Dracvlad wrote:
I have seen people getting upset because the old mechanics which often resulted in a confused carebear being shootable for no explainable reason were replaced by crimewatch 2.0. I saw a lot of people completely bemused how they ended up being shot or got CONCORDED. And people bemoand that change, are they serious...
The idea that the old aggression system was hard to understand is just a talking point CCP Greyscale shat out to justify him leading a big project he could brag about and was supported by the ignorance of non-highsec players and carebears who had literally zero understanding of the system and still don't understand the current one.
The old system was actually extremely simple. If you steal from a can you get flagged to the corp, if you rep someone who stole from a can you get flagged the corp too. Same goes if you remotely assist someone at war, you inherent the flag the person you're assisting has. Timers related to individual characters were identical to limited engagements but lasted 15 minutes. All flags have the same duration and work the same way.
That's seriously the whole thing. The only part that was worse was the fact that criminal flags could propagate through a rep chain without warning, which was a bug because there was meant to be an dialog box which didn't always trigger before the flag propagated.
Whereas new crimewatch added multiple different flagging types of different function and duration and which interact with each other and with the safety system in unexpected ways. My favorite is how allies in a war can't remotely assist the people they're allied with or vice versa without becoming suspect flagged. It also didn't even bother to fix logistics repping awoxers not becoming flagged, which is not a bug and is still normal gameplay. Also it eliminated clan flipping from the game, which was a great low-investment way to introduce new players to PVP in a controlled environment and actually generated conflict (my first war against an alliance much larger than my corp happen when they declared war on us because I was can flipping them) and replaced it with suspect baiting which is far less interesting and accessible.
It's worse in pretty much every respect with regards to its stated goals. It didn't eliminate edge cases at all, in fact they failed to realize that in the first version there was no way for neutral logistics involved in a war to gain any kind of flags at all and there was a period of about 30 days post patch where neutral RR could not be legally attacked at all. This was a glaring logical error that illustrates the total lack of thought and care put into the system. CCP didn't consider the "edge case" called "wars". It's also not easier to understand, see everyone BAW has ever killed because suddenly all of their logistics shut off in the middle of a fight because they don't know what is and is not considered "neutral logistics" or what happens if you remotely repair any character that has an LE with anyone.
It doesn't affect me negatively because I'm not new or inexperienced and am generally the one in a position to leverage it's bizarre behavior to screw over people who are, but I absolutely hate the design of the whole system, it behaves very strangely and has a distinct anti-combat flavor to it.