I get annoyed when my technicians act on tickets without first picking it up.

So they might send a reply to a user but they haven't assigned the ticket to themselves

I'd like to make the ticket unworkable unless you first pick it up

without resorting to scripts has  anyone got any good ideas? I was looking at business rules and I noticed

Negate Create/Edit Operation: This action lets you to Negate (discard/revert) an operation (Create/Edit Request). For instance, using this you can stop a request that matches the configured business rules criteria from being created. You can also stop a request from being updated/edited. Once this action is performed, all the applied rules will be discarded.

could I create a business rule used technician = not assigned and the negate rule?