EVE Online to introduce new logout system, ‘safety system’ to prevent you unwittingly committing crimes

One of my first experiences with Oblivion was accidentally stealing a pen that was on a merchant’s desk, and then — not knowing that I’d stolen it — being chased around by a guard who then killed me. Good times. Well, EVE Online clearly learned from my experience, because they’re about to implement a new ‘safety system’ that forces you to manually enable the ability to commit illegal acts.

The new system has three levels: ENABLED, where you can commit no illegal or even slightly illegal acts, PARTIAL, where you can only commit acts which will flag you as suspect, and DISABLED, where you can do whatever you want. In the upcoming ‘Retribution’ expansion, there are two levels of illegal behaviour — more details and massive charts here.

CCP are also adding a ‘safe logoff’ system to the mix, that brings up a 30-second countdown timer which, if you’re not doing anything dangerous, will allow you to safely logout once it finishes. You can cancel any time if you need to defend yourself — as Greyscale writes, “this should ensure that you’ll never (again) die because you logged out a minute too soon and got podded while the client was closed.”

Source: EVE Online Devblog