If this particular aspect of wingmen in the 'verse has been covered already, a search of "wingmen" did not return it in the forums search engine. Put simply, if one pilot is attacked in monitored space and allowed to return fire without a nation/faction standing loss, a wingman pilot in that same sector -vicinity- should share that exception. I leave the mechanics to discussion, but my thinking is within the already existing framework of groups. If this is already so, I was unaware.

attackers can currently pass a flag by using a third party capship, which is announced/flagged (or we would just use capships which have their own standing to covertly maintain ourselves in kos situations)

defenders cannot pass a flag.. players who become hated or kill on sight can already be attacked by anyone at all, no flag required

i dont think this should be a thing, but supposing it was..

such fleets/groups should be clearly labelled along with their participants prior to engagement.. if the attackers cant have hidden assets then the defender shouldnt either

personally i wouldnt want my group roster leaked at any time, nor do i want to be identified in others groups as i may just be chatting or otherwise monitoring a situation im not necessarily directly involved with

attacking a lone light ship in an nfz shouldnt suddenly turn into "i just attacked a fleet of tridents".. gotchaaaaa..

So my wingman, with whom I often fly with, has to stand by and do nothing because nation/faction standing rules? Either that or be penalized for responding appropriately? Mechanics aside, forget that

I think that this ties into a general discussion around griefers. I've had some bad experiences with griefers that have discouraged me from playing the game, related to griefing in Monitored Space. It's very frustrating to be trying to do something with guildmates, then griefers come to blow up their capship, and you as a friend are helpless to do anything unless you are willing to take a standing hit. I've even seen griefers multibox with an Atlas gunner to make the standing hits even higher. Related thread https://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/38668

I would be in favor of a system like this to discourage griefing in Monitored Space.

were not seriously supporting our own arguments with alts are we.. lmfao

ROC

1.2 Message Board Conduct

Attacks or insults others on the board. Feel free to debate the idea, but do not turn your disagreement into an attack upon the poster.

As part of the general discussion, why do I have to watch swarms incoming targeted at my Trident and not be able to return similar fire without factional repercussions?

Day L-10 Jun 9 15:44:31 2025 UTC

If this is implemented as stated in the OP, this is what will result:

Member of group A dives in front of fire from Joe-N00b.
All eight members of group A are now free to engage Joe-N00b with zero factional repercussions.

----

This kind of mechanic is not a good thing for the game.

Eight plays online, in a group? At a station where two other players are also at? One denying service, the other being denied? For a total of ten players online in a single sector? When that incredible scenario happens, I’ll happily concede the point. Maybe don’t camp stations in the first place? Run the rabbit to ground and move on

Trident in Dau L10, a capship dock where you can easily repair and reshield, and you're upset about this scenario posted above? The flag is based off damage, not intent of attack. Certain well thought out criteria need to be met before you can engage. You don't get the self-defense tag until damage is done (so your shields have to be dropped). Why are you worried about incoming swarms against a dent unless there are 12 ragnaroks all stacking against you at once (which will probably never happen)?

Most of the other knowledgable players know the rules of engagement, what triggers self-defense tags, and how to force a self-defense tag to allow you to attack other players freely. Its the same for everyone and has gone through years of tweaking by the devs.

What are you looking for? The ability to turn on a single attacker with a group retaliation before they even do any damage to you? How would the devs even implement that? That could be severely exploited as "float" said even worse than the current ruleset. You don't get to attack, unless you are damaged first. If your wingman was smart, he would fly into a missle and draw the self-defense tag allowing him to engage. It's that simple and it's been a commonly used tactic by the player pirates for years. Just gotta learn (or teach your wingman) how the mechanics work and operate within the rules. Space is supposed to be dangerous, not fair. It's not fair a PCB can pin a shielded cap and leave you defenseless if youre packing rails, but it's a mechanic the devs wanted implemented to make it more dangerous. The game is full of stuff like that and we just live in it.

we can put ten people in a sector on a whim.. more even.. its simply unnecessary for everyday affairs and certainly overkill for a single pilot and/or their alts so you might not see it happen.. but it can

weve had nearly 30 capships in a sector in recent history just for something to do..

the remaining active influential players are in big groups often, being unaware of it doesnt mean its not happening.. (you are supposed to be unaware of it, generally speaking)

As stated before, when that happens I’ll gladly concede the point. Ten pilots to camp little ole me? I call that victory #ForceMultiplier

The game's design goals should not be limited to an individual person's "current impression of current player-base scale". We design it around what makes the most sense for the gameplay, long term, and preferably will not create obvious problems with larger player-counts.

I've talked elsewhere about the upcoming marketing campaign and how I've been explicitly holding off on acquiring users for some time, while we focus on development (evident from the drop in Newsletter rate since 2021), but that that is going to change in a drastic way. One can also see how many of the items on the Game Development Direction wiki are explicitly about managing scale. Why would I burn the time, if I didn't think that was likely?

Also, keep in mind our peak historical on-boarding rate has been upwards of 50,000 new users per hour. So let's not make anything trivially exploitable by groups, or at least the current player-scale shouldn't be used as a meaningful argument.

Moving right along.., perhaps there could be some other mitigating factors here? Like maybe the grouped-player doesn't simply have to be "attacked", but rather destroyed? And the other members of the group have to be within X proximity?

There could also be a special-case for a capship in a group, where damage exceeds "X". Capships are shielded, so they can absorb a lot of hits before any real damage is incurred.. far more than one would be likely to do "accidentally". The damage level required to trigger the grouped-self-defense could be lower than is needed to deshield, but larger than any single-hit (other than an Avalon, maybe). Additionally, capships avoid the whole "griefing arse flies in front of newbie shots to intentionally get response engagement" problem, as they're usually a bit slow for that kind of case. That might at least mitigate theratt10's problem case.

Thank you for the consideration. If I personally run people into a station, I hover for a minute or two then move on. That being said, I am perfectly willing, and able to stockpile large quantities of procurement commodities to deal with such situations . I also have one other solution, but that one I’m keeping up my sleeve. But really: #DBAA (Jane-Breaking Bad)

If you kill a player in an area where a flag matters, they are already tkos in theory right, so.. anyone could attack anyway... and "X" proximity should not include being inside a station while parked next to a station.. because the reality is, there is no wingman in any of these scenarios by any of us. its all alts and multiboxing..

..we tend to use an already damaged subcap to fly in front of player fire.. such as the 4% moths or flavor of the minute.. again resulting in a kill..

2200 UTC 15JUL25 Edras G11: unguilded UIT pilot camping my Trident conducting a logistical movement. My wingman is on scene but can’t fire even if the UIT pilot destroys my XC. WGAF if it’s an alt or whatever? Don’t be jelly I employ alts as a cohesive unit. Also, none of the above outlandish scenarios. #FUBAR #DBAA

Edras G11: unguilded UIT pilot camping my Trident conducting a logistical movement. My wingman is on scene but can’t fire even if the UIT pilot destroys my XC.

Yes, that's how the game works. There is no way to determine "intent". Even self-defense is non-trivial to determine, and defense of others is even more-so. Station Sectors are Guarded, meaning there are guards and defenses who take action in the event of attacks.

If you have some kind of articulate, logical and clearly-defined Suggestion to make, then post that. But stop posting this "I want to complain every time something I disagree with happens to me". That is not productive. I already explained that on the other thread.

Access to posting on Suggestions requires complying with the Rules of Suggestions.

When one singles out text citations in response, one incidentally ignores the contextual meaning.

It is suggested the [whatever technical terms represents the nuts & bolts of VO] recognize the guild, “Office of Strategic Services [#OSS]” as a “collective defense” entity.

To wit: recognize guilds as “collective defense” entities.

*See Article 5, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 04 April. 1949

When one singles out text citations in response, one incidentally ignores the contextual meaning.

We don't know what the contextual meaning is, unless you write it out. That's why we keep asking you to do that. Like, this thread wasn't previously about guild-specific collective self defense.

Anyway.. it seems like there are several issues and concepts at play here. I'll try to cover some ground..

1) We are not special-casing guilds, and giving them magical abilities to subvert or circumvent factional rules that impact everyone else. I've written lots about why I don't like giving guilds special abilities elsewhere. This is way beyond like "we should have a shared bank!" type organizational constructs. The basic game should not be fundamentally different for guilded vs non-guilded players. Additionally..

2) As was already been pointed out some weeks ago by Scotia in the first thread response, no real "adversary tracking" is actually necessary anyway, once universal TempKoS is triggered. Which then opens a debate about "should we just trigger TempKoS more easily?". Doing it by damage, instead of death, has serious tradeoffs, as it also makes it easier to get newbies to accidentally trigger their own TempKoS by flying in front of their shots.. a well-known abusive behaviour would get worse.

3) That being said, there is probably some merit to triggering TempKoS based on someone fully dropping the shields of a capship (under the same conditions where a fighter-ship death would trigger it). Completely disabling shields requires a lot of effort, and it clearly indicates a high level of aggression. It could be a shorter-term TempKoS that is assessed against everyone who contributed to the capship's shield reduction recently, prior to it being dropped (rolls in alts, multibox pilots); or, it could only be whomever did the most damage (avoids newbie-abuse by suggesting they shoot a capship and then dropping the shields after their attack, getting them TempKoS'd along with you). The former would probably be a better grayspace solution.

4) It may be uncomfortably controversial, but many issues on this thread, as well as other recent threads, are also far more easily solved by removing "most" PvP from Nation Space, effectively nulling all "friendly fire" damage between players within the region (aside from, perhaps, those with KoS status). We could still technically have black-market weapons that could be acquired in grayspace and used in Nation space, but they would probably be detected at the border and result in a strike force in pursuit.

5) Another step could be raising all Nation Space to Monitored and Guarded states (making them like Capitol Systems), potentially along with reducing the number of PKs necessary for extended TempKoS status. There are some risks here to newbies, again, which are largely avoided by #4 and just eliminating common-case PvP from the region until they cross the threshold into grayspace (with very clear warnings thereof).

A lot of the issues here are more about communication than design. We can have really elaborate rules of engagement, but if they're hard to explain to new users ("don't shoot back at people near stations, unless you're in a guild, on a Tuesday, and the moon is in a waxing crescent phase.."), that's going to be an on-going problem. If the game's complexity becomes only accessible to high-end pilots, then the game suffers as a result.

Contextual meaning: Wingmen and Shared Retaliation

As for your doctoral thesis, this forum needs a ‘Tom Symkowski:’ 😂 🏳️