Okay we need to talk about how wanted levels are handed out.
Disclaimer: I'm not a git gud advocate.
I've seen many video's like this, and it's a case of tunnel vision, I'm sitting here thinking "what the hell, he's right there, should be easy to avoid!"; unfortunately the player has their focus set on the target(tunnel vision), they don't see anything else.
Spatial awareness. Accidents happen folks, shake it off and come back when the wanted status goes away, which is usually after 10 minutes and a hyperspace jump. It's an annoyance, but if you are paying attention it shouldn't happen very often.
........... and they are very cogent thoughts.
To put this whole context into perspective considering the amount of whinging that goes on here about PvP etc. and whether this game is oriented too much towards combat:
You want to do combat then pretty much all bets are off as this is ED:H.
You can become lawless and wanted for any other number of reasons.
So you get wanted in one system for a couple of minutes, hours or days and then get a legacy fine; is that such a big deal really?
One system. That leaves how many other systems where you are not wanted out of so many billion.
Celebrate your lawlessness....... I choose to myself but it's up to you.
Is it really such a big deal?
Situation awareness in tactical sciences. You are right. Some minutes and jump away and back.
Exactly.
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.....or just psychopathic tunnel vision.It finally hit me.
I think I decoded what is actually going on in the minds of such people. We think that they are maybe inexperienced, have slow reflexes, weak awareness of their surroundings, etc.. but no, what is really happening, I think, is that they are WELL AWARE of the ships that are moving into their line of fire. But they just don't want to release the finger from the trigger. And they are mad with the game because it PLACES OBSTACLES between them and "fun" (aka shoot until my barrels melt) And that's the reason these threads exist. They want NPCs to move, not their trigger finger.
Which is also the reason why it is absolutely pointless to point out to them what they are doing wrong and what they should do instead. They don't want to change their habits, they want to change the game.
A little OT but did you know "tunnel vision" is a proper physiological thing?
Your eyeballs are built so that, in times of excitement, blood flow is diverted toward the receptors in the centre of your eyeball so you can see what's in the centre of your vision more acutely and, as a result of being used to that happening, your brain filters out the stuff in your peripheral vision.
That's why, in real-life, training for stressful things is so important.
It doesn't really matter if the training is actually useful in the current situation.
The usefulness comes from making the person feel calmer, so that physiological reaction doesn't happen and the person is more capable of dealing with whatever comes their way.
In terms of ED, that's why stuff like this tends to happen when you're a newbie (ahem, in an FdL... which is a separate issue) and stops happening so often when you become more comfortable with the stuff you're likely to be facing.
It could be repetition blindness too (which is also a psychological thing). The game keys the player who wants to do combat to look for hostiles and the trigger finger goes off reflexively before the brain has cognised that the target is actually not a threat.
This is absolutely something Fdev needs to work upon. There's all kinds of strange things that happen in Multicrew related to this. And using a beam weapon still means instant-wanted status if you hit the wrong target.
It makes sense to me that if a ship is wanted - scanned or not - then firing upon it shouldn't result in making *you* wanted.
Scanning a ship before firing shouldn't be a hard requisite to lawful combat - it should instead be a means of making sure your target isn't Clean.
It shouldn't be up to the players to continue having to work-around this.
It makes sense to me that if a ship is wanted - scanned or not - then firing upon it shouldn't result in making *you* wanted.
Scanning a ship before firing shouldn't be a hard requisite to lawful combat - it should instead be a means of making sure your target isn't Clean.
It shouldn't be up to the players to continue having to work-around this.
So guilty (wanted) until proven innocent (clean)? Really?
As I said, much earlier in the thread. It's game mechanic, designed I suspect to inject just a little bit of thought / discipline / skill into combat.
Do it the way you are suggesting, let players make the call based upon an assumption, "They are all in a wing, so must all be wanted if one is", and FD could seriously mess with the player base by purposely making half a wing wanted and the other half not. Now that would be entertaining to watch.
It's generally pretty easy to avoid friendly fire and premature trigger finger and still comfortably win any engagement, and if accidents happen, the penalty is trivial. Players don't need to work around anything, they just have to abide by the rules of combat...
As a cynical old git, I always look at proposed changes with an eye to how they might be used as an exploit.
Thing is, i don't really see any potential for exploitation if they changed it so you only ever got a bounty for firing on clean ships, regardless of whether you'd scanned them or not.
I guess the only possible down-side might be that people would get used to blasting away randomly and then they'd whine when they couldn't figure out why they ended-up with a bounty.
I know it's silly but when I'm in a HazRes I really do make an effort to protect the other clean ships that are there.
I'll see laser-fire off in the distance, target a ship and see that it's clean, it's shields are down and it's taking hull-damage.
I'll boost toward the firefight, target the attackers and start shooting at them immediately, even though I know it'll get me a bounty, because I want to distract them from the clean ship.
Since they're attacking a clean ship, I know they're likely to be wanted (although that isn't always the case) so it's a judgement call.
It'd be nice if, in those sort of situations, you didn't incur any bounty as long as your judgement was good.
Heh, I didn't mean YOU. I'm well aware of the nature of your posts.
I meant that article. I can't believe that really happened.
It is the Onion, a satirical newspaper that takes its satire from parodying real life events. The US is currently plagued with trigger happy cops....hence this article.
Perhaps they should find a way, but I'm not sure what would make sense since positive identification is a thing in real life as well. Firing based just on what you think can get you into a lot of trouble. Sure, we can reasonably discern something in the game from outside of it, but the game doesn't want you to make the assumption, it wants you to 100% positively identify the target. Playing by that rule is simple. However, perhaps they could look at extending the amount of tolerable damage done before a wanted status is triggered and perhaps it is reasonable to assume that if a target is wanted they wouldn't report you firing on them, regardless of your scan status, since it would be calling out to the very thing they are trying to avoid, the law. Work can be done and it can make sense, but I also don't think there should be too much room for just lazily holding down the trigger as you maneuver about. There should be some tactical analysis, trigger discipline, and overall awareness that the player needs to engage in.
Not really.
If it worked as V'larr suggested it'd be more a case of no offence being committed as long as your judgement was accurate.
You see a ship, open fire on it and then, if it turns out to be wanted, you're in the clear.
If it turns out to be a clean ship, you have committed a crime.
I want different levels of "Wanted" to add greater depth to the C&P system, & to ensure that Cops will always preference the bigger fish over the smaller fish. So they won't turn & kill the guy with the 200Cr assault bounty (petty criminal) when they've got 2 ships with 500KCr bounties each (notorious criminals) to deal with. Once they're gone though.......
That implies it's up to your readout and not the victim though, which means your own computer would be calling authority to report your crimes. As is now, it's the victim's computer that is calling the authority. The error is that wanted ships are calling the authority just because you haven't positively identified them, when they probably would not even if you haven't scanned them. Some ships can easily be destroyed before you even finish an ID scan. Imagine the friction if people were then presented with a full 7 day bounty instead due to murder. What we have now is letting you know before you even get to that point that you're making a mistake, even if lawbreakers probably shouldn't or wouldn't report you.
That would go against the tradition of having NPC vs Player bias though, we can't have that. The galaxy revolves around us after all. [haha] Joking aside, we really are the bigger threat, at least until Mom can release the hounds. [big grin]
In my suggestion a while back, I think I had it go Petty Crim->Minor Crim->Major Crim->Heinous Crim->Most Wanted Crim.....or something to that effect.
I like it. I wouldn't mind being treated differently depending on what I've done and how much of it. I used to really like that authority would randomly pull me over for a scan if I had been doing a lot of smuggling.
I too try to protect Clean ships, even though by all application of common sense such ships shouldn't be in the location in the first place....
Well, the dungeon masters of this game happen to be Fdev, and if we can convince them, the game doesn't *have* to run by the rule that 100% positive identification is necessary to avoid being made a criminal in 100% of cases.
A possible compromise here would be that shooting an unscanned-but-wanted ship produces a *fine*, one that does not escalate into a bounty or wanted status but still gives you a slap-on-the-wrist.
Either way it's absolutely silly; in real life, if you managed to shoot an armed criminal before anyone noticed he what he was about to do, there's no way you'd become a hunted most-wanted Criminal in turn. (Yes, most likely, a trip to the police office and a full testimony of what happened, but at the end of a day, you'd be labeled a hero.)
But as I mentioned there are other issues too, like the Beam Lasers and why that means the current method of counting "hit ticks" is unsatisfactory, and the Multicrew wonkiness.