Think again:
1. Not only you, everybody has the "report crimes against me" option.
2. You (and your ship) do not know it.
3. You just shot somebody. How does your ship know if it should report this crime or not?
Crime Update Discussion
- Thread starter Sandro Sammarco
- Start date
Think again:
1. Not only you, everybody has the "report crimes against me" option.
2. You (and your ship) do not know it.
3. You just shot somebody. How does your ship know if it should report this crime or not?
Your ship knows if you have completed the scan or not. Your ship knows you fired on and damaged the target. Your ship has all the necessary information to report you for the crime.
The target's ship knows you attacked it, but it won't report you for two reasons.
1). A wanted target cannot report a crime against itself.
2). It has no way to know if you have completed a scan.
The only entities that know you have not completed a scan are you and your ship. Since you clearly are not reporting yourself, it must be your ship. It is the only possibility.
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In all other games if a target is marked red it means we are clear to engage. For some reason, in ED it means something else.
And yes - I was talking about this situation a couple of pages before - attacking a wanted ship should NEVER be punished, because if somebody is wanted it means that he is dangerous enough that everybody is encouraged to shoot him.
Yes.
Who said that? (though in our case this is irrelevant)
Yes and yes.
The only problem is...
If
the other ship
has "report crimes against me" turned off,
this crime
will
NOT
be
reported.
How can this be possible?
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Habeas corpus, I suspect. The authorities need evidence the crime actually occurred.
Which would mean, I suppose, that BOTH ships are making reports. Their ship is reporting being struck by weapons, and your ship is reporting you fired on a target without a scan. The computers put that information together and issue a bounty.
That's spectacularly overcomplicated, however.
Nope, the ship that is scanned, can register the scan. If its not complete and the ship takes damage (only direct hits will count), the crime is reported. Your own ship has NOTHING to do with this system, its your target doing all the work. THIS is why you get a warning that somebody is scanning you.
He can register that a scan is taking place, but how he can see when (or if) the scan was finished?
Let's say, you see a suspicious person on the street. You take his picture with your mobile phone (this he can detect) and send it to the police asking if he's wanted or not. What makes you think that he can detect the exact moment when you receive their reply?
Besides, does the fact that authorities not only accept crime reports from a WANTED pilot, but even punish somebody for attacking him sound okay to you?
Yeah that sounds OK. Just like right now, criminals have rights. Sounds legit.
And the criminal here ingame has the right to be identified as a criminal first before you can shoot at him without getting a crime reported.
And ingame you are not stupid, you use the same equipment and you can not only register the scan, you can see if the scan is finished or not. Every ship and pilot knows exactly how long he was scanned and was the scan finished or not.
Think about something else - traffic in your home network. PC A scans a network device on PC B. And the router/switch (or the police ingame) can see the traffic and log it.
The same way the scan network works ingame, you, your target and the local security know anything if a scan was initiated.
But you can turn off the "report crimes against you"-option and in this case the local security wont get data from your ship if something happens.
And the criminal here ingame has the right to be identified as a criminal first before you can shoot at him without getting a crime reported.
And ingame you are not stupid, you use the same equipment and you can not only register the scan, you can see if the scan is finished or not. Every ship and pilot knows exactly how long he was scanned and was the scan finished or not.
Think about something else - traffic in your home network. PC A scans a network device on PC B. And the router/switch (or the police ingame) can see the traffic and log it.
The same way the scan network works ingame, you, your target and the local security know anything if a scan was initiated.
But you can turn off the "report crimes against you"-option and in this case the local security wont get data from your ship if something happens.
Again, though... the target has no way of noting if a basic scan was completed. Basic scan does not notify the target! Only KWS/cargo scan notifies the target! And even those do not notify on completion, only if a scan was attempted!
Therefore, again, the attacker's own ship is tattling on them for not finishing the scan, AND the system is accepting a report of an assault from a Wanted ship! This seems far less likely of an implementation than a simple check in the system of "Is the target wanted?" It's overwrought, creates additional opportunities for an (in-universe) hacker to spoof the system by creating bogus reports, and what fringe spacer wouldn't disable the part where their own ship tattles on them anyway?
This system only makes sense when you evaluate it as a game mechanic. When you start looking at it from a "How would this actually happen in-universe?" perspective, the logic breaks down.
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To a certain extent that was always true in the Elite games. Even the very first version had a sort of galactic panopticon that registered every kill and awarded bounties or criminal status accordingly. The manual made some reference to ships' cameras transmitting instantaneous evidence to GalCop, but even then we all knew that was handwavium and didn't make any in-game sense. But it was 1984 and gamers weren't so picky.
Part of the problem with ED is that FD wanted at least two extra mechanisms to come into play during combat. Firstly, unlike classic Elite where firing on another ship didn't affect criminality unless you destroyed it, they wanted assault penalties to be different to murder penalties. And secondly they wanted some sort of skill-based "dogfighting" mechanic that didn't necessarily involve weapons, hence the KWS.
Even back in the design phase there were people pointing out what a convoluted and impossible-to-rationalise system this was, but FD wanted their dogfighting and so it stayed.
Personally I try to rationalise it as:
- There is a galaxy-wide database of criminals, and the bounties they currently carry in various jurisdictions. This is uploaded to your ship every time you dock.
- The criminal database includes very specific signature information for criminals' ships; unique EM and heat emissions, infrared reflectivity (just like in the Elite manual!) etc. Kind of a 34th century version of the submarine sound library used by sonar operators.
- Basic scanners get simple transponder ID information from ships but this might be spoofed by criminals (even though in-game it never is) and so can't be relied upon for anything other than local bounty claims.
- When you use the KWS, it is slowly mapping the target ship's emissions and matching them to the database. When it has enough data for a unique match, it can reliably display any out-of-system bounties.
I'm not even getting into the KWS here, though. This is just dealing with basic scans and the fact that the only entities which know you didn't fully basic scan your target are you and your ship, and therefore your own ship must be reporting you, at least in part
Alas that has always been the case though. In Elite it was the mysterious kill camera, in Frontier I'm not sure the mechanism was even addressed, and in ED it's the scanner. I'm not sure there's any logical way around it if criminal acts are to be recorded in real time. So yes, your ship rats on you and you can't turn it off.
IIRC during the DDF there was talk of crimes only being detected if a victim or third party recorded the act (i.e. was in the vicinity) and was able to transmit it back to the authorities, so in theory you could go one-on-one in an otherwise deserted system and literally get away with murder if the victim was destroyed before the evidence "got out." Thankfully that idea was dropped. It makes for good fiction but would be chaotic in a multiplayer game.
The thing is, if FD was not so fixated on "You must fully scan your target or you will get a bounty even if he is wanted," then there would be no need.
The only time that it becomes necessary for your own ship to tattle on you is when you fire on a ship you haven't scanned that IS WANTED.
If you fire on someone who is NOT wanted, you would get a bounty anyway (assuming the target has not disabled "report crimes against me") just as you do now.
But FD is determined to implement this "feature", which many players hate, and which is inconsistent with the frontier spirit of the game, in spite of the fact that it breaks verisimilitude in a major way.
Everything is much simpler if the only determinator in whether you get a bounty is whether the target is wanted. Players will still be punished for poor fire discipline because eventually that target they didn't scan will be clean!
Why cling to a feature which annoys players, impedes realism, and ultimately adds nothing to the game?
So wanted criminals have no right to live, but have right to...
...what?
But FDev insists that we are too stupid to know when to shoot things, and can only act on permission of the almighty scanning kitchen timer.
I do not like this.
I want to make decisions by myself.
Otherwise where is that great game that "does not hold your hand"?
Well, that's simply not true. We players do not see a "somebody finished scanning you" notification.
I don't think a network analogy could apply here: scans are not P2P, you are not asking the bad guy: "are you wanted?", then he honestly replies yes or no - this would be even more ridiculous than ships reporting themselves.
But anyway,
WHY WOULD ANYONE CARE???
Will everyone start shooting each other without scanning if this is removed? - No!
If we attack a clean guy, we are reported anyway.
If we attack a wanted guy - they WANTED him killed anyway.
Will it remove these ridiculous situations when you try to help cops, but they start shooting at you instead of that dangerous criminal? - Yes!
Will it add more of that risk/reward gameplay if you will have to use your brains choosing to just shoot the guy or wait for the scanner? - Yes!
What is the problem?
Why FDev insists on this unrealistic, counter-intuitive, overcomplicated logic?
Once again, the existence of "report crimes against me" option disproves the ratting-yourself theory - see the example in my previous post.
It doesn't, it just means that your own ship's report is ignored if the target doesn't also make one.
Your ship is still the only possible entity that could be reporting you didn't scan the target.
I can only guess it's because someone at FD (maybe DB?) was so enamoured of the exceptionally good flight model that they felt that everything needed to be performed by swinging the ship's nose to point at something and/or sliding in behind a target in a dogfight stylee.
I agree that it's a very overcomplicated mechanic, but then so is much of the rest of the game when you get right down to it. "In order to do that thing I must first select this thing, then press this until that happens, unless another thing happens first in which case I'll select a different thing..." Some of the "things" make more sense than other "things", but little of it really holds together in a way that would be logical in a real future setting.
Very few of the scanner mechanics, either in combat or exploration, make much sense when you stop to think about them. I agree that the Wanted thing is a particularly obvious gameplay-over-realism decision though. While personally I don't mind it that much (there are certainly bigger issues to address) I wouldn't shed many tears if it went away either.
I just don't see a benefit to it being the way it is, and I see numerous drawbacks. So having it be that way bothers the obsessive in me.
This is precisely what I think that should change in the actual bounty hunting system. A wanted target should NEVER be able to "report crimes against me", since attacking him is not a crime. I really hope they change it before this new update, or it will make the game incredible punitive against hunters, instead of being punitive against criminals...
Well its not that easy. You have to make sure that the guy IS actually wanted before you spread his gut all over the next station etc.
Its easy to understand, just wait a second to finish then scan, then you can shoot till he is dead.
And we need bigger bountys and fines. Killed a dropship? Here your 5K bounty, be happy. It should be at least 100k for murder, so people would think how they kill and what they can do after getting a decent bounty so people will actually hunt you?
That would be lovely if it were possible. But it is not. And if you've spent a few hours in a RES, you know that.
For example: I spent several hours of play in a RES in Beta-1 Tucanae. This turned me into hostile for a pirate faction that has a station there.
Thus, all members of that faction, which are always wanted pirates, attack me in the blink of an eye.
Once I was surrounded and attacked by several of them. I had no time to stop and scan each of them and then I ended up targeting and attacking one that had not enough skill to hit me a shot, although he tried.
Result: I got a bounty on my head for attacking in self-defense a ship that, after all, was wanted. This make no sense at all!
Ok, it was just 400cr, but all local ships that were allied became enemy and I was forced to leave the combat.
This is a terrible artificial intelligence and a stupid system that punishes those who are trying to help!
If they will make the system more rigid and punitive, so they really NEED to change this aspect.
A ship does not become wanted when scanned, the scan only shows a tag that is already there. Thus, it should not be a crime to attack a wanted ship, even if you have not scanned it yet.
If they don't change it before the update, then the update will be much more punitive for those of us who are bounty hunting than for those who are pirating. After all, a pirate does not care about his wanted tag as we hunters do. As a matter of fact, they tend to see the price on their heads as a token, a medal. They don't care about it.
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