Draglide12 wrote:Well if an individual can choose to turn off their ID, why not a group of people?

They can, but what you were suggesting is that certain factions don't even bother to install them - that the whole idea was foreign to them.

It would be illegal not to have IDs installed, so we can assume that all factions are regulated to install them by whatever means they're made to use the same currency as well.

Illegal, by the United Star Systems? I mean a race of beings that has never seen outside civilizations. I assume we'll find entirely new species type factions in game.

I'm only saying faction because it's the blanket term for all divisions. There are corporate or governmental, and there are also cultural factions. There can be factions within factions. Faction X has only recently made contact with known space. They are a nomadic raider people and as a result have stealthy ships that don't use IDs so they can raid civilization. Within their own space, wherever it may be, they don't seem to identify eachother with IDs. They visually identify their own people, but often attack other tribes within their race.

Why would they all of a sudden adopt IDs because of an inter-stellar law used by their enemies that they have no peaceful interaction with?

Because if they don't, anybody can run in there to cause havoc, and they won't even be noticed. An armada of ships could filter through, and as long as they didn't go in all at once, they would realistically be able to infiltrate, and then destroy, said faction. It's in the faction's best interests to adopt IDs as soon as they come in contact with another species, or even sooner - you don't think all members of a race would be completely peaceful with each other, do you? That's flanderization of an entire species.

"Oh look, a ship design that I have never seen before. In fact it looks absolutely nothing like anything that would be derived from my culture. Totally just my friend Steve. No worries, not an outsider at all."

How do we even know where these people's home systems are? If they're nomadic they might move around in unknown space, staying on the fringe. Given the AI Josh has already written it is very possible that this will happen with some factions we encounter.

Just shoot anything that comes into our space that doesn't look like us.

I very much enjoy debates, but they're not fun if someone doesn't listen. :\

Even if they didn't need it for other species, they would need it among themselves. It's not culture. It's survival of a species. There's a reason all humans build shelter no matter where we live. It's because we wouldn't survive without it. If a species didn't have ID, their own pirates could destroy them and wipe them out without any problem whatsoever.

What? Why would they need IDs? ESPECIALLY if they don't interact with outsiders. I... I... wtf? This makes no sense. It's a fucking need to have IDs now? Food, water, shelter, oxygen, fucking digital IDs.

If the game is gonna start going that way... I may just go elsewhere.

That's like saying that if you don't wear a police badge you're a criminal and you are going to all kill eachother. "We need mandatory law-abiding citizen badges so we know that when people don't wear them they're criminals and need to be shot on sight!"

Because of gameplay.
The player wont be able to interact with them because if they dont adhere to one of the established standards they wont adhere to ANY of the standards.
No trade because they dont have an interchangeable currency.
No communication because of incompatible communications protocols.
No useable equipment because of different hardware connectors.
No docking because of different connectors.
[Insert Long list of incompabilities]

Because it was already agreed by community decision (and iirc by josh) LT wont deal with such hassles.
(Multiple currencies, multiple standards etc)

Such a faction would at best be an "grand menace" style faction.
Just there to be menacing and a point for the plot to rotate around.

Because you cant interact with them besides fight them

Draglide12 wrote:What? Why would they need IDs? ESPECIALLY if they don't interact with outsiders. I... I... wtf? This makes no sense. It's a fucking need to have IDs now? Food, water, shelter, oxygen, fucking digital IDs.

If the game is gonna start going that way... I may just go elsewhere.

I mentioned their own pirates for a reason... If there's a species, it makes sense that not all of them are cookie-cutter copies of each other, which means some of them may turn to piracy as their means of survival. This would splinter a species into multiple factions so that an ID becomes necessary. It's not necessary if there are no IDs whatsoever, or if you cannot hide no matter where you go (as was mentioned earlier).

As I explained in my post, the entire idea is to make it so that stealth is a viable option. Removing IDs turns off stealth as a viable option. You could even turn off stealth altogether if you wanted, and just make all ships visible at all times - that could be an option in the game. However, if you want stealth to be in the game, it's only fair to make it accessible by all species.

Besides fair gameplay, without IDs (if you have them turned on as an option), a species won't be able to tell its own pirates apart from other faction members.

There's no reason to get upset. :\ I wasn't trying to offend you.


edit: (because you edited your post)
No, it's like saying if someone doesn't have a driver's license and they're driving, they're a criminal. big difference. It's not like police badges.


reedit: Cornflakes had better points than me.

I guess I can see the point of the gameplay thing but... It just seems so wrong in a game with such a focus on freedom and emergent gameplay. It seems like arbitrary restrictions are being implemented.

And I do feel like in a universe where NPC players determine their own fates it is still entirely possible that one might choose not to interact in non-violent manners. What happens when one of these factions arises in game naturally but is artificially restricted by mandatory IDs on all vessels and being reliant on a currency value from an economy they deliberately destabilize.

It seems like an ID free ship would be the epitome of stealth. It would only be detected at close ranges, when it is ready to pounce.

Mhm, and that's why we proposed IDs for ships, so that you could turn them off - otherwise you'll always be visible to absolutely everyone in the system. This scanner change enables stealth gameplay. I think you could even have AI that would group together and go on raids while running silent without IDs on, but among friendlies, it makes sense to turn it back on.

I guess I was understanding the system in a way that scanners would have various ranges and precisions, and an ID was just something that broadcasted a signal that was easily detectable, thus increasing the range of detection.

If detection is so reliant on IDs, that would basically make scout ships almost entirely useless, and make the scanner module itself useless for detecting much besides static objects.

My expectation had been that ships engines/crew would give off radiation which scanners would pick up. Detection would be based on the size of the signature and the distance from the scanner.

This makes sense based on the scanner we saw because fainter signals produce less of an effect on the graph/visual.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:Because of gameplay.
The player wont be able to interact with them because if they dont adhere to one of the established standards they wont adhere to ANY of the standards.
No trade because they dont have an interchangeable currency.
No communication because of incompatible communications protocols.
No useable equipment because of different hardware connectors.
No docking because of different connectors.
[Insert Long list of incompabilities]

^ Boom. ^

And of course, to regulate qualifications if we should still want them.

This is why I imagine an invisible regulations committee/corporation like CONCORD from EVE Online to exist in Limit Theory, in lore if nowhere else.

Draglide wrote:If detection is so reliant on IDs, that would basically make scout ships almost entirely useless, and make the scanner module itself useless for detecting much besides static objects.

My expectation had been that ships engines/crew would give off radiation which scanners would pick up. Detection would be based on the size of the signature and the distance from the scanner.

Just because IDs are implemented doesn't mean that scouts will be any less effective at spotting vessels that don't have their IDs on based on radiation they emit.

I'm not opposed to that, but even in EVE there are pirate factions.

I guess my formal disagreement with the scanner system as it is envisaged now in this thread.

Yes, Voyager can be detected from Earth, using NASA's massive sensor suite. Not something I'd expect most typical ships to fit. And we've had tons of sci-fi stuff tossed around to explain all sorts of game mechanics, why can't we just do the same here? Just reduce the scan range. Make scanning actual work. IDs light up a ship to be easily and clearly identified. If they're off you still have to work with the scanner and actively scan space to find other ships.

From what I understand the current system is a double negative. "We don't want it to be too easy to detect ships throughout the system. Instead of just reducing signature size/scan range, we're going to nullify scanning of ships, then fit those ships with automatic detection mechanisms."

Why? Just reduce the scan range. Based on distance and amount of emission, it becomes easier or harder to detect notice a signal on the graph. Why implement the fancy scanner Josh has if we're just going to use it for detecting ore?

Draglide12 wrote:I'm not opposed to that, but even in EVE there are pirate factions.

I think pirates would still include ID-broadcasting hardware for identifying each other, but in general they wouldn't broadcast IDs to other ships in general.

Can we design the system like that? Since IDs are something that are communicated to other vessels as a handshake protocol and not just broadcasted everywhere, can we create "profiles" to specify what kind of agents we want to communicate our IDs too?

I would hope so. Even though based on the thread I'd assumed they were being used as something that just broadcasted everywhere.