It's not all that complex but it undermines the system, and its unnecessary. If the heuristics are correct then the average joe player that demonstrates decent fire control skills and doesn't go on TK sprees should never be even remotely in danger of a weaponslock and he should have a low, stable grief score that might fluxuate about 100 points.
There is no need for any grief forgiveness at that point because the system works as expected. Then you don't have "please forgive me bro!" or other such stuff. In the middle of a battle people don't have time to be doing that, and the incidents outside of a battle should never be significant enough to cause problems with someone's typical grief score.
It should "just work".
One big advantage and if there's anything I would like to see implemented around this, is SOE statistics (hopefully ones we have access to as well) regarding the grief levels of players, and the grief generated by specific actions/weapons.
I'd love to be able to look at my character's grief score and see a breakdown like a pie chart about where that score originated. Is 90% of my grief from throwing plasma grenades? Running over friendlies? Etc. If you know where your grief comes from you can better correct whatever actions caused it.
Then on the other end SOE and hopefully players as well can look at the overall grief distribution of where it is coming from. Throwing out the outliers (very high grief players) allows them to look at the distribution of grief among the average player, look for anomalies, and then tweak them.
Going along with this would be the ability to fine tune the grief generated from any action in the game. They can use the data + the fine tuning to normalize the grief generation across all actions in the game.
If you put in grief forgiveness or other things it skews results and as stated before...its just unnecessary. If they get the heurstics right you simply don't need it and it will just add additional actions for players to do and social issues ("zomg, so-and-so didn't forgive me after I accidentally hit him!! what an ass!"). There is no problem forgiveness solves that can't better be addressed by fixing the hueristics.
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