My legion got farmed by an aggressive, strong player without any hope to fight him back.. All I could do is to attack him and warned him but he kept doing it to my legion. I sure wished that I could send my ship to guard his weaker ship so he can stop farming my friend cuz he would have to fight me instead..

In real life, an navy escort was sent to guard other ships. In Star Trek Online, I could extend my shield to protect my weaker friend's ship.. So.. Why not here? It makes sense.. Heck, we are able to guard our legion's planet.. So why not expand the guard feature to guard ships as well? Of course, only can guard one thing at any given time. Guarding a ship means abandon the planet guarding..

This would be an interesting and odd thing to implement O_o. It could be abused but definitely an interesting idea.

It would certainly be abused. I could guard my lvl 10 buddy, so he could attack his peers relentlessly and they couldn't retaliate without going through me first.

I'd much rather see a system that didn't reward attacking much weaker players.

well i think a gaurd option would be cool if it had limitations.. like maybe the gaurded person does recieve a bonus in it's attributes (but this is based off the gaurded person's attributes only) and the gaurded person recieves the cloaking buff also of the other player so he is targeted less in the random battle scans

No.. Once weaker player attacks, it loses guard feature by big brother..

Guarding is great against farmers who hound on weak players out of steer enjoyment and that weaker player had no hope to win. That player just had to take lot of deaths for no reason.. That's where guard can be useful to protect weaker legion players to stop those ruthless farmers..

how about inheriting the attack score (combined) but not the def score? but only while defending a direct attack. the score would not be added to planets either unless the defending player specifically wants to defend the planet.

or how about having to disable the defender before attacking the weaker at all (defense only) also does not extend to planets.

I like the idea, but ya this would needs some serious limitations. I.e. this only working on the defense not offense.

I like the concept, I just don't think it would work within the framework of this PvP system. It gives low levels with big friends (and multi accounts) too much of an advantage, and would be very unfair to people of the same level. If I wanted to make a name for myself in battle, how far would I get if most of the target list had a huge bodyguard? It's giving somebody huge combat bonuses that they didn't earn.

If your ship is weak, then it's weak. If you have tough friends, send them an alert and let them attack directly. The issue here is that people are being farmed by much higher level players. Remove the incentive to farm them and this problem goes away.

I dont see this as a way of preventing farming as much as a way of introducing a new way to fight. As for getting rid of the incentive to farm, base XP off stats not rank!!!!

Ok, if there were a "fleet action" option side by side with the individual targeted PvP combat then I'm all for it. Assign your legion members to your starfleet (or have them join on their own) and then battle others from the fleet list. It could even be done so every level lets you assign 1 more ship. XP could then be awarded based on some combination of level and fleet size, for example maybe smaller fleets get a bonus. That could open the door to a whole variety of strategic options.

But for plain ship vs ship PvP, I would want it to remain ship vs ship, and not ship vs ship and all of ship's high level friends.

^
Ya, now if you were to be able to do this and as a lone ship not be targeted by fleets while fleets did their thing this would be awesome.
As for smaller fleets getting a bonus, only if they were to attack bigger fleets.

Actually I think Castle Age's duel vs invasion is a form of single combat vs fleet battle. In CA, people can have a large well equipped army, or specialize in dueling. Invaders tend to farm the duelists who usually have small armies, but then the duelists tend to farm the invaders who put everything in offense and rely on their greater numbers.

Iv always liked that way of doing it, specially since i had no one else in my army.

Bumping this, because it was recently linked in another topic, and I think it would be an awesome add for a future "big update!"