I have been making many posts describing why the law system is fundamentally broken, and why it will never work as intended. With this thread, I would like to sum up the problems with the law system, and offer suggestions how to fix it with a major rework. The first and most important argument for why it doesn't work: The more laws you introduce, to mitigate various scenarios, the more difficult it becomes to remain a law-abiding player. The law and crime system largely works against the lawful player. The criminal player doesn't have to abide by the law. In fact, they can blatantly disregard it and use the law system against the law-abiding player. I will give a few examples: 1) I just got released from prison with a squeaky clean crime stat. I go to Aberdeen, put a gun to the face of an ROC miner and there is nothing he can do besides letting me rob him or become a criminal himself. 2) A bounty hunter tries to hunt a bounty clearing his CS at a bunker. But the bounty is protected by lawful team mates that protect the entrance. The bounty hunter is now forced to shoot the team mates and thus becomes a criminal himself, or give up on the mission. That's fundamentally broken. And the solution is not to make more laws. Because the more laws you make... You guessed it, the more options it opens for criminals to use the laws against the law-abiding players. I guarantee the creativity of players will always surpass any system you can put in place. A complete rework of how the law is enforced and how punishment is applied is needed. The solution to this dilemma is to make the game more of a space western with fewer laws and where everyone can defend themselves without repercussions. This can be achieved by totally reworking the way comms arrays work, what they cover, and how crimes are reported. This first most important major change: Crimes should not be reported automatically. To report a crime you need evidence. To report a crime, it should require you to fly to the nearest space station to submit your evidence of the crime taking place. Put up a booth/terminal at each space station called "Avocacy reporting" (or something like that - basically a police station). Evidence could be a blackbox that an exploded ship drops, or a token you pick up from a dead player (e.g. a "data chip" from their mobiGlass). After the evidence has been submitted, the player can be dealt a crime stat and a bounty mission generated. This could even potentially happen weeks later if the criminal is lazy and leaves evidence behind (PES) and someone stumbles upon it. The black boxes and data chips, would basically have the identical information as what the game engine currently obtains from the all seeing comms arrays. As for monitored ares, they should only be around around space stations, cities, outposts, etc. where it could be plausibly said that the facility can obtain the information (be the witness so to speak) though sensors, such as cameras radars, etc. The comms array system could still be used to keep track of objects. So the comms array system knows that a ship just disappeared, but it will not know if the player was clumsy and just flew into an asteroid, until it has been investigated. Also, blackboxes, and data chips would have an emergency beacon that would make them trackable for some time after they became active. This will also enable transponder gameplay, where a player (smuggler, criminal, or whatever) can choose to stop being tracked by turning off the transponder of their ship - but that a separate topic. The effect of this for the two examples I gave initially, is that the ROC miner/bounty hunter could just shoot whoever threatens them and take their data chip to prevent anyone from reporting their self-defence. It would solve many other problems too. Such as accidentially shooting at a friendly ship is no problem (XenoThreat), because they have the data of the blackbox in their possession and don't need to report it. Or vice-versa, a ganker is shooting at another player, they can jump away and report the crime the next time they dock. Lots of gameplay could be added on top of this. E.g. a player could put up a mission to have their black box recovered. And it would also work for PvE. E.g. if you destroy a UEE ship or kill security, you better remember to recover the blackbox/data chip before leaving, because the UEE (or a player through a generated mission) will be investigating what happened to their ship. If these changes were made, the game would become much more alive, and law-abiding players would be give agency to defend themselves and not just take a beating or socially distancing themselves from other players because they are afraid of having to act in self-defence.