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.