interested parties take part. I think alliances are perfectly suited to establish and enforce a war policy.
brilliant, I really like your idea of using the forum. It is far better than my initial idea, as it does not require any extra effort or development on the website or server. We would be using existing systems. We would just need to round out the specific rules.
I also like your idea of limits on duration and a required cool down period. Perhaps I am over complicating things, but I was just thinking that perhaps we could develop an equation that determines maximum duration based on the number of members on each side. For example, if 2 large factions are at war then they can be at war longer, but if it is too one sided, then it reduces the maximum duration. It could be something as simple as, the max starts at 7 days, you take the difference in size between the two sides, and subtract that many days, but not allowing it to go below 3 days. So in other words, the war could be between 3 and 7 days depending on the difference in size between the two sides.
Specific example faction ABC has 8 members, faction XYZ has 2 members. There is a difference of 6 members, which brings the max days down to 1 day, but we bring that up to 3 days. Thus this war could only last 3 days. For the mathematicians and programmers
MaxDuration = Max(3,7-abs(X-Y))
where X,Y are the faction sizes
I also like that idea that once war is declared in the forums, the rules or engagement are suspended. In other words open hostility between members are allowed. I also like the idea of leaving the specifics of the war up to those involved and to be ironed out in the forum post.
There seems to be a trend for the player base to want the server to do some kind of programming. While it’s a nice concept it puts a burden on an already overloaded staff.
The community needs to come up with something straight forward and simple.
A forum post Declaring war with a reason would justify breaking the IFF in my opinion if their was a video or chat proof. As to when the conflict ends that’s up to the factions. Some people push the line to far and peace can never be achieved.
One challenge I see is there are already conflicts so they would have to be identified first.
Who took the first shot has always been the real issue here.
The admins are willing to enforce the Story rules, but we need the players to start making videos and stop writing long posts. We just don’t have time to read the logs or long posts people make.
Here’s what I’d like to see in a post:
You: Here is a video of Trader faction attacking my alliance faction on planet X.
Possible outcomes.:
We jail and make a record of it. (Rexxxus has already done this in the past) We could also declare them pirates if it continues.
Admins do nothing and you just declare war on them.
Whatever is decided on the official story will have to be cleared with Rex first.
I agree completely, there needs to be a shift of using video evidence when making any kind of accusations (I took the hint about long posts and promise to keep them short and sweet from now on). The one thing I think will need to be considered is offline attacks.Using your example, if the trader faction attacked the alliance factions while the alliance members were offline, then it would be difficult to provide video proof. Hopefully the offline protection will be fixed soon and then that won’t be an issue.
Based on Statlers input and the discussion thus far, here is a basic outline for rules of war.
War must be justified with video proof of some form of grievance upon which the war is based. (Example, ammo drainging).
War must be declared in the forum (perhaps we can make a new section for this) and screen shot must be provided of this war being declared in the game chat. Also, the video evidence from 1 must also be included.
A duration must either be given, or if declaring indefinite war, then conditions must be given under which war would end. For example, replacement of lost ammo plus a penalty of gold.
While there is no restriction on how often war can be declared, if it becomes excessive then an admin may become involved. For example, if a faction is constantly being griefed by another, then a state of near perpetual war is ok. However, if a faction is declaring large scale wars for rather minor offenses, then that may be judged excessive.
My thoughts this set up is it covers your example Statler where peace sometimes is not possible. If there is sufficient reason, then a faction can declare a state of indefinite war and give conditions under which it would end. It would then be entirely up to the other party to meet those conditions.
For example I will use myself. My conduct recently has understandably made myself a large number of enemies. Thus I feel LHI would be justified in declaring a state of indefinite war against me and they could stipulate something along the lines of my submitting myself for jail time as a condition of peace.
No - it’s war, not two gentleman hitting each other with gloves because someone ate the last digestive. If I want to declare war you suck it up.
Okay - everything but stuff related to 1)
Kind of, if we kick 1) in the head then I agree some form of ‘win’ condition must be included and must be reasonable i.e. no “I pwnz0r you til I get 1 beeeelion gold” - this could be ship kills, base kills, compensation etc - i dunno how you police this, maybe have to play it by ear
This is too subjective, you need some principles to work by. If people break the rules the admins should intercede - for everything else there is war.
My first thought after reading this was some form of increasing “cost of war” i.e. the attacker has to pay the ‘intergalactic police’ a war tax that increases proportionally to the number of days and has a built in ‘repeat multiplier’ so you cant just undeclare then redeclare. i.e.
A wants a fight with B, A declares war and pays a tax of (R100k) CR for the first 5 days, after the 5 days, they pay (RN*10k) per day, where R is the repeat multiplier and N is the number of days the war has been going on.
When the war is undeclared the multiplier R for A declaring on B is set to 5 and goes down by 1 every 48 hours. So if A declares again straight away, the first 5 days costs 500k and each subsequent day costs 300k, 350k, 400k etc. Also the multiplier stacks so if you re-dec, then redec immediately again, the R value is 10
Voila, a Credit sink (which this game sorely needs) and a self regulating war economy.
LOL @ glove slapping and a good point about 1. I agree, war is hell. However, I was more meaning for 1 to apply to areas where declaration of war would violate story rules.
For example, Alliance faction declares war on a pirate faction. Well they can openly attack pirates anyway, so no real justification is needed.
Second example, a trader faction wishes to declare war on another trader faction. Since hostilities would be in violation of story rules, I think some form of justification needs to be involved. It can be simply I want an excuse to attack them. Otherwise, what is the point of having the rules in the first place if they can be so easily negated through war.
While I like your idea of a tax, I think there is enough of a backlog of programming for the server developer(s), that we should try to avoid that if possible.
As far as deterring war abuses (perhaps call it war crimes? lol), we simply would treat that like rule violations. If you think a faction is abusing war, then get video evidence and present it to an admin for review.
So I could implement a section there also about factions who are in war with each other. With a little effort we could implement a command maybe ONLY faction founders can write fa:war:ENEMY-FACTION-ABBREV
That means the WHOLE faction is officially in war with the other one.
Preventing that a troll in your faction starting this I had this idea: Idea To Help Admins
So it would be official on the website and other people can see if they join or help or ignore.
This can be later worked out like accepting / decline it over the website. Implementing Live-Stream links or best Highlights of a fight or just a Popcorn stock market. Kappa
and promise to keep them short and sweet from now on). The one thing I think will need to be considered is offline attacks.Using your example, if the trader faction attacked the alliance factions while the alliance members were offline, then it would be difficult to provide video proof. Hopefully the offline protection will be fixed soon and then that won’t be an issue.