Irn Bruce
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Posted - 2009.07.18 00:43:00 -
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I guess there's an argument to be made that it's a form of griefing. The definition of griefing is engaging in actions that serve no purpose other than to annoy, or ruin the game, for others. The only reason to self destruct your ship in combat is to prevent the people who have beaten you from gaining anything from the encounter. You don't gain anything from doing it, you just deny other people from gaining anything.
I'm not sure how self destructing works with regard to loot (the people I kill don't often last long enough to pull this off :P), but if it does indeed prevent any loot from dropping then for a start that's just inconsistent. Why would loot drop when a ship is destroyed by another ship, but not when it destroys itself? Even apart from that, there are plenty of people who make their living from PvP. The only way to make money this way is either to wardec people in highsec and hurt them enough that they pay up, or to ransom their ships, or to destroy them and take the loot. Successfully self destructing your ship totally negates the last 2 of those. That seems a bit unfair to me.
With regard to the killmail, why shouldn't you care about killmails? They're in the game, why not care about them? They're the only record of what you've destroyed, and like I say, for a lot of people, PvP is the whole point of the game. It's not about controlling space, or making isk, it's about fighting battles, and the fact you can say you killed a mothership is more important than being able to say you helped your alliance hold on to XY-123 for an extra 3 weeks. This is a perfectly valid approach to the game, and a very common one too.
For example, if someone in a lone cruiser was able to tackle a capital that had no hope of support arriving any time soon, and he was able to kill it by himself, albeit slowly, why shouldn't he be able to brag about it? Without the killmail there's no proof. It's a flaw of the system (admittedly for reasons of lag perhaps unavoidable) that killmails are only sent to the final blow, which in the case of a self destruct is nobody. If that can't be fixed, then there definitely needs to be something else done to prevent killmail dodging.
I'd like to suggest that it's impossible to self destruct your ship while warp scrambled, but obviously that would open the door to all kinds of griefing. to be honest I like your idea of linking the self destruct time to ship size. I reckon that's the only way to do it fairly. Say an upper limit of half an hour for a titan, with a minimum of 30 seconds for a frigate. If you can't kill something in half an hour, you probably don't deserve the kill, frankly, and I honestly can't think why anyone would want to self destruct a supercap other than to deny killmails/loot, but half an hour isn't that long a wait really, at least, not in Eve terms.
One other possibility would be to remove insurance payouts on self destructed ships. I don't know if people regularly insure their capitals, but your car insurance company wouldn't pay out if you burnt your own car out, would they?
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