I know CCP has ways of detecting macro-mining pattern in the logs if they are made aware by a player that points out the potential offender in a petition.
Well I have a good though unlikely to be implemented way to wreak worse havoc on macros.
The reverse petition in conjunction with hulkageddon. A police force of volunteers who roam the belts in search of baddie-bad micro miners. When a potential macro is found, a special type of petition is filed, which grants immediate immunity for what would ordinarily involve CONCORD intervention. The macro hunter would reap the rewards of the drop, and gain a sec-status boost just like they were ratting. Now of course mistakes will happen, and there is a way to deal with that too.
The reverse petition filed will flag the pilot with something like a convo request popup, but clearly a warning of impending doom with a countdown. If they do not acknowledge the accusation within say 15 minutes, the accused is criminally flagged with a standard counter and anyone may freely dispatch their ship (but not pod). Alternatively, the accused could be flagged only to the petitioner.
The method to avoid abuse (macro spamming), would be to limit the number of petitions each pilot may send between down times, as well as limit the number of petitions a pilot may receive. If either number is exceeded, then the petition fails and the miner is safe from both explosion and safe from macro spam.
Also, the same pilot cannot petition the same accused more that once per down time regardless of how many petitions either has left.
So this still opens doors to problems of abuse. There are ingame ways to prevent this. Firstly, a faction should be setup, one lime CONCORD but specifically for combating macro miners. Individuals or corporations would have to join this faction in a similar way to the militia for faction warfare. Trial accounts would be ineligeble, and there should be a security standing minimum requirement.
If the pilot makes a mistake and the accused was not using macros which a review of the pilot logs will reveal, and the pilot just had to go afk for some legitimate reason ( which he doesn't have to validate, he wasn't macroing after all), and files a petition, the the macro hunter would be forced to pay the replacement cost of the ship and all it's mods and cargo contents (crystals for instance). As well the macro hunter would suffer a security status just as if he killed a pilot under ordinary circumstances. If the security status falls steeply enough due to repeat mistakes, the pilot is unable to file the macro hunter petition until sec status is returned to acceptible levels or enough decay time occurs to nomalize the sec status they have now, say measured in days or weeks. If sec status falls below minimum entry requirements, the member (or Corp if it's a Corp membership) gets booted from the faction. So corps would be very careful to monitor their members or risk Corp expulsion.
This system would help improve the proposed goal, by ensuring only legitimate macro hunters would be interested and that they would be careful of who they mark as macros.
I know there are still holes, but in general what do you think?
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.
6 months ago
