Make the control player based? We are already going to be using war counsels, groups of player hunters and griefers get reputations, their names get known, let the admins give the war counsels extra powers in game to punish those guilty of "treason" in some way, no GMs need be involved.

Give commanders the ability to punish other players because people tell them they're griefing?!
Sorry but while that's a nice idea in theory, in reality it probably wouldn't work.


Firstly the commanders have to have more to go on than just heresay.
Basically there would have to be some kind of system marker to designate a player as having inflicted friendly fire that they (the commanders) can access in order to even be sure that there was a case to consider.

Supposing they did have access to such records then they would still have no way of knowing if that player was intentionally griefing or whether it was an accident.
Once again they'd only have other player's accounts of the situation to go on and they have no way to know if those players were giving a fair account of the situation.

So to be fair they'd really have to wait till there was some sign that the player was repeatedly griefing, by which time the damage would have been done.


Even if the player hung around it would take a long time for such a player driven system to yield any results simply due to uncertainty, but it's only stupid griefers that would get caught this way.

Long before the player council could decide on a course of action an actual spy/griefer could either create another character and do the same thing again under a different name (they aren't in it for the exp, just the info and to mess up the enemy) or if their account name is known by the council they could just pass the griefer baton to a friend.


Add to that the possibility for abuse of this power by the commanders and you have a supposed solution to a problem that isn't just ineffective it potentially makes the situation worse.


No, if you want to make a system to prevent griefing and punish friendly fire it has to be automatic, instant and game driven, not to mention affecting every character on the player's account.

That's a fair criticism, I was just throwing ideas around, the biggest problem with automatic systems is that they tend to be indiscriminating with how they hand issues and therefore have no allowance for mistakes and tactical decisions where factions send in suicide squads (for example) to help mark and entrench targets.

Although I'm not really concerned about friendly fire (I play a lot of planetside 2 and it's never really been a problem there as far as I've seen) I don't understand why their needs to be a mechanic in place to stop it. I mean, in a game with only one server, any kind of temporary ban from a server equates to preventing someone from playing the game at all, which is way too harsh (especially if those team kills weren't the person's fault, accidents happen).

Why isn't controlling comrade killing players the jurisdiction of the squad leaders/strike force commanders/war council? I mean, if a commander tells his deployed artillery units to fire on a melee another strike force is involved in, odds are he would be the one to be punished, not the vehicle gunners who were just following orders. What kind of justice is it when 5 men from a strike force get temp-banned/penalised for following the chain of command?

A stray shot hitting a friendly or a guy getting hit because he runs in the line of fire shouldn't be much of an issue. You shouldn't be punished for only a few incidents spread out over a decent length of time. If you do kill several of your own people in say 5 min then your likely doing it intentionally. You can always put in exceptions for aoe guns that still cause a punishment for repeated hits over a period of time. For PS2 you pretty much have to kill 7 or 8 of your own faction in a short length of time to get weapon locked, personally i have always seen this as too lenient. If you do manage to get locked and you weren't intentionally team killing then you might need to take the time to think about why you got locked.

This is the system used for ps1.
Level 1 (0-600): You are gently reminded, via a help window, of why it's a bad idea to kill friendlies and how the grief system works.
Level 2 (600-1000): You are warned, via a pop-up warning in the center of your screen, that killing friendlies is a bad idea and will eventually cause you lots of problems. This warning pops up 3-4 times before you hit the next level.
Level 3 (1000 plus): Weapons lock. Weapons cannot be fired and reduction of your max throttle speed to 10% (so that you can't ram anyone). This weapons lock lasts for 20- 30 minutes.
Level 4 (1600): Account Suspension for 3 days.
In this system i would say the full health of a marine should be about 200 points. A degeneration mechanic could drop the grief points from 1000 to 0 over the space of an hour or so. Add in a mechanic to prevent aoes from counting more then 2 players hit at once and you shouldn't have too much trouble. That means you can kill 5 of your own side per hour before getting locked. This steal seems pretty lenient given that the time to kill is quiet a bit higher then ps2. If you managed to get locked then either you need to take a break and practice your aim or you were intentionally killing your own side. If you managed to get suspended then you are obviously causing trouble for your own team.

on topic i hope the drain for spawning is a personal cost, this is the only way to prevent trolling by spawning then killing yourself or running directly to the nearest enemy machine gun. For kill trading you could reduce the xp or req gained for killing the same enemy in a certain length of time, say 3 min or so. In a real fight that should be short enough that you don't get penalized unless the same guy does something stupid several times in a row.

Looking at this thread made me realize that one of the biggest problems games have today is the players themselves.

Think about it...

You realize this thread does nothing but give people ideas to find ways around the system just let the programmers figure theres things out it will turn out fine

also you realize that there will be enough players to stop any base farming because there are likely to be people defending all bases and im sure there will be an alert when a base or outpost has ben lost or captured

There will always be those that try to abuse the system, you cant stop them by pretending there isn't a problem. If were lucky things like ghost capping wont be a problem because you get a better spread of population across the lines but it doesn't hurt to discourage exploits even if they're unlikely to occur.

Exactly.. That's one of the main reasons I think Demitri's idea of having team killers only able to play weak 'sin-bin' units (like grots) for a while, after racking up too many friendly fire demerits, is a winning solution.
The perp can still play

Plus a forgive system was mentioned where the victim can forgive the perpetrator for an honest mistake - ofc that isn't foolproof and there'll always be sour grapes, but it can help separate the accidental from the intentional.