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Star Citizen is set to give players a class of freedom previously unseen in almost any title in the current market with a plethora of outlined mechanics at play. One of which allows you to steal the ships of other players, but as developer Cloud Imperium Games has revealed, you cannot keep the ships you forcefully take from others.
Stealing ships is not meant to be the first protocol by a player and as such, any ship that a player steals will disappear the moment the criminal party exits the game. This is done to promote the act as a “short-term goal,” according to system designer Will Maiden, and can even be sold for scrap, but should not be to build a person fleet through other players' hard work.
For the players who have their ships stolen, Star Citizen has an insurance system in place to ensure that their hard work never goes to waste, but this will come at a cost to the player. This system can be abused by the player to duplicate ships easily by orchestrating their ship to get stolen and then claiming on the insurance for a new one. Deleting the ships bypasses this problem, as well as keeping trolling via stealing to a minimum.
This isn't the only way that Cloud Imperium Games tried tackling the problem of theft and abusing the system. Previously, the developer had mentioned that each ship was equipped with a hull ID code. This code would be invalidated once theft had taken place, making it so that the criminal party cannot land that ship on any lawful planet without being chased down and selling the vehicle might prove a task in and of itself.
Of course, this new system is a little more ham-handed but it prevents a whole host of problems that come with the freedom to kill enemy players and steal their stuff. Just look at Grand Theft Auto Online and how players like to torture one another for reference.
KitGuru Says: This new system makes it infinitely more difficult to simulate the pirate lifestyle Star Citizen once optioned during its crowdfunding campaign, but in its place it preserves a whole selection of other roles it allows for. Do you think this is the right course of action or could it have been handled better?
Just doesn’t sound right. You want to play a pirate but you can’t keep what you steal?
They need at least to give the option to cut down the ship for parts and sell for scrap what’s left.
Agree – they should at least allow you to strip the weapons and engine parts so you can liquidate them or mount them on your own ships, and like you suggest scrap the hull for a bit extra money. At least give the pirate some reward for being a pirate!
Ideally, you get to keep the ship intact and use it as well – and perhaps design a mechanics where there are consequences such as the victim (NPC or human) reporting the theft and your criminal stat goes up significantly so you’re now on the watch list by security forces and there may even be a bounty on your head. At one point CIG even have the idea of making the ship belong to insurance company after the theft so getting a new ID to make the ship yours is extremely expensive and difficult to pull off – which is a pretty good idea and mitigates insurance fraud.
Understand that CIG doesn’t want players to get upset about having their ships repeatedly stolen a the landing pad, or a group of people exploiting loopholes in the insurance system to generate a lot of UEC for free but this is a very lazy way of policing bad behavior as it breaks the immersion. Hope this is just a placeholder solution before they can implement a better policing system.
I don’t think its a question of CIG not understanding what players want but more of a question of CIG is now so big that Chris cannot manage all aspects of the game and some areas of it are now being looked after by people who may not understand his vision of that particular gameplay style. As such they are looking for a simple quick fix (makes their job easier) without regard to past promises (which were always subject to change due to tech/hardware limitations or even just not being workable at all). But also more importantly to a fact that too many ‘pirates’ looked on this as a surefire method of getting rare ships cheap without putting in much effort ESPECIALLY if they were doing this as part of an organisation.
Part of the solution is to ensure that at the end of the day if a pirate does get a ship ‘illegally’ that the cost of making it legit is at least equal to the cost of getting it via legal means. Its the ‘fraud’ side of things that also weighs in and that is something that CIG is going to have to work on since they know the ins and outs of what data they are able to track and what they feel is enough evidence to punish players for doing that. I can see some ways of tackling this but for now want to see some things put in place (such as lockable ships and hacking) before going further with them. And for the record I am not looking to be a pirate – never been my playstyle even in those games with pirates as a main character.