Have you met the goons?

Friendly fire done as thoughtlessly as the OP suggests it might would be a terrible idea. Here's how you do FF:

1) If you damage a friendly, you are fined an ISK/SP penalty based on the amount of damage you do. The penalty grows larger the more damage you do in a short period of time. One stray shot isn't a big deal, but unloading into a friendly would be heavily penalized. Similarly, if the game could track whether the friendly target shot were near an enemy target, and increase the penalty if the friendly was not (so as to differentiate accidents from malicious acts better) that'd be helpful.

1a) The exception to this is that, people in your corp, people in your pre-made squad, they do not cause you to be penalized as all if you shoot them. You can always leave your squad/corp if you started getting maliciously teamkilled by your "friends". So for corp battles, for example, there'd be friendly fire, but there'd never be penalties for it beyond what the corp works out for itself, should one of its members start going rogue.

2) If you kill a friendly, you are fined the cost of their fitting/vehicle on top of other expenses.

3) If any character on any of your accounts kills more than two or three friendlies a game, or deal X amount of damage, you become designated as a teamkiller. That is, you'll show up with a special chevron rather than regular blue or red one -- perhaps a purple chevron to split the difference. The status will persist for 30 minutes, through multiple games. When so designated, anyone in the game, on your team or the other, can kill you without repercussion.

4) If you are designated as a team killer more than X times in Y period of time on any of your accounts, you get banned for 1 day. If after that ban expires you again become designated as a teamkiller, you get banned for 3 days. Then 7, then 15, then 30. After, if you get designated as a teamkiller again, your account is permanently terminated and all your characters are deleted. I assume that the PS3 is able to ban by machine, so that's what it'd end up as.


Without meaningful punishment for TK'ing that prevents alt PSN accounts being used to just go wild with friendly fire teamkilling, FF would be a bad addition to the game, and you'd routinely have to deal with people abusing friendly fire. The only way to make friendly fire work for a free game like this is to put access to the game at jeopardy for people should they abuse the system.

I'm usually not but I am going to be hostile as this thread demands it......

But this is the dumbest thing to hit the game since the daily cap.

1. "discourages spray-and-pray"?? You know what discourages spray and pray?.....An enemy that can shoot!! This is by far the most ridiculous reason to implement TKing. Do you think that someone who's spraying and praying cares who they are killing? They are spraying for a reason...think about it.

2. "VTK"? Really?? Smart trollers will only TK bluedots or better yet...leave the squad and create their own so they can't be VTKed. Not to mention....one intentional TK is one too many. I don't want to lose one proto suit to a dik that's just out for kicks.

3. If some of your best moments are TKing, then you are the sort of player that makes TKing intolerable. I don't understand why anyone would include friendly fire to increase gameplay satisfaction. I mean, what kind of player needs that? CCP can do better by increasing gameplay movements and faster gameplay feel.

4. TKing is silly for infiltrators...because once you TK once, you are immediately getting kicked out of the corp.

5. And the dumbest reason of 'em all....."if you can't afford to lose it...." WTMF! I can have 500 proto suits and can afford to lose 400 of them but why would I want to LOSE ONE by an intentional teamkill??? I can be solo in a match with randoms and don proto gear to help get the win. To get trolled and intentionally shot in my proto suit is not cool and not something CCP should be implementing.

Friendly fire, again, is the dumbest idea to hit since the daily cap[/i][/b]

And this is exactly what people will do. They'll go play another game, and Dust will fail because it will be rife with TK'ers whom nobody wants deal with, and then it'll just be you and a handful of other people murdering each other in the MCC spawn, gloating about how hardcore you are for enduring the "New Eden experience".

If CCP's goal is to make a game that people want to play, they should ignore the kind of sentiment you've expressed. It's possible to have a more unforgiving sort of game that does have friendly fire, without crippling the game through not doing anything to stop people from maliciously teamkilling to their heart's content. There is a middle-ground between the thoughtless elitism you've expressed, and the rather shallow life of no FF at all.

Just to be clear though, it'd be banning for numerous obviously malicious instances of team killing. What I've suggested is a blatant copy of the friendly fire system used by the free-to-play game World of Tanks, and it works perfectly in that game. It's the only way to prevent teamkilling from ruining the game. Without eventual machine bans, people will TK on alts, TK on alt PSN accounts, and otherwise simply circumvent the typical penalties. There needs to be something that actually matters at risk, otherwise many people will continuously TK, and the system will be a huge detriment to the game, rather than a valuable addition.

You're right, it won't, but that's because CCP knows better.

Other FPS games with FF have significant differences. Servers you can be kicked/banned from by the host, optional non-FF servers you can play on instead, and in particular, you don't actually lose anything in those games when you die, other than your time. The game I compared Dust to -- World of Tanks -- is the best comparison there is. Both games make a big deal out of making and losing money, both games are free to play with a single server (although WoT has a single server per region instead). You can't compare a game like Battlefield 3 to something like Dust. Someone starts TK'ing in BF3, you shrug your shoulders, maybe say a swear or two, and either try to ignore it or move to a different server. In Dust, you can't help but play on a FF server if they were to make FF for Instant Battle games. And each death is, potentially, the loss of ISK.

The solutions I've seen, the ones that act as if rampant TK'ing isn't a problem, and have some pithy comment about how "New Eden" works -- as if that's at all relevant or even accurate -- aren't sensible solutions. Either CCP makes teamkilling heavily penalized, or it keeps FF off of Instant Battles, or it accepts that its game will be far less popular than it would if it had no FF on Instant Battle servers, and indulges the inner child of people who go about that TK'ing business. Unless the penalties are such that making an alt PSN account and TK'ing with throw-away characters would substantially endanger your main PSN account with your real Dust characters, FF' for Instant Battles would ruin the game.

I read what you wrote and I told you why you're wrong. If two paragraphs is too long for you then feel free to not respond to things I write in the future. Sometimes I say things with more than a few words. Welp.

People will TK left-and-right because Dust isn't like any random FPS you've ever played. Even in those games, people absolutely do TK maliciously fairly often. In Dust, however, it will be far worse, because people will know that they're causing real harm to a person's character by costing them money when they die. TK'ing members of rival corps would be pretty much SOP for many groups out there as well. You really have no idea how bad TK'ing will be if CCP were to take your hands-off approach.

If they add friendly fire to Instant Battle games, then no, you can't move to a new server. You can quit your game, but your next game would invariably include FF as well. My point, which I thought I made fairly clear, was that in other FPS games where it's a bunch of separate servers with different configurations, players are free to choose the ruleset that suits them best. People wouldn't have that choice with Dust (as nobody would ever voluntarily play on a FF server if they could help it, aside from people looking to play what's essentially a free-for-all).

And, to reiterate, there is already a game which is F2P, which is very similar to Dust in having earning money/experience for matches being a central part of the experience, which has FF. And the FF system they have is coupled with an intelligent and effective way for friendly damage and TK'ing to be automatically and appropriately punished. CCP doesn't need to look any further than World of Tanks to see a game with always-on FF, with zero cost for people to make an account and play, and which does not have any significant problem with TK'ers as a result.

Your fantasy about the solution coming from within the community, and involving a flawed voting system, are totally unneeded, even if they were sensible answers in the first place.

Let me tell you why there shouldn't be FF

If you wipe the floor with someone one game, he's on your team next game, how fun do you think he/she would think it to be to kill your proto suit as many times as he could while on your team?

For MD and LR users, you will be punished for your team running in front of you or getting in blast radius.

For tank drivers, please this is ridiculous.

Random grenades before a team mate dies kills your 200k suit, because he wants revenge and you happen to be taking that revenge for him.

AV grenades, will they seek friendly vehicles?

When your CRU is camped, there will be many casualties.

Teamwork will consist of staying away from each other for no accidents.

Enabling FF will not work and it will accomplish what CCP does not want, which is a lot of dedicated DUST players will rethink their priorities. It will be fine with me because I have plenty of games to play that are significantly better RPGs. RPGs that are not choked by the seven year plan of CCP. It will reconfirm my opinion of back shooters like you and the filth that haunt FPSs.

The goons will love it and DUST will become an unplayable mess.

May you be the first to die by Friendly Fire.

TL;DR
I can team kill and be team killed, and have no penalty because i payed for the game and you didn't. How is that fair?

FF was never here, yet you're still playing this game. This isn't about removing FF but adding it. You didn't downloand Dust and said, "Yes! They have friendly fire...I can't wait to play it". You dl'ed dust for other reasons. I never say this but if you want FF, then you should go and play the games that has FF