Guilt by Association
Lost ship and all it's contents. So, here is a buddies drama over the weekend.
My buddy  plays Eve Online. He likes that game. A bunch of folks at work play it. They seem to enjoy the complexity of it. Eve Online is a space age MMPOLG (Massively Multi-Player On-Line Game). It simulates not only the warring and diplomatic end of things, but the economic side of things as well. The idea is to acquire wealth and thus big ships and minions and so on. you have to learn how to do things which is based on how long you have been playing the game.
Our hero has been playing for ever. He has accumulated a bunch of crap. He decides to move it across the universe because some one told him the grass was greener over there. Half way across a "secure" chunk of empty space, he runs into a gang of evil doers who are bent on simply grabbing as much as they can out of the game and don't care who they hurt in the process.
Here is the scenario. Our hero enters the system via a gate. He is suddenly bunched up in a group of ships  He figures out very quickly that it is a cage of ships. A battle cruiser shows up and starts to destroy the sucker who came threw the gate before him. That ship is destroyed and our guy starts getting nailed just because he is the next in line. You see, our hero took precautions to look inconspicuous. It doesn't matter because he is just the next guy thought the gate. Well, the battle cruiser and the other ships blocking the way are of course in on it together. He gets destroyed before the "cops" show up. The cops destroyed the battle cruiser because it was the one firing on the other wise helpless ships that were just flying through the gate. The other ships all just stand there and mop up the debris that is all our hero's stuff that he has spent like a year of game play accumulating.
This is one time that guilt by association would come in handy. Of course the ships that conspired with the battle cruiser should be brought to justice in some manor. But they will not because the game is not set up that way.
I seem to remember a charge of "conspiracy to commit piracy on the high seas" in a movie. Substitute "deep space" for "high seas" and you have the game equivalent. Justice is a difficult enough concept in reality. I can only imagine how difficult it would be to simulate.
I forgot to mention that our hero cannot dispense some instant justice because he would then  become the ship firing on the "innocent" ships that did not fire on him first. This is a frustrating part of the game. You basically have no recourse at this point. This kind of kills the game for me. If the justice system refuses to work, I want to higher a couple of Guidos to go start lopping off parts of this prick's anatomy until I get my shit back. Maybe get the fourteen year old's account suspended for a week or two who pulls these kinds of things.