All posts by CCP Masterplan

EVE

Warp Drive Active – Warp Acceleration Changes With EVE Online: Rubicon

Greetings, Warp Enthusiasts!

Today I'm going to talk a bit about some of the math behind the warp speed changes coming with Rubicon (and I'm going to do it using graphs, which are vital to any good dev blog!) With the Rubicon expansion, there are going to be noticeable changes to your ship's mobility as you warp around New Eden.

For a long time, the options available for us to balance how ships warp around have been rather limited. The only really variable we could tune was the top speed. However, as I'll show later, changing this value only has a minor impact on the overall travel time of fast ships vs slow ships. Now that the ship rebalancing train has reached the Interceptor class - ships whose defining characteristic should be their ability to quickly get on top of a target - it was time to take the opportunity to do something about this. With these changes, we should see a more meaningful role for fast tacklers and scouts to be able to snare targets for their larger (and slower) friends.

Firstly, I want to make sure we're all aligned regarding what this does and does not cover. For the purpose of this blog, I'm talking about everything that happens in a warp AFTER your ship's velocity has reached the alignment threshold of 75% of its maximum speed, in a direction roughly oriented towards the destination. Before this point, your ship is simply aligning, not warping. Nothing we're changing in Rubicon affects this alignment phase, only what happens after you see the warp kick in.

Engage!

A warp is split in to three phases - Acceleration, Cruise and Deceleration:

  • During the Acceleration Phase (as the name implies) your ship's speed is increasing, up to its maximum warp speed (measured in AU/s).

  • Once the ship has reached maximum warp, it will spend a period of time in the Cruise Phase. Here, it will cruise at its maximum speed, until it is time to begin decelerating.

  • The Deceleration Phase is mostly the opposite of the Acceleration Phase - The ship is slowing down from its cruise speed until it drops below its sub-warp maximum velocity. At this point, the ship exits warp, and everything returns to normal.

This graph shows the three phases for a cruiser hull performing a 30 AU warp. Acceleration takes almost 9 seconds, it then spends another 9 seconds cruising at 3 AU/s. Finally it spends nearly 22 seconds decelerating. All ships follow the same pattern, but with higher or lower top speeds according to their class.

For various gameplay and technical reasons (something to do with hamsters and nanites), ships in EVE don't follow the physical acceleration models that we might be familiar with in the real world (or whatever your favourite digital simulation of real-life might happen to be) - specifically Newton's 2nd Law. Instead we describe their motion during acceleration with the following pair of equations:

x = e^(k.t) and v = k.e^(k.t)

where x is the distance travelled (in metres) at time t (seconds), v is the speed (m/s) at time t, and k is a constant (sort of - see later).

For the deceleration phase, the equations are similar, but with a negative time coefficient (and an offset to handle the time/distance elapsed during acceleration and cruise).

So, what value does k have in these equations?

In the old warp behaviour, k=3 (acceleration) and k=-1 (deceleration) FOR ALL SHIP TYPES. Those caps are there because that is important! All ships, no matter their top warp speed, would accelerate at exactly the same rate. This means that for the average warp, the majority of the time is spent following that same curve whether you are in a freighter or an interceptor. Let's illustrate this with another graph...

Warp Drive Active

Here is a graph showing the speed of the same cruiser from earlier, along with an interceptor doing exactly the same warp. Note that even though the interceptor has the ability to reach a top speed 4.5 times higher than that of the cruiser, it only completes the warp a few seconds earlier. This is the ultimate problem that we've tried to solve with the changes in the Rubicon expansion:

For most warps, faster ships should be noticeably quicker at covering distances than slower ships, so that we can have meaningful differences between ship class mobility.

Remember that constant k I mentioned earlier? Well here's how we've changed things. For any ship, k is now a function of that ship's maximum warp speed. This means that ships that have a higher speed will reach that speed sooner than a slower ship reaches its own (lower) top speed.

For the acceleration phase, k is equal to the ship’s maximum warp speed (in AU/s).

For the deceleration phase, k is equal to the ship’s maximum warp speed (in AU/s) divided by 3, but with a maximum value of 2. This maximum is in place to prevent ships with excessively high warp speeds from decelerating out of warp so quickly that they transition from "in warp, many AU away" to "next to your battleship and firing up tackle" in less time than the server, client and player can reasonably handle.

Ludicrous Speed!

Here's a comparison with the same two ships as they will warp post-Rubicon:

Observe that even though the interceptor's maximum warp speed has been reduced from 13.5 AU/s to 8 AU/s, it still manages to beat the cruiser to the finish line in less than half the time.

Punch it!

The current design has the fulcrum set on T1 cruisers. If you're flying a T1 cruiser with no modifications to your warp speed then you will not notice any difference warping in Rubicon. Every ship that warps faster than a cruiser will see their acceleration increased (and therefore see significant reductions in overall time warping) and every ship larger than a cruiser will see their acceleration decreased (and therefore spend more time in warp). The small ships are being sped up by a larger degree than the big ships are being slowed down, so the average warp speed across the classes of ships is getting faster. These numbers are shown in the following table:


(Click To Enlarge)

Those are base numbers for each ship class. If you need to go even faster, then you have a few options:

  • Hyperspatial Velocity Optimizer rigs will increase a ship's warp speed, at the expense of CPU output
  • Use a Strategic Cruiser - some of the subsystem options provide a boost to warp speed
  • Plug in an implant - the new Ghost sites coming in Rubicon might have something interesting for you...

Fleet warps will continue to work in the same way as before - all ships will use the warp profile of the slowest ship, so remember to Stay Aligned and you will arrive together! Similarly, acceleration gates will slingshot your ship using the same warp acceleration as a manual warp.

These changes are already on the Singularity test server, if you're keen to try and see how they feel. I hope you found this interesting, and that you enjoy everything coming in Rubicon.

Last one to that stargate buys the first round!

- CCP Masterplan and the Five 0 team

 

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EVE

WantToTrade: Tags for Security Status

Hi there. I hope that everyone enjoyed Fanfest last week as much as we did. This dev blog is a follow-up to the Fanfest presentation where I introduced Team Five 0's 'Tags for Security Status' feature coming in Odyssey. If you were present for the talk, or watched it on the live-stream, then you'll have some idea of what you're about to read. If you missed it [Why would you miss it?] then read on to find out what is coming to a low-sec system near you soon.

[As soon as the presentation is available on YouTube, I'll post a link here]

For those who don't like scrolling, here's the five-line summary:

  • We are adding some new pirate NPCs (non-player characters)
  • These NPCs will only appear in asteroid belts in low-security space
  • When killed, these new NPCs will drop a new type of pirate tag
  • These new pirate tags can be taken to a CONCORD station (in low-sec space) and turned in at the new 'Security Office' station service
  • Turning in one of these tags will raise the security status of your character

Now let's take a more detailed look at these changes:

To begin with, I'm going to list some of the goals that we had when starting this project. Some of these came from the high-level goals for the Odyssey expansion itself.
  • Give players a reason to be out in space. In particular, to be out in low-sec space.
    • Add something unique to low-sec that gives residents and visitors a resource worth fighting over 
  • Add an alternative method of raising security status via the proven market mechanics
    • Provide an alternative way to get back in to high-sec for 'reformed' outlaw players. We have had players that would rather stop playing altogether than grind their way back up by killing NPCs
    • But we still need to respect the sandbox!
  • Reflect the DUST 514 storyline progression
    • The new NPCs represent the pirate factions seeing profit and/or power by supporting the clone mercenaries of DUST 514. This support has caused local CONCORD officials to offer special rewards to capsuleers who keep this new menace at bay.

New NPCs

We're adding four new classes of NPC to each of the five pirate factions that populate low-sec areas: Sansha, Guristas, Angels, Serpentis and Blood Raiders. Each faction will be getting the following new NPCs:
  • [FACTION] Clone Soldier Trainer: In charge of funds, equipment and locales used in the preparation and deployment of clone soldiers loyal to the faction.
  • [FACTION] Clone Soldier Recruiter: In charge of scouting vulnerable areas - remote planets, isolated outposts, interstellar colonies and other places that hold human life - with the aim of bringing in new recruits for the pirates' clone soldier programs.
  • [FACTION] Clone Soldier Transporter: Responsible for the swift conveyance of clone soldiers to their intended destination.
  • [FACTION] Clone Soldier Negotiator: A fixer who establishes contracts between pirate-trained clone soldiers and those who might employ their services.
These NPCs will be found according to the regular faction distributions, but only in asteroid belts in low security space. The different classes will vary in difficulty and rarity. They will be more common than office/faction spawns, but less common than the regular pirate NPCs that you see in the belts. They will put up a reasonable fight (including using warp-scrambling effects) so come prepared!
Once you've found one of the new pirates and killed it, you should go and check the wreck. In addition to some random loot, each NPC will always drop one tag.

New tags

There are four tag types (one for each class of NPC) and all faction versions of a given class will drop the same type of tag. The tags can be freely bought and sold on the market like most other commodities.
If you're interested in raising your security status, the first step is to acquire a collection of tags (via whatever means you find appropriate). The quantities and types you need will depend on your current security status, and on how high you are looking to raise it. Each tag type only works for a specific band of the security status spectrum, so if you wish to go all the way up from -10, you're going to need some of each. Here is a chart showing the boundaries at which each tag can be used, and how many tags are required to bridge each section:
Tags can only be used to raise a security status between -10 and 0. If you want to get higher than zero, you need to do that the old-fashioned way.
Each tag is worth 0.5 points of security status, so that's 20 tags between -10 and 0.
We fully expect certain tag types to be more in-demand than others.
Each tag has an associated ISK fee. This 'processing fee' is paid to CONCORD along with the tag when you turn it in. [This value is still in balancing, and is likely to change before release]

New station service

Once you have your tags, you need a place to turn them in. Fortunately, we've got that covered! To incentivize capsuleers to hunt down and kill the new pirates, CONCORD and DED stations in low-security space have opened a new service - the Security Office.
These Security Offices are scattered across 45 low-security stations. Like all station facilities, their locations can be highlighted on your star map:
Take your tags to one of these stations, drop them in to your hangar, and the Security Office will be available:
Here you can drag the slider to the right according to how much of a security status gain you need. The tag requirement and ISK cost will update, as will the text describing the consequences of the resulting status. Once you’re happy with the deal, click Exchange Tags to complete the transaction. The tags and ISK will be handed over to CONCORD, and your security status will be updated in return.

So does this mean I can now buy CONCORD standing?

Good question! Before I answer that, let’s talk about the links between Security Status and CONCORD standing:
Both of these attributes are tracked in the EVE database by the same single value. That is, if one is modified, the other one implicitly changes as well. This is limits what we can do in terms of hanging features on this value – for example CONCORD agents would read/write your security status when you run missions for them. Committing a crime that lowers your security status could then cut off access to certain agents, or even certain areas of space (such as the Sanctum constellation).
In Odyssey, we are tackling this issue in the following way. We are making Security Status in to a new per-character attribute, which will be completely independent of the standing system.
During the downtime on release day, the following process will run:
  • Each character gets a new Security Status attribute in the DB
  • The (unmodified) CONCORD->character standing is copied in to the new Security Status attribute
  • All CONCORD->character standings will be wiped
We will then switch over all gameplay logic (such as outlaw status, NPC kill rewards, police response etc) to use the new attribute. The Security Status attribute will maintain the familiar -10 to +10 range, and will be unaffected by the various Social/Connections skills (other than Fast Talk, which will continue to improve Security Status gains from killing 'Wanted' NPCs by 5% per level).
So, to answer the original question: Does this mean I can now buy CONCORD standing? No. You will be able to buy an increased Security Status with tags+ISK, but not standings.

Changes to ‘cycle-ratting’

The standings system is designed to track relationships that don’t change extremely rapidly. As such, it uses fairly heavy caching - typically changes can be around 15-20 minutes old before they get applied, and each solar system has its own cache. One consequence of this is that changes to CONCORD standing received by killing pirate NPCs are heavily delayed. Only the largest kill per tick would apply (where a tick is the total time that a change takes to works its way through the cache layers). Furthermore because the cache is per solar system, it is possible for a character to have multiple ticks in the pipeline if he is killing rats across multiple systems. Hence ‘cycle ratting’ is a way to use limitations of the standing system to accelerate the rate of security status gains. 
In moving the security status attribute out of the standing system, this behavior will go away. The pending change will follow the character around as he jumps between locations. In effect, the tick will become per character, not per solar system. There will no longer be a way to have multiple ticks in parallel across different solar systems. The tick will now be an explicit 5-minute interval, starting with the first NPC kill that a character makes. We are also rebalancing the security status gains given by some NPCs as part of this change, so you might notice slightly different gains per tick.

When can I try this out?

We will soon be updating a public test server with these (and many more) Odyssey changes. Please give us your feedback - we're very interested to hear it in the comments thread for this blog.

And finally, some graphs

During my Fanfest talk, I presented some graphs showing how Retribution impacted PVP, particularly in low-sec space. For anyone that missed the talk, here are those graphs again. I recommend checking the recording of the talk for some discussions/interpretations of this data, and also some annotations highlighting particular points of interest.
EVE

You have insulted my honor – I demand satisfaction! Dueling comes to EVE Online

Greetings most honorable space pilots!

As CCP Seagull recently announced, Retribution 1.1 will be shipping on 12th February. With this change, Team Five 0 is adding something that was much requested as part of the Crimewatch changes, but that didn't fit in to the original release plan: The ability for consenting players to flag themselves for legal combat against one-another without (legal) outside interference - AKA Dueling.

Background

Prior to the big Crimewatch revamp we introduced in Retribution, this was possible via a slightly awkward method of can-flipping: By 'stealing' one unit of ammo from someone's jet-can, you could flag yourself to that player, allowing them to legally attack you. This wasn't just used for setting up a 1v1 fight or trying to trick someone in to attacking you first - players started getting creative by using this mechanic to host tournaments and king-of-the-hill contests in high-sec. This emergent behavior is just what we like to see. However the new Suspect flag (allowing everyone to attack you for loot-theft, instead of just the can owner) means that setting up such controlled fights is no longer easily possible. Thus I set out to do my best to ensure we introduced a replacement mechanic to support this as soon as possible.

How it works

It is quite straightforward really and builds on top of Retribution’s new Crimewatch behaviors: A player can issue a Duel Challenge to another player in the same location (either in the same station together or in space together). The target is then notified of the challenge, and has a period of time (currently 30 seconds) to either accept or refuse it (somewhat similar to the conversation-request mechanic). If the target refuses the challenge (or simply doesn't respond within the required time), then the request is dropped and nothing further happens. However, if the target accepts the challenge, then a 5-minute Limited Engagement is created between the two characters. From here, the existing Crimewatch mechanics take care of the rest (Punishing neutral remote-reps, extending the life-time of the engagement due to module activation etc). When a challenge is accepted in space, a notification is sent to all ships in the immediate vicinity, informing them of the honorable combat that is about to ensue! As might be expected, challenges can only take place in high/low security space - Null/WH residents already have plently of tools to satisfy their grievances.

Duel challenge dialog

Note that there is no special exclusivity or isolation from outside interference just because a duel has been agreed. Other players can interact with the combatants exactly as normal, providing that they are prepared to accept the normal Crimewatch consequences. (Inteferring in a Limited Engagement via remote-assistance can net the assistor a Suspect flag, making him a global target).

There's a couple of restrictions in place to ensure that this can't be used to cause undue load on the server, and to prevent 'challange-spam' from negatively disrupting someone’s client (similar to the exploit of convo-bombing someone)

  • A player can only have a single outgoing challenge request active at any time. After issuing a challenge, you must wait for it to be accepted or refused (or for the request to time-out) before you can issue another challenge to someone. This doesn't mean that you can't have multiple engagements going on at the same time, it just means that you can't go through the local list and blindly issue challenges to everyone in parallel. As soon as a challenge is responded to, you can move on to issuing the next request, so setting up a 3v3 for example will still be quick and easy if everyone is on the ball.
  • Similarly, a player can only have a single incoming challenge request active at any time. If he currently is considering a request from one person, any requests coming in from other people will be denied.
  • Challenges will respect the Block option in the contact list. If you have blocked another character, that character will not be able to issue challenges to you.

Future features

There’s a number of ideas for building on this in the future. For example, fleet-to-fleet engagements have been suggested as one way to scale up these engagements. Further suggestions are also welcome. The first pass of the Dueling feature should be hitting the Singularity test server any day now. Please try it out and let us know what you think in the comments thread linked with this blog.

 

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EVE

You have insulted my honor – I demand satisfaction! Dueling comes to EVE Online

Greetings most honorable space pilots!

As CCP Seagull recently announced, Retribution 1.1 will be shipping on 12th February. With this change, Team Five 0 is adding something that was much requested as part of the Crimewatch changes, but that didn't fit in to the original release plan: The ability for consenting players to flag themselves for legal combat against one-another without (legal) outside interference - AKA Dueling.

Background

Prior to the big Crimewatch revamp we introduced in Retribution, this was possible via a slightly awkward method of can-flipping: By 'stealing' one unit of ammo from someone's jet-can, you could flag yourself to that player, allowing them to legally attack you. This wasn't just used for setting up a 1v1 fight or trying to trick someone in to attacking you first - players started getting creative by using this mechanic to host tournaments and king-of-the-hill contests in high-sec. This emergent behavior is just what we like to see. However the new Suspect flag (allowing everyone to attack you for loot-theft, instead of just the can owner) means that setting up such controlled fights is no longer easily possible. Thus I set out to do my best to ensure we introduced a replacement mechanic to support this as soon as possible.

How it works

It is quite straightforward really and builds on top of Retribution’s new Crimewatch behaviors: A player can issue a Duel Challenge to another player in the same location (either in the same station together or in space together). The target is then notified of the challenge, and has a period of time (currently 30 seconds) to either accept or refuse it (somewhat similar to the conversation-request mechanic). If the target refuses the challenge (or simply doesn't respond within the required time), then the request is dropped and nothing further happens. However, if the target accepts the challenge, then a 5-minute Limited Engagement is created between the two characters. From here, the existing Crimewatch mechanics take care of the rest (Punishing neutral remote-reps, extending the life-time of the engagement due to module activation etc). When a challenge is accepted in space, a notification is sent to all ships in the immediate vicinity, informing them of the honorable combat that is about to ensue! As might be expected, challenges can only take place in high/low security space - Null/WH residents already have plently of tools to satisfy their grievances.

Duel challenge dialog

Note that there is no special exclusivity or isolation from outside interference just because a duel has been agreed. Other players can interact with the combatants exactly as normal, providing that they are prepared to accept the normal Crimewatch consequences. (Inteferring in a Limited Engagement via remote-assistance can net the assistor a Suspect flag, making him a global target).

There's a couple of restrictions in place to ensure that this can't be used to cause undue load on the server, and to prevent 'challange-spam' from negatively disrupting someone’s client (similar to the exploit of convo-bombing someone)

  • A player can only have a single outgoing challenge request active at any time. After issuing a challenge, you must wait for it to be accepted or refused (or for the request to time-out) before you can issue another challenge to someone. This doesn't mean that you can't have multiple engagements going on at the same time, it just means that you can't go through the local list and blindly issue challenges to everyone in parallel. As soon as a challenge is responded to, you can move on to issuing the next request, so setting up a 3v3 for example will still be quick and easy if everyone is on the ball.
  • Similarly, a player can only have a single incoming challenge request active at any time. If he currently is considering a request from one person, any requests coming in from other people will be denied.
  • Challenges will respect the Block option in the contact list. If you have blocked another character, that character will not be able to issue challenges to you.

Future features

There’s a number of ideas for building on this in the future. For example, fleet-to-fleet engagements have been suggested as one way to scale up these engagements. Further suggestions are also welcome. The first pass of the Dueling feature should be hitting the Singularity test server any day now. Please try it out and let us know what you think in the comments thread linked with this blog.

 

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EVE

Introducing the new and improved Crimewatch

Hi folks. I'm CCP Masterplan from Team Five-0, and I'm here to talk about a significant change to the aggression system in EVE coming along in this winter's expansion.

I'm going to cover a bit of history, a discussion of why we're making these changes, and then get in to the details of what the changes will be. The current system is notorious for its lack of documentation, both publically and also internally within development. This dev blog is the first step towards improving the public documentation of the game's aggression mechanics. Therefore it is going to be quite long, as there are a lot of details to explain. If you read nothing else, I suggest you at least look at the “Summary of significant changes” paragraph further down, as some previous assumptions are getting changed.

Previously, from Five-0...

Back at Fanfest in March, we first talked about what Crimewatch is, some of the problems it has, and some of the changes we wanted to make. During the summer releases of Escalation and Inferno, we undertook significant behind-the-scenes work to get Crimewatch in to a better state, but with the constraints of keeping the design changes to a minimum. This put us in a position where we could then embark on more significant changes at the design level. With the Retribution expansion, we are going to be shaking up some of the rules, making improvements to user visibility and understandability of the system, and taking the opportunity to close a number of ‘creative abuses’. In the old system (which I'll refer to as CW1 for brevity), much of the behavior was built upon Aggression Flags. These flags were between two parties (characters, corps, factions and others). These flags could be triggered in a wide variety of ways, from direct activation of your guns, through stealing items from a container, to simply being ‘observed’ by an invisible NPC controller. Sometimes the aggression flags were visible in the client, sometimes they weren't. Attempting to document the complete behavior of the CW1 aggression flagging system was a daunting task; attempting to make design and code alterations even more so. The system also scaled unevenly in terms of server performance: Low-sec space often came off the worse, because it sometimes saw major fleet fights, and also had to handle the legality issues of Global Criminal Countdowns.  

When we started on this project, we identified a number of outcomes that we wished to satisfy:

  • The new criminal flagging system should be easy for players to understand
  • The new criminal flagging system should be easy to developers to work with and unlikely to break
  • The new criminal flagging system should not impose a significant performance load

Note that we're not attempting to dumb down the system, or restrict what you can or cannot do. In fact, these changes should empower you to find even more creative solutions to the problems that other players might present you, and punish them accordingly. Our overriding design goal for this feature is to “tame the beast”: the root of all evil in the current system is that it's just too complex, so our number one goal is to simplify. In terms of balance, we have a secondary goal to try and maintain the current “balance of power” as much as is possible within the scope of the main goal. We're attempting neither to make space safer, nor make it less safe, but rather to come up with a system with approximately the same consequences as the current system but in a much simpler package. This process is necessarily imperfect, and we're inevitably going to find that some things are slightly easier and other things are slightly harder. This is regrettable, but we're absolutely not going back down the rabbit hole and re-complicating the new system to solve comparatively minor imbalances, because the overall cost is just not worth it.

If we were making a theme park game where your actions are tightly circumscribed this could be problematic, but thankfully we're making a pretty open-ended sandbox, which gives us developers a lot of confidence that you players will find new ways to do old things pretty quickly.

Introducing some new Flags

A core concept of CW2 is Flags. We aim to decouple Actions from Consequences via a flagging system. For each character, we track a number of flag types. Performing certain actions will cause yourself (and possibly others) to pick up one or more types of flag. Having a flag will cause consequences for you and others around you. Flags are always per character. There is no character-to-character flagging any more. (But see Limited Engagements further down) We want to make sure that you know your own flag states at all times. A lot of work has gone in to making sure we can keep your client up-to-date at all times, whilst minimizing the overhead on the servers. The following image shows a character with three flags. From left-to-right: PVP flag, Suspect flag, Weapons flag. Each flag also has an associated timer, shown by the clock around it. The specifics of what each flag means will be explained later.

Some actions that will give you a flag are long-lived. For example, activating a turret module against a player will give you a PVP flag. As long as you have one or more relevant modules active, the timer will be held at the start, and the countdown will not commence. Once the last module has been deactivated, the timer will begin counting down. Restarting the module will obviously move and hold the timer back at the start. Other actions are instantaneous ‘one-shot’ events, such as stealing from a container or getting hit by a smartbomb. On such an event, the related flag will be triggered and immediately begin counting down. Triggering the event again will restart the countdown. In most cases, using assistance modules on another player will cause you to inherit all of his flags, including whatever their current countdown state is, if the flag has a higher time remaining than your own. Assisting someone with 10 seconds left on his Weapons Flag will give you a 10 second Weapons Flag (as long you your current flag doesn't have more than 10 seconds on the clock). The system will work in such a way that a pair of mutually-assisting logistics ships won't lock each other in to being perma-flagged (as long as they themselves aren't also aggressing), but will have their timers count down in sync with any combat ships they are assisting. In general, logistics ships should be able to jump through gates at the same time as their fellow combat ships.

Summary of some significant changes:

Note: By ‘offensive modules’, I mean turrets, missile launchers, electronic warfare modules (such as webs, neuts, ECM), as well as drones with similar effects. ‘Assistance modules’ refers to logistics modules such as shield transfers, remote armor reps, sensor boosters etc., as well as drones with similar effects. Here's a brief summary of what the different flags mean:

Weapons Flag: This flag is activated by using offensive modules against another player (or simply by activating certain non-targeted weapons such as smartbombs). Having this flag will prevent a character from performing actions such as jumping, docking and switching ships in space. This flag functions in all areas of space.

PVP Flag: This flag is activated when one player uses offensive modules against another. The initiator of the action will get a PVP flag. If the recipient is a piloted ship, then the owner of this ship will also get a PVP flag. Having this flag will prevent a ship from being removed from space if the pilot logs off. This flag functions in all areas of space.

NPC Flag: This flag is activated when a player uses offensive modules against an NPC (or vice-versa). Having this flag will prevent a ship from being removed from space if the pilot logs off. This flag functions in all areas of space.

Legality Flag: This flag exists to penalize those who commit criminal/suspicious actions in Empire space (high and low sec). A character with a Legal flag is always a legal target for offense from all other players. This flag has two severity levels: SUSPECT and CRIMINAL. The severity depends on what action is performed and where it happens. The severity also controls what consequences can occur (CONCORD will always attack CRIMINALS but not SUSPECTS, for example). This flag functions only in Empire areas of space. (But you can't shed it by jumping in-and-out of null). The CRIMINAL severity will always override SUSPECT.  

Here's some of the important changes compared to the old system that players should be aware of:

  • Illegal attacks on ships (not capsules) in low-sec only incur a Suspect flag. No CONCORD response if the attacker subsequently jumps in to high-sec.
  • Stealing from a container will expose you to potential attacks from all players (but not from sentry guns). The existing rules for what constitutes 'legal access' to a container are the same (I am the owner of the container, I am in the corp registered to the container, I am in the fleet registered to the container, The container is Abandoned), but we are adding one additional rule: If I can legally attack the owner of a container, then I can legally take from the container.
  • Using assistance modules will pass on all flags to the assistor, possibly preventing them from docking/jumping for the same interval as their assistee
  • It is possible to be prevented from switching ships or ejecting (whilst in space) by your actions
  • After losing a ship and entering a capsule, players will still be restricted from docking/jumping for up to a minute (if they have an active Weapons flag).
  • There is no A-to-B aggression flagging anymore, just global flags. (Well, sort-of, see Limited Engagements)
  • Assisting an outlaw in low-sec (outside of a combat situation) will not be penalized
  • Security-status penalties are now ‘front-loaded’, so a criminal/suspect will incur the full penalty when an illegal attack starts, not when (if) the target is destroyed.

Flags in detail

The following two charts show which actions cause which flags (and where), and then what the consequences are for having a flag.

click image to enlarge

click image to enlarge

We're still tweaking the contents of these charts, so not all decisions are finalized. If there's a case that you think isn't covered, then please let us know about in the comments section. Hopefully the fact that we can actually explain much of the new system in this way shows how improved things are compared to the old system with all of its special-cases and exceptions.

Limited Engagements

The personal-flags system tidies up a lot of problems with the old system, but still leaves us with a couple of cases that aren't covered. The main one is that a suspect can be freely attacked, but he has no way to defend himself from attack without committing further crimes. We want to ensure that a player always has a right to self-defense, even if he is A Bad Guy. To solve this, we still require a form of A-B flagging. However this will be heavily limited in application, and won't be propagated via assistance chains like the existing aggression flags are. This is where we introduce the concept of a Limited Engagement. An LE is between a pair of characters. (Always characters, not corps, alliances, factions or anything else). An LE gives each party a legal right to attack the other, without triggering any Legal flag. An LE is ACTIVE as long as offensive actions are on-going. Once offensive acts have stopped, it will begin to count down. Resuming hostilities will reset the timer. If the timer expires (probably 15 minutes but still TBC) then the LE is ended. An LE is created when character A attacks character B, and where B is globally-attackable due to being a Suspect, Criminal or Outlaw. This then allows B to defend himself against A. Like Criminal and Suspect flags, An LE is only effective in empire space. Assisting someone who is engaged in an LE will cause the assistor to receive a Suspect flag. This is to prevent neutral logistics interfering in ongoing combat without risk to themselves.

Kill rights

Performing an action against another player that gets you a Criminal flag will also award a kill-right to that person. This will happen regardless of whether or not the target ship was destroyed. This will feed in to the revamped bounty system that Team Super Friends will be talking about very shortly, so look for a dev blog coming from them soon.

Next time, from Five-0...

Team Five-0 have a few more features lined up that we'll be talking about in the run up to Retribution, such a Safety System to prevent Accidental Condordokken that is better than modal dialogs. We're also working on a replacement for the usage of loot-theft as a way to initiate consensual 1v1s without incurring criminal penalties that we hope to release for Winter. Keep an eye out for an announcement about when these changes will become available for public testing. In the mean-time, please let us know what you think about these changes in the comments thread. We'll be reading it all, especially posts with useful feedback in them. (Here's a guide to making a Good Post by my good friend CCP Fozzie)