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[Desiderya]

What Lou said, but:

That mission brief implies the colony itself is in Republic-controlled space. Not Amarr space, where the mission to shoot the industrials is taking place. That doesn't exactly make it a civilian colony. It's an invading entity, encroaching on someone else's territory. Nuking it from orbit would be perfectly legit in a state of war.

Hm, FW missions always send you to hostile space, i.e. an amarr agent will give you missions that take place in republic space. Therefore the 'civilian colony' would be in the warzone, but not in amarr controlled space.
-> Shades of Grey.

[Hamish Grayson]

So I assume that mission was done once, at one time, by a single capsuleer, which in fact, seems to be the attitude CCP takes on it.

My take on it is that Zor did kidnap a executive's daughter and a some capsuleer did rescue her.    However, when you do the Damsel mission you are rescuing some random damsel from some random thug and are not the hero of that specific Zor/Damsel story.

[Morwen Lagann]

What Lou said, but:

That mission brief implies the colony itself is in Republic-controlled space. Not Amarr space, where the mission to shoot the industrials is taking place. That doesn't exactly make it a civilian colony. It's an invading entity, encroaching on someone else's territory. Nuking it from orbit would be perfectly legit in a state of war.

Hm, FW missions always send you to hostile space, i.e. an amarr agent will give you missions that take place in republic space. Therefore the 'civilian colony' would be in the warzone, but not in amarr controlled space.
-> Shades of Grey.

Just because the transports you are hitting are in Amarrian space, do not mean that the colony they are going to is as well.

Very recently, we spotted a huge transport fleet carrying thousands upon thousands of Amarrians towards our borders. We let them enter, pretending as always that we had not noticed.

Enter what? Their own (Amarrian) space? Why use the word "enter" in that case? That makes no sense logically.

This time however, we reinforced all of the likely exit points with additional patrols. As a result they have not yet been able to leave. They are sitting largely defenseless as they wait for an opportunity to pass back out into Empire borders.

In order to "pass back out" of something, you must have entered something. If they're passing back out into Empire border space, they therefore must have entered Republic space.

[Hamish Grayson]

They sound more like squatters than invaders.

[Morwen Lagann]

In an active state of war, can you afford to take the chance? Especially with an enemy like the Empire?

[Nicoletta Mithra]

It's quite simple. If your char shies away from killing civilians, don't kill the civilians. - There's the option to decline a mission. If the char does feel killing those civilians is somehow justified, kill them.  If the char feel like lying about whether he did such a mission or no, he can do so - and probably will.

Anyway, that such a mission exists does by no means necessitate that every capsuleer involved in FW needs to do it.

[Matariki Rain]

What Nicoletta said.

[Gottii]

Man, from Gottii's IC view, every time he pulls the trigger on an Amarrian vessel, he's killing family, i.e. the slaves that serve on the Amarrian ship.

Killing some Angel "support staff" doesnt bother him a bit after that.  We're callous deathbringers for a reason...

[Desiderya]

Just because the transports you are hitting are in Amarrian space, do not mean that the colony they are going to is as well.

In order to "pass back out" of something, you must have entered something. If they're passing back out into Empire border space, they therefore must have entered Republic space.

It was an observation that the hostile act on the capsuleers part consists of hitting a target outside 'their' empire's space. It's simply a fact by the game mechanic. Your mission will not be in "your" space, whatever the briefing says.

The logic is flawed there and I might simply chalk it down to the fact that the mission briefings might have been written before it was decided that FW missions always take you into hostile space.

So in a literal way, the mission briefing is not working at all. It claims that the amarrian fleet has entered republic space and is now detained there, waiting for a chance to get out again. However, the mission will send you to amarr space.
That's why I've said: Bend the story behind it so that it makes sense while retaining the gist of the matter, i.e. shades of grey, hitting civilians - or mostly civilians - it is.

[Merdaneth]

Missions are generally bull when taken literally. So you gotta do something with them

Civilians transports that don't warp out when not being scrambled? I don't believe it. Civilians getting caught in the same manner tens of thousands of times? Naah, not really.

Hell, for all you know I might have done the mission and destroyed the transports after having taken the time for the civilians to get off. Invisible tranport ships might have taken them to a safe place (or be enslaved). If invisible transport ships work for the Sansha, why not for me?

You just can't tell what actually happened and just taking the mission literally all the time ruins any suspension of disbelief.

[Merdaneth]

Also, I have Mina Darabi living in my quarters for two years now. We're practically married... 

[lallara zhuul]

I may be wrong... but in a state of war (which FW isn't, it is some sort of military action, but not real war. If it would be then the both empires would be completely mobilized) both participants claim that the contested territory is theirs and then they fight over it?

I'm not sure that is there such thing as the Geneva convention in New Eden.

It might be completely legitimate to kill civilians whenever you want, even without a proclamation of war.

Hell, it might be legal to kill a non-citizen everywhere in every empire where the non-citizens are not protected by CONCORD.

[Desiderya]

I may be wrong... but in a state of war (which FW isn't, it is some sort of military action, but not real war. If it would be then the both empires would be completely mobilized) both participants claim that the contested territory is theirs and then they fight over it?

But they don't call someone entering space they want to claim as entering their borders. There's a system in place, occupation, and entering the occupied systems might be called crossing a border. Technicalities, I know, but even with your view the mission wouldn't make enough sense to be taken literally over and over and over again.

[BloodBird]

I'd argue, as I attempted to before, that if we counted up all the times that missions like this have been done by all pilots since FW started, we'd be well on our way to depopulating the cluster. I see it like this: there are like, 10 at most, FW missions, and it seems very very strange to do the exact same mission over and over again. So I assume that mission was done once, at one time, by a single capsuleer, which in fact, seems to be the attitude CCP takes on it.

I can no more consider the content of Shades of Grey to be IC then I can the content of Damsel in Distress, which seems quite improbably after the second or third time running it in one day.

My corp considers missions thusly: when you're doing missions, you do them ICly, but specifically what you're doing in them is very purposely left undisclosed, because to do otherwise shatters the suspension of disbelief around missions in general.

This has been my experience as well. In all the IC - and most OOC cases where I've run missions in corps or whatever we don't consider the constant repeated missions as "fact". We never go into much detail IC "Just doing soem work for X in Y system" etc. and OOC we don't bother to consider the 'importance' of the missions or make much of it. We just move on and farm the missions for all their OOC positive rewards - standing, loot, salvage, ISK, etc.

So if asked what I'm doing in an IC manner while missioning it's just "working for my agent" and nothing more. Belt ratting? "Patrolling X system clearing out some Y pirates."

Going into any more detail would break the suspension of disbelief and so the topic of missioning and the scale of it never comes up IC.

It's quite simple. If your char shies away from killing civilians, don't kill the civilians. - There's the option to decline a mission. If the char does feel killing those civilians is somehow justified, kill them.  If the char feel like lying about whether he did such a mission or no, he can do so - and probably will.

Anyway, that such a mission exists does by no means necessitate that every capsuleer involved in FW needs to do it.

Annnnnnd now that I've read the actual tread ( ) ^THIS.

[Graelyn]

I do wish CCP would change ratting and missions in a way that they weren't so ridiculously unrealistic. Why not make the numbers we have to kill fewer, while keeping the difficulty and rewards the same? Seems an easy cosmetic fix, just cut down the number of rats by 7/8ths and make them uber.

I think on the ship balancing panel it was said that the overall goal with NPCs is to remove their number, make them harder and make them require fits that are not so entirely unsuitable for pvp. So in the long term, we might see something like that.

Apparently, the sleeper/incursion AI was stage 1 of this (all NPCs are supposed to start acting intelligent). The problem is that every single mission and NPC encounter in the game has to be redone all at once for this, and CCP is gun shy about upsetting that 70% of the playerbase running missions in hisec.