Friendly Fire

[Cmdr Nemo LXXI]

Friendly fire is a lot harder than it use to be, but with weapons being able to fire multiple rounds at the same time and our utilizing multiple weapons simotaniously, it's easy to get a wanted status when one happens to land one two many shots on the wrong ship.

Using gimbals and being as careful as I could, I'd still received a wanted status on occasion because of friendly fire. I've since change all my weapons to turrets and as of yet, haven't had it happen once. I've watched how my turrets will actually stop for a brief moment when an NPC happens to fly into my line of fire.

 

[Lestat]

Friendly fire is a lot harder than it use to be, but with weapons being able to fire multiple rounds at the same time and our utilizing multiple weapons simotaniously, it's easy to get a wanted status when one happens to land one two many shots on the wrong ship.

Well we always been able to use multiple weapons simultaneously so that has not changed. To avoid friendly fire is easy now. See when Elite Dangerous was Released it was hard. One bullet equal Wanted it did not have this 10% buffer also Larger your ship larger the Hardpoints. So Hitting a smaller ship could cause 10% damage easy.

Using gimbals and being as careful as I could, I'd still received a wanted status on occasion because of friendly fire.

Let me guess you keep firing gimbal weapons when someone launched Chaff Launcher. Which disrupts Gimbaled weapons target so it going wild and could hit any target. Yes, I can see how not paying attention could cause an issue.

I've since change all my weapons to turrets and as of yet, haven't had it happen once. I've watched how my turrets will actually stop for a brief moment when an NPC happens to fly into my line of fire.

I use fix weapons.

 

[Jermanicus]

Never said I never got fined, but I learned from my beginner mistakes and now it rarely happens, if ever.
And I don't recall complaining about it.

Like I said, good for you.

Maybe you didn't complain about it - again, good for you. You are entitled to your opinion.

As I am entitled to mine without being flamed.

 

[Daynen]

What bothers me is not even that cops get irate when you rattle off a clip or shotgun them. Okay cool, I actually assaulted you. My bad. I'll take responsibility, pay my fine, you'll get home safe, no hard feelings right? WRONG. What bothers me is that, for an accident, you can receive a BOUNTY. Look up that word in this context. That is a REWARD FOR KILLING ON SIGHT. For an ACCIDENT. Issued by a SECURITY OFFICER.

WHAT. The F*%&.

Add onto that the fact a "bounty" as low as a hundred credits is suddenly not only alluring enough for every officer in the system to turn psychopathic, but for every ship with any weapons at all! I'm flying a full-combat fitted capital ship, wasting wanted ships of all sizes left and right in full view of DOZENS of other innocent vessels and they think a HUNDRED CREDITS is worth getting VAPORIZED?

There's absolutely no sense of scale, proportion, or risk versus reward. The entire game just flips a switch and now you're public enemy number one. For the juicy (and for NPC's, actually NON-EXISTANT) reward of...less than a quarter of a fuel tank.

All because the joker decided RIGHT THEN was the perfect time to zip across your bow. AFTER your projectiles were in flight.

Yet notorious criminals who go on protracted killing sprees filled with nothing BUT innocent victims and cops just have to...switch ships and they're clean?

Videogame logic be damned. This is lunacy.

 

[Lestat]

What bothers me is not even that cops get irate when you rattle off a clip or shotgun them. Okay cool, I actually assaulted you. My bad. I'll take responsibility, pay my fine, you'll get home safe, no hard feelings right? WRONG. What bothers me is that, for an accident, you can receive a BOUNTY. Look up that word in this context. That is a REWARD FOR KILLING ON SIGHT. For an ACCIDENT. Issued by a SECURITY OFFICER.

When you don't use Sound radar or Visual it really a fault of the users.

WHAT. The F*%&.

Add onto that the fact a "bounty" as low as a hundred credits is suddenly not only alluring enough for every officer in the system to turn psychopathic, but for every ship with any weapons at all! I'm flying a full-combat fitted capital ship, wasting wanted ships of all sizes left and right in full view of DOZENS of other innocent vessels and they think a HUNDRED CREDITS is worth getting VAPORIZED?

There's absolutely no sense of scale, proportion, or risk versus reward. The entire game just flips a switch and now you're public enemy number one. For the juicy (and for NPC's, actually NON-EXISTANT) reward of...less than a quarter of a fuel tank.

All because the joker decided RIGHT THEN was the perfect time to zip across your bow. AFTER your projectiles were in flight.

Yet notorious criminals who go on protracted killing sprees filled with nothing BUT innocent victims and cops just have to...switch ships and they're clean?

Videogame logic be damned. This is lunacy.

Well I agree the 1,000 credits is a little low. When you can make 100,000 credits per target. I think they should have the Fine based off of Exploration, Trade and Combat Rank. Maybe something on the line. Exploration or Trade the 25% per Rank each and a Combat Rank 75%.

 

[Daynen]

Nonono, my point was not what determines the bounty. My point was about how ridiculous it is for these things to happen in this order:
1: accidental hit on non-wanted target.
2: KILL ON SIGHT status INSTANTLY awarded to unintentional attacker. Bounty is 3 to 4 digits (less than the very first mission you ever completed in your first sidey, I'll bet.)
3: Every security ship in the system drops everything it's doing (save defending itself from a previous attacker) and shoots to kill on YOU. Not to disarm, not to dissuade, and certainly not to detain--KILL.
4: Every station in the sector knows you have a bounty (of 1000cr or less) and decides that's noteworthy enough to tell you to F*&% off (even though they still let you land for some reason.)
5: every NPC with a warrant scanner for several systems over decides that that bounty (again, less than your first ever mission reward) is worth risking their ship and their life against you and will not back down unless they are completely rendered unable to fight (which subsequently increases your bounty.)
6: you now have to drop what you were doing, open your galmap and find the nearest place to pay your pittance of a bounty so the entire galaxy stops shooting you for no reason.

Again I reiterate: this all happens over an accidental weapon impact, from a cop who thinks death is the only justice so he ISSUES A BOUNTY on you that not even a day 1 sidey noob would bother going for...but the whole damn galaxy decides it's worth every bit of risk for that cool grand. It's completely idiotic. It lacks any sense of scale, proportion or sanity.

As an aside: I use sound, visual AND radar to pick my targets. In an area where security ships are abundant it's not uncommon for sec ships to weave close to my line of fire. Sometimes I swear they TRY to get into my fire, even when they can clearly see the beam or the projectile pouring into that target well beforehand. If it's a fast, nimble sec ship like an eagle or the like, sometimes they'll approach from the blind spot and dash straight across my screen, rather than literally anywhere else in open space. I take responsibility for every shot I fire in error or every target I click by mistake, but some of these NPC's go so far beyond it's astounding. The NPC's desperately need a little logic upgrade with an ever so slightly better eye for self-preservation and the crime and punishment system needs a complete rethinking because it's absurd by any measure of the imagination.

Except, apparently, Frontier's imagination...

 

[DocLooshkin]

Hello, Fullo111.

I agree that the reaction to friendly fire incidents is more than a little extreme. In a slightly saner universe, the police and other interested parties would have some reasonable third option, something else in between issuing warnings and declaring murderous fatwas. Evidently, this is not that universe.

Both in and out of the game, there are various hints that the Pilots Federation - which every player is a member of - is not well-regarded by the NPCs. Aside from the friendly-fire-inducing boosts in combat, we've also seen a period where SAVs would repeatedly boost into players' ships inside the no-fire zones at stations, sometimes destroying themselves and forcing bounties on players if they were flying even slightly over the speed limit.

None of this looks like accidental behaviour to me, it looks fully-intentional. On FD's part, it's presumably intended to add risk and consequences (albeit of a somewhat overly-escalated kind) to what might otherwise often be largely risk-free situations - and on the hypothetical NPCs side, it's presumably an excuse to open fire on members of an organisation that is thoroughly hated, possibly for its perpetual refusal to do anything substantive about criminal acts committed by so many of its pilots.

Ideally, I'd prefer to see a more reasonable police response. If this is considered undesirable by FD, or too costly to develop, perhaps we can go the other way and have the NPCs' abusive behaviour more clearly expressed somewhere in-game...

[...] Following decades of protracted litigation, it seems that one of the longest-running lawsuits in history may soon be finally coming to an end. The Pilots Federation has been suing every significant factional government and system authority of the last eighty-seven years, over what it calls "a protracted, ongoing campaign of deliberate harassment, provocation and violence" against its members.

Now, sources close to both the Pilots Federation and the defending governments' legal teams suggest a settlement may be about to be reached. No official announcements have been made as of yet, but unconfirmed reports suggest the defending governments will soon begin transferring no-fault compensation awards to the PF, amounting to some 550 trillion credits between them. The governments have apparently also agreed to launch a re-education campaign, aimed at local law-enforcement, intended to discourage them from what's been described as "unsanctioned, unwarranted, criminal vigilanteism, hiding under a false flag of law".

Responding to these early reports, a number of groups representing PF pilots say it remains to be seen whether any of this will have an effect on local police, especially given that "none of the governments involved are prepared to take any responsibility at all, much less apologise". They've also expressed concern at suggestions that the huge sums of money involved work out to awards of less than 25 credits per affected pilot, once legal fees are taken into account.

Commander Chunky Mungo, of Chunky Mungo's Magical Mystical Bereavement Group, an organisation representing the families of deceased pilots, said "it's a sad day when so many lost lives and livelihoods are swept under the rug with so little care from those in power. The money's rubbish, too."