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[Sergarr]

Serious grievers operate in groups, GavJ. If you do not account for possibility of more than a half of your players co-operating toward ransacking the remaining players into oblivion, your game has a very real chance to fail right in the beginning.

[Fniff]

Especially if the griefers are smart. They could pretend to be legitimate players just forging vehicles in a nice clan, then suddenly turn around and start laying waste to everything.

[miauw62]

Yeah, griefing is sort of an art in some games. Fifty players could easily go after singular players and kill their automatons, in which case those players are screwed anyway.

[Flying Dice]

If they can grief it, they will. That's your most basic rule of thumb for online multiplayer. Without hardcoded property protection and PvP-immune safezones, there will be groups of people doing little beyond ganking and stealing for lulz.

[GavJ]

I fully intend to have other mechanisms in place to help cut down on griefing. That would mostly be sort of another thread, though.

There could be community policing, there could be general rules and logging that can get you banned in the meta-game if you do too ridiculous of stuff, or there could be a requirement to display your real life name from the credit card you signed up for your account with and keeps a profile of your history on the game (lack of anonymity and accountability makes everybody 10x nicer. It works for some online newspaper comment sections pretty well and people are willing to sign up still), there could be time restrictions on how long you have to be on a server to do certain things to give mods some time to notice a big swarm of suspicious people and react if needed, there could be lots of possible things.

I was only bringing up security insofar as it could be one mechanism to help prevent people sprawling their power all over the map, as pertains to the economy and avoiding inflation/deflation. I did not intend to imply that automaton sheriffs are the ONLY thing in the whole game stopping people from being dicks.

Although on the whole, I have a philosophy of much less hand-holding-ness than most games would have. Eve Online is a bit more where my opinion lands -- do things to control true exploits and unreasonable gangs and try to make relatively safe zones, but don't pretend like it's a unicorn utopia -- you can still get scammed and things within game without breaking ToS. This is after all supposed to be an adult-oriented frontier world of ethically questionable robber baron types. A bit of paranoia and dark mood is okay.

Fifty players could easily go after singular players and kill their automatons, in which case those players are screwed anyway.

I conceive of them as being indestructible, by the way. Definitely a possibility of incapacitating them temporarily (difficult but possible) or pending minor repairs. Or running out of fuel. But never being totally destroyed.

[Morrigi]

Well, even 50 people armed with clubs, bows, and the occasional rifle are going to get mowed down by a walled base armed with defensive turrets, surrounded by punji stakes.

In addition, if the worlds are big enough, an intelligent player or group of them could simply set out on an hour-long expedition to somewhere well out of the way of roaming bands of goons, and set up a concealed base.

In Minecraft, (with mods, of course) for example, it's entirely possible to build a fully functional base that's literally invisible to the outside world save for a single, easily defended, entrance. If you're going for a block-based sort of thing, then a combination of player-crafted, very tough blocks, booby traps, and hidden turrets and so forth would make a base nearly impossible to find, a massive pain in the ass to break into, and all but guarantee severe casualties for any roving band of looters.

If such a base could be found and its defenses neutralized, it would be earned through teamwork and blood. That is proper PVP, and I would play it.

There's also the problem of defining "griefing". For example, in EVE Online, for many players, about half of what they do on a daily basis would qualify as "griefing" in other games. If it actually was, then the entirety of New Eden would be a lawless hive of scum and villainy. This is not the case, and non-consensual PVP is not necessarily griefing. For this game, I think an EVE-style system like that, supported by your automatons (CONCORD) would be ideal. It might also be an idea to take some inspiration from Wurm Online and their phantom guards or whatever the hell they're called. Basically, in Wurm, players can build huge guard towers requiring hundreds of bricks and tons of mortar, all of which must be mined, chiseled, and mixed by hand. They can then gain the services of a few high-level ghostly guards granted by the Gods or whatever to defend their lands... For a fee, of course.

Now, in your game, maybe there's some super-rare crystal that would allow a player to build additional, lower-level automatons after purchasing a permit from the Empire at some exorbitant cost, or something.

or there could be a requirement to display your real life name from the credit card you signed up for your account with and keeps a profile of your history on the game (lack of anonymity and accountability makes everybody 10x nicer. It works for some online newspaper comment sections pretty well and people are willing to sign up still)

Are you trying to engineer failure? Because that's how you engineer failure. You're also opening up the possibility for someone to get fucked over in-game in a rules-friendly way, and then, in their anger, falsely accuse the conspirator(s) of some kind of real-world crime. Inevitably, this would turn into a massive media shitstorm, probably ruining the life of an innocent guy who was just playing a video game.

You also may be forgetting that most people play video games to escape reality, not be forced to be tied to it. I would not play a game that people could use to track me down in real life. Why would I, when plenty of games out there already don't?

[GavJ]

defining "griefing"

I define griefing as blowing shit up just for fun, even though you aren't actually in need of the resources or have any reasonable beef with the person. If you have some good reason to seek retribution, or if it's legitimately profitable for you to do it (not spending a week to blow up a day's worth of work for some stranger just to annoy them), then I don't think it's within the realm of game rules to outlaw it (as in banning players). Although in-game law may still come after you.

phantom guards

That phantom mechanism sounds a bit clunky, but yes I was thinking there could maybe be additional non-player-associated automatons send by the empire to help keep peace. Like an extra 1 of them per 4 players or thereabouts. They don't take directions from anybody for personal work like the other ones do, and hang around nearish spawns, responding to reinforcement requests from other automatons.

* Significantly increases site security
* Doesn't do anything to make abandoned sites any more secure, because somebody has to call in the reinforcements
* Creates a nice scaffolding system for players, who can hang near spawn with quick response times until they're ready for more risk/reward further out.

The "security by obscurity" thing you mention is also a great point. The game should only give clients the data they need to display what they can see currently (plus a few extra meters buffer so you don't get glitches when you dig anything). If you want to find well hidden bases, you have to actually go stalk people and stuff, and they can guard themselves against that if they are so inclined. This shouldn't be the only viable strategy, but is another route you can take if you want to save resources on defenses by just trying to hide instead. Sort of like taking on some extra risk for a higher profit margin.

And yes the turret defenses and things in your base are also key. Your automaton is mildly intelligent. It can do things like help direct the aiming of cannons and coordinate defenses. And somebody with an established industrial facility can majorly out-build these things compared to nomadic griefers. So in an attended facility, you can build maybe 5 "turrets" (or whatever) for every 1 a nomad might manage. And your might be twice as effective if coordinated by an automaton, so you can match 10 attackers pound for pound long term without getting worn down. Whereas an unattended facility the attackers actually have an advantage, or it's more 1:1

Are you trying to engineer failure?

People play all sorts of games with their real life names attached and full accountability. Casinos aren't exactly unpopular... Nothing's stopping you there from falsely accusing the guy at the poker table of some crime if you get pissed off. Somehow society (nor casinos) crumble under "media shitstorms" from this sort of event. Keep in mind, the accusor would also not be anonymous, and could be sued for slander, etc. if need be. There are alsready also many competitive facebook games, etc. with people's real names. And as mentioned, this is popular in internet commenting systems for news articles too -- it significantly reduces people being dicks in comments, and it does not in practice stop many people from signing up. I think you significantly overestimate people's indignity and/or the novelty of this approach.

However, that said, your actual legal name is definitely an extreme version of that idea anyway. I think it would still be quite effective even for just your account name to have history publicly posted for the game. Especially if you make the history nice and machine-readable, and let server owners set up custom auto background checks by default to screen people based on their previous in game history.

e.g. statistics like
"estimated ratios of resources mined vs. traded vs. donated vs. broken vs. stolen"
"number of different servers explicitly banned from"
"number of players killed per 24 hours of play time"
and so on.
Possibly only for the last 2 months of paid account time or whatever equivalent.

[~Neri]

What other possible explanation could you give anyway, though, for being magically unable to steal, etc? (Also not super concerned about elaborate workarounds, since if it's a shorter term game world setup, then game updates can fix those without changing the rules mid game)

Plus I have played EVE, and the people who get ganked in the secure space are virtually 100% of the time revenge for something you did specifically or political targets with purpose, not just "watching the world burn" attacking random dudes.  They give bounties on people with giant hulk mining vessels who represent the worst of the worst in mindless automated farming, which is a playstyle that PVP players hate and are effectively protesting/terrorizing to discourage it. This fact is very well advertised.

In general though, I think that game represents an actually very successful system of safety zones, and is pretty much foolproof against encouraging anybody to frivolously harass newbies. I never got attacked once as a newbie in safe space nor did anybody i personally knew.

Ever use smartbombs?

It's super easy to gather a massive group of players in one small spot. I gathered a horde when I found out I could orbit the sun.

It would be quite easy to drop some smartbombs.

Entire group annihilated.

Didn't actually do that, but it's very possible.