Mchief wrote:If a player hacks another player more than once the hacked player should have that many attempts at retribution. And the hacker should be expecting it.
If the search just gave you a list of all your possible tagets rather than just 5 I would say ok but even I have noticed that <insert player name here> can pop up many times after I have hit them .
Players are able to retrace once for each attack, as long as the retrace is made before a subsequent hack occurs. While I understand that this is not always possible due to factors such as time zones, varying length play sessions across players and people requiring more than 3 hours sleep a night etc, retribution against the same player can still be found via the search as you mentioned - for both the attacker and defender - instead of relying on a direct retrace. A retrace is not the only way of getting revenge.
Retraces have their own rules, and as such differ from the search rules. Retraces provide additional targets for free, above and beyond the 5 that are "paid" for via the search. In addition to this, retraces will bypass the 3-hour protection that search has, allowing you to attack a player twice in succession by finding them on the map and then retracing a previous attack - something that the standard target search wouldn't allow.
Due to their being no cooldown when using retraces - as well as allowing retraces to bypass the search filter - retraces have to be limited in some way to prevent abuse. As players are also able to seek retribution by finding that player again on the search, removing any duplicate retraces was deemed the best option during design. Note also that finding an attacking a player via search that you have an active retrace for will not remove the retrace.
Mchief wrote:why not add a reduction to the amount of resources a player can grab on each attempt where more than two results in a significant decrease
Having different values for different previous attackers would be pretty arbitrary. While I can see why it's preferable against repeated attackers from a personal perspective, there's no logical reason why a previous attacker is prevented from looting the same as any other attacker.
As for alternatives, such as preventing a player from appearing as a target if their was an active retrace available (for example), this would not be possible due to the search calulation being unable to look at previous attacks that have taken place. Similar to the request for players wishing to prevent their Facebook friends from showing up in search, individually tailored search parameters/results for every single network are not feasible - the search has to work the same for everyone.