ENH: financial bailout mode and/or savings/loans

[jpcsupplies]

As an extension to the Anti-Grief implications of the economy mod -

If a player joins, has no owned blocks, no faction, and a bank balance of zero; or less than the price of a drill, then grant them another 100 credits, or enough to buy a single drill. Alternately we could simply "grant" a player matching this criteria a drill, and touch nothing else financially.

This is obviously only needed in the case that spawning without tools or ships has been enabled in the dedicated server, and for whatever reason no supply of tools is otherwise available.

It should only be attached to an on server join or similar equivalent event to minimize abuse.

As such this represents a fairly low priority enhancement. - Particularly as on such a server they are probably out of drills for sale anyway - and we would also have to add a cheat to buying drills that allowed a player to buy a drill even if none are available if they are flagged as a player getting financial bail out. (ALTHOUGH the grant idea is probably a safer compromise)

[jpcsupplies]

Actually... scrap all that.. how hard would it be to record a players inventory so if they disconnect, the items they were carrying can be reclaimed back like offline trades? That means if a server is using economy as an anti-grief measure, losing all your money doesn't mean losing your tools on a crash.

Only tricky part is detecting if a player is in a cryo so as to prevent items duplicating when they reconnect and /claim what the cryo already puts back in their inventory.already.

[midspace]

It's a great idea (to put into Admin mod). Except we need a hook in SE to tell us when a player disconnects, when we can snapshot their inventory. That API doesn't exist curently, and has been asked about quite a few times.

[jpcsupplies]

for economy the items could be recorded during our data file save cycles, for admin mod setup a timer to save out inventory.. one or the other, since we cant have both doing it. Timer means worst case scenario an inventory timewarps on a crash.

If you want to do it admin mod side how about -

For detecting connects/disconnects just count the number of connected players, and their steam ids, compare to the previous check of connected players and their steam ids.. if it changes we know they/who disconnected. Only issue i see here is by the time we notice they disconnected we no longer have an inventory to backup, which takes back to periodic saves anyway?

A lesser evil is recording all players inventories, (maybe in the lcd refresh cycle of econ or your lcd stuff in admin) to memory. Combine that with the connected player count checks, if we detect a player left - save their last recorded inventory.

[jpcsupplies]

Loans? In the context of this mod we could also take another page from TTDLX and add a loan system ? Available funds to loan set by a rough evaluation of items owned by that player, divided by 4 or similar?

[jpcsupplies]

Loans logic outline: Conditions:

• Must be owner or leader in a faction, loan is applied to faction balance somehow? (Has a job)
• Faction must contain at least 2 members (including owner) (its a real job)
• Once a loan has been taken out they are not permitted to /buy/ from other players (abuse restriction) /unless/ the total of the loan is less than half the value of the item being purchased. (This allows a faction to take out a loan to cover a shortfall in the purchase cost of a ship or station, but not to give free money to another player)
• A faction with an active loan can only buy from NPC markets (except under the prior condition)
• A faction with an active loan is allowed to /sell/ ships (and parts?) to other factions (or NPC?) since making money is the idea of a loan.
• Maximum loan amount is a base amount per member (say 50,000 per member) plus a percentage of the value of anyships the members own. Eg. 50,000 x 2 (100,000) plus (they own a ship worth 10 million) 25% of 10 million. (2.5 million + 100,000 = 2.6million credit limit)
• Those taking out loans can take out any amount under their credit limit
• Interest paid at end of loan. If they forget to pay it in time, but have enough funds to cover the loan just take amount they owe and terminate the loan.
• If a loan ends and defaults - take any funds held by owner, faction or leaders, and it doesnt cover the loan - randomly sieze the lowest value ship (or station?) that can cover the outstanding loan amount and transfer ownership to the NPC faction? Prioritize ships/stations owned by faction owner or leaders. Pay the difference in value back to the owner or leader equally after seizure. also set ship or station "non-grindable/indestructable" for 24 hours?
• Evil: this also means "goverment siezes funds" if those same players roll over the account purge time limit.

[jpcsupplies]

We could also have a smaller system for "free agent" miners or members of the default npc faction. Say a 5000 to 10,000 limit, + 10% of value of owned ships/stations.