No warning, confirmation, or criminal charges for selling an occupied passenger cabin

[sturnclaw]

Observed behaviour

Sell a passenger cabin with an embarked passenger. The passenger vanishes into the ether, never to be seen again. The mission giver either gets mad at you, or suffers a spontaneous existence failure along with the rest of the mission/game (crash).

Expected behaviour

The player should be prevented from selling an occupied passenger cabin entirely. Alternatively, if it is desired for the player to be able to take this course of action, provide a warning popup and either return the passenger to a "loading dock" on the station to be embarked in a different cabin, or charge the player with an Unathorized Program Deresolution crime.

Steps to reproduce

Sell an occupied passenger cabin.

My pioneer version (and OS):
2024-07-10 / equip-v2
Linux

[mwerle]

Spitballing: add an option to sell passengers as Slaves on the black market? (With an extremely high fine if caught, of course) Not delivering passengers should have a very large reputation impact, regardless of how they were "lost".

If dropping a passenger at a non-destination dock will be an option ("right, if you don't behave, you can walk from here"), then the entire group the passenger belongs to should also disembark.

If just wanting to move passengers between cabins, we'll need to work on a passenger management screen.

(I'll add these to the "passenger_gameplay" scratchpad too)

[impaktor]

Spitballing: add an option to sell passengers as Slaves on the black market? (With an extremely high fine if caught, of course) Not delivering passengers should have a very large reputation impact, regardless of how they were "lost".

Wouldn't one be then very strongly incentivized to re-load save if caught?

Don't get me wrong, I do imagine a future where there's some combat / RPG dice roll to convert passenger to slave/hostage. I think this would be a way to convert reputation to money. (We have a way to convert money to reputation, through the donate to cranks).

[sturnclaw]

I'd prefer not to have the option at all, but if it were to be implemented it is something that should come with extremely severe consequences and be an option of "last resort", relegating the player to essentially a life of piracy in most lawful systems. At the very minimum, I'd expect the player to have significant difficulty taking another passenger mission in their career without jumping through a lot of hoops to clear or obscure their reputation.

[mwerle]

Wouldn't one be then very strongly incentivized to re-load save if caught?

Hmm; true. I guess reputation damage is less immediately visible and thus less incentive to reload..?

I'd prefer not to have the option at all, but if it were to be implemented it is something that should come with extremely severe consequences

It was just a spitball suggestion; but as @impaktor said, if the consequences are too severe, people would just reload their save.

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Apologies for derailing this issue.

[sturnclaw]

Apologies for derailing this issue.

It's not a derail at all, it's something that does need to be discussed.

If the consequences of taking an action are severe enough that the player would just immediately reload a save even if they took the action intentionally, that's probably a good sign the action shouldn't be possible in the first place.

Given that the consequences of enslaving a passenger you've signed a contract with for safe passage would by necessity and jurisdiction be quite severe, it's probably not worth implementing at all - and I certainly do not wish to add "scamming and enslaving NPCs" as a viable gameplay loop to Pioneer.