I'm tempted to start the Penguin Pirates.

Hey, you know, that might honestly be the best anti-AFK tool out there. We need an empath ability to seek out the nearest ship on the plane.

Say what you will about griefers, they're the best volunteer automation police ever.

My only worry with my idea of encouraging AetherPK is that as I said, it encourages the players to police the problem, not the administration.

Putting that in the hands of all players has certain consequences. Hilarious ones, though.

Check report 320 actually. <,<

And actually, isn't ethereal homogeneous enough that you can already grid scan out there for about the same effect?

You know, if we wanted to encourage aether-PK, the reward for killing a ship could be stealing half the experience they've gained in the last X minutes. Or something like that.

Ohsnap.

Killing an aethership allocates a certain x that can be turned in for/automatically imparts y (in this case, experience or gold or..)?

Hah! The gnomes on Facility run a scrap yard. That is lulz.

Make each scrap worth the experience of X amounts of aetherbeasts, with the scraps unable to be given away. That way, you can't farm them and then sell them off or give them to people for ANOTHER XP faucet (one is enough to whine about).

You would need a loop to prevent two ships farming one another, though. Admittedly, the 'EXP lost by a crew piloting the farmed ship' sounds like a determent in itself.

.. this is sounding horrible.

They drop all or most of the dust they're carrying, maybe if selling dust was more lucrative/less of a hassle?

The obvious solution to deter being ganked: don't pick up dust. Then you've gained nothing but killing them, which renders the system defunct.

EDIT: I say defunct because you can already do that (killing another ship, that is), and nobody does it.

Yeah, it doesn't really work, but it sounds funny. Scraps would have to be based on number of people killed or something, otherwise it's: Person A launches Hammer by himself. Person B starts attacking Hammer. Person A ascends. Hammer explodes. Person B gets scraps, sells. Repeat, reverse, repeat.

If dust was valuable enough to warrant ganking other for it, people would definitely be picking up dust.

What you do is force ships to declare allegiance, which sets the ship's owner's current citizenship as the domain of the ship. Two same-domain ships cannot collect scrap from one another.

Allegiance can only be changed every X Years.

Also, if this idea were taken seriously, you'd be right: scraps gained from the ship would need to be proportionate to the amount of people killed. It makes big, multi-siphon ships that bring out huge crews a bigger target; incidentally, these are the biggest culprits of AFKscripts anyways, thus giving the 'system' a nudge in the direction it was intended to go in anyways.

I think it's a bug that you can do this, actually. Not 100% sure, though.

That's why you make the scrap check upon the death of the ship dependant on how many kills of players you 'scored'. An empty ship would yield nothing, which is a net loss for you. Of course, declared domain/allegiance negates the entire scheme ANYWAYS.

Who am I kidding? Aethership PvP is too cool of a solution to this issue.

Orly? Well, lets make it a feature, instead, since it's how I escape horrible pilots and empaths.