One of the main draw cards of Eve is its different approach to player killing.

One of the great disappointments of Dust is its failure (or charitably, reluctance) to break from the mould of a generic lobby shooter.

Legion has the chance to avoid that.

From what I can gather so far, the 'even teams lobby' aspect has been removed in favour of a DayZ-style open world approach, nothing pleases me more. However, the thorny issue of friendly fire is something that must be considered.

I propose that friendly fire is always enabled in legion, with caveats.

Why?

1. It strongly differentiates Legion from generic lobby shooters
2. It aligns the game with other open-world sandbox games like DayZ
3. It further aligns the game with the Eve universe.
4. It opens up player interaction.

How would it work?

tldr; very much like Eve.

Each player has a security status from +5 to -10.

In null sec districts, anything goes, kill anyone you find without sec status change.

In low sec districts, killing people with low sec status, and whatever PvE content there is, will increase sec status. Killing anyone outside of your corporation lowers it. If you go on a murder spree, so be it, your sec status will tank.

In high sec, players with low sec status are forbidden from entering. Team killing (outside of corp mates) is frowned upon; a number of ways of modelling CONCORD control could be chosen:

1. Perhaps (direct-fire) weapons cannot fire when pointing at other players? (seems extreme)
2. If you kill a neutral, CONCORD pulls the plug and suicides your clone, drops your sec status, and imposes a suspect timer for the next x minutes (during which you can be killed by anyone). Basically, any of the Eve timers and flags and mechanics can be ported to Eve.

Thoughts?

I think it's important that we offer both FF and no FF gameplay. The latter being particularly important for newcomers to the game.

My take:
- Friendly fire for Sandbox and organized matches (i.e. Corp battles and PC)
In the sandbox, this adds a gameplay of risk/reward, due to the dangers of doing an ad-hoc team-up.
In Corp Battles it adds tactics, because firing lines have to organize properly in order to not shoot each other in the back of the head. It also allows spies to sabotage corp battles.
When you have hand-picked your team and comms are implicitly expected, it makes sense to enable friendly fire.

- No friendly fire for modes where you are forced to work with blueberries
Blueberries are lobotomized chickens with a grudge.
I do not like the idea of starting a pub game, taking out my AV weapon and being greeted by a blueberry tanker who accidentally thought that I was a red.
I also do not want some ****** to punch my REs and get my kicked
And I don't want to be the guy who's carrying the entire team, with half of the team having given up and doing situps in the MCC, only to get shot in the back by a bored blueberry, which causes a loss of expensive gear that could have given my team a win despite the bad odds.
The kind of ****** griefing that is created by FF in pubs should not exist in this game. It adds no value. There is no fun in starting a 15 minute match at the end of the day for some relaxation, only to have some ******** punch you in the nose because he likes to annoy people. And the griefer doesn't get anything out of it, except for annoying people, which is a horrible motivation for this specific game mode.
Yes, this is New Eden. But pubs are contract battles. I'm pretty sure that employers would want a mechanism to prevent the mercs from going AWOL and shitting on everything, considering how unstable these individuals are.
It would be hard to justify in lore, aside from "weapon locks up when looking at a blueberry", which only covers direct fire weapons. But this is a case where the gameplay is simply more important.
You will have many fuckheads ruining the game for new and casual players if you can't enforce a clear-cut sense of safety (or at least "he can't kill me directly!") around blueberries in pub matches.

P.S.
Have you thought about making a game mode that is tied to a faction?
I don't mean faction warfare. I mean a mode where one side can only consist of Amarr players (Or players with Amarr gear), for example. I would love to see the effect of asymmetric gameplay, if you go all the way and make drop uplinks Amarr-only, nanohive Caldari-only, etc.

Yes...but just because something works in EVE doesn't necessarily mean it would work in another game of a different genre and type. We don't want to encourage newbies to be griefed straight out of playing because of friendly fire happy trolls that can easily kill them!

Votekicking a person out of space in eve would be a hilarious proposition.

If Legion is trying to be sandbox, it shouldn't have to rely on that kind of stupid structuring.

It's either lobby based or sandbox.

CCP can't promote it as both. They need to choose.

And really, what's wrong with Concord showing up GTA style? That'd be funny as hell.

I can already see the feedback loop forming. Corps that run into people's line of fire until they are kicked out of the battle, then stalk them until they have a chance to kill the reverse-griefed person and collect the bounty.

People, you should start thinking your ideas through. This isn't an ideal world. Not even human-run systems are capable of always judging the situation correctly - How do you expect a simple automated system like this to do the job?
How the **** is the game supposed to detect "yes, this guy totally threw himself into his mate's forge gun to create a bounty that he intends to collect!" and differentiate it from "this guy has been running around with a forge gun, and shooting his mates in the back whenever they were focused on an enemy"?

CCP has two options - Find a magical way to solve the reverse griefing issue or disable friendly fire entirely in pub games.
I would support the former, but the latter is far more rational.