Update Kill Warrant Scanner Feedback

[wstephenson]

Is it on the to do list for Frontier to focus on the ability to actually track with precision targets via the wake scanner or other mechanics ? (both PvE and PvP) and if Yes, do you know when approximately ? (this year or later)

Everything's on The List, somewhere, but the date range is fuzzily specified as In The Future.

I understand that chasing fugitives across multiple systems and multiple governments is no longer an option for the Kill Warrant scanner. However This is something we will be looking to address in a future update, where we'd like to improve wake scanning and look at other modules, such as tracker limpets (No ETA, no guarantees, obviously).

You should be happy that FDEV don't employ time travellers, they'd be putting out proposals couched in terms of "we hope will get around to implementing this last week".

 

[Deleted member 115407]

The Kill Warrant scanner will have the following functionality, shortly after launch:

• It will detect all bounties issued by all factions in the system.
  [*]It will grant a license to kill any ship that has a Federal bounty if in a Federal jurisdiction, any ship that has an Empire bounty if in an Imperial Jurisdiction and any ship that has an Alliance bounty if in an Alliance jurisdiction.
• Detecting any bounties with a Kill Warrant scan will prevent you losing reputation with the ship’s faction when you destroy it, unless it belonged to a criminal faction.

Making the Kill Warrant scanner work in this way neatly differentiates its use from Interstellar bounties, whilst retaining a strong case for using one, in terms of credits, reputation and influence gaining.

Wow, these sound like really nice changes, especially bullet #2.

I also like the way interstellars are being handled.

Sweet! Looking forward to it! Now just bump the value of assault bounties up into the 10k-20k Cr range and we'll be cooking with baby fat!

 

[Alec Turner]

Well done CMDRs who pointed out the KWS failings in 3.0 Beta
Well done FD for listening
Lets hope it all works out

I have to say that Sandro had more stamina for this than I did in the end (I'm pretty much KO'd on the ropes over the whole KWS thing) so 1-0 to FD as far as I'm concerned.

Well played sir!

 

[wstephenson]

A bounty hunter that normally plays in solo will "Require" a kws just to legalize their action to attack a wanted ship. It sounds like if we do not do so. We are committing a crime by not using a kws.

No, the local jurisdiction's bounties will still be visible with a basic scan. The KWS will reveal bounties from any other jurisdictions in the system.

Wanted npc's will have less value than wanted commanders.

I don't think FDEV have changed bounty amounts, just how the bounties are allocated between factions and the imminently-retiring 'lightweight interstellar bounties'. So your average pirate Dangerous Anaconda in SC will still be worth ~ 250-400KCr with a KWS, but it will all be in local factions' bounties, not Fed/Imp/Alliance.

I have to say that Sandro had more stamina for this than I did in the end (I'm pretty much KO'd on ropes over the whole KWS thing) so 1-0 to FD as far as I'm concerned.

Agreed, thanks for taking the time to stick around and hash it out through 4 iterations with us, despite any number of other Important and Urgent things.

 

[fsdraconis]

I'd like to make a suggestion for consideration.

Would there be room to make the bounty system work like the new mission system when we turn in bounties? (Three choices would be available. 1 No influence or rep, just lots of credits. 2 less credits, more influence and rep. 3 Materials, less influence and rep and less credits.)

Maybe use a bounty value gradiant to decide what grade material is offered up to grade 5? So if someone wanted more grade 3 materials they would want to go turn in the bounties with in that reward tier value.

 

[Jynessa Loraeyn]

Let me see if I have this right.

A bounty hunter that normally plays in solo will "Require" a kws just to legalize their action to attack a wanted ship. It sounds like if we do not do so. We are committing a crime by not using a kws.

Wanted npc's will have less value than wanted commanders.

As someone who isn't that interested in power play. This sounds like the basic npc bounty hunter will get paid less and be required to use a kws just to legalize bounty hunting.

If we are going to an Interstellar Factor and losing all of the influence. Shouldn't we get a credit bump for that influence? It is clear it should have value. (While the background sim may not actually do it. In a real universe the factors would be taking that data in large volumes to sell probably to the super powers. Giving them a large profit.)

No, you definitely don't have that right.

When you do a basic scan on a ship, it will either be Wanted or Clean. If it's Wanted, it means the authority on the system has placed a bounty on it and you can legally attack it. This is the same in the new system and the old system.

The difference in the new system is that if you do a KWS scan on a target, it ALSO reveals any bounties the OTHER local factions may have placed on the ship. This is going to replace the 'lightweight Interstellar Bounties', i.e. Federation/Empire/Alliance in the current live game.

The 'legalize' part you're mixing up is in the new system, if the authority in the system is, say, a Federal aligned faction and you KWS the ship and it reveals a bounty from ANOTHER local faction that is also Federal aligned, then it will make that ship Wanted where before it was Clean... 'legalizing' the attack on it. You don't have to break any laws... if anything, it's the opposite - if you scan Clean ships they potentially could change to Wanted if you reveal a bounty on them from another faction in the system that is aligned with the same superpower as the authority. The same goes for Empire faction bounties in Empire aligned systems and Alliance faction bounties in Alliance systems.

It remains to be seen how much that'll actually happen - I'm not sure how many people will bother scanning Clean ships on the off chance they'll turn Wanted. Also, the Clean ships I've scanned in the live game with a KWS have never had any hidden bounties so far.

For how it changes for someone who only ever KWS scans Wanted ships - you'll get extra bounties, but they'll be from local factions, instead of those broad-brush Federation/Empire/Alliance ones.

 

[fsdraconis]

Thank you for the clarification Jynessa Loraeyn. The bit with the license was a little confusing in the new system.

 

[Adept]

But the limit of bounty per kill will still be limited to only 2mil, making all of this pointless. Maybe if you spent as much time discussing powerplay as you spend discussing some small utility item, it wouldn't be a dead wastleland riddled with 5C trolls.

PP is hampered by being added in an overly cautious, non-ambitious manner. It's an optional overlay over the pre-existing BGS, where players get to contribute to prominent political figures' super PACs.

It should have been (and should be changed to being) about the superpowers and local factions, but allowing you get involved on a deeper level. It most likely should also only work in Open.

 

[Jynessa Loraeyn]

Thank you for the clarification Jynessa Loraeyn. The bit with the license was a little confusing in the new system.

No problem - you aren't the first who saw the legitimise part and was worried it meant you couldn't legally attack Wanted ships.

I'm actually wrong myself - there's nothing new about the KWS revealing the bounties on other local factions - it does that now in the live game (along with those lightweight interstellar bounty things). I used to think the KWS also revealed bounties from authority factions in OTHER systems, but that's wrong... it turns out it only ever revealed bounties from local factions in the same system. I've been messing around using it in live, and just as Sandro said, the only extra bounties I'm seeing are from other factions in the system.

The point is - if you use the KWS to only scan Wanted targets, you should be fine to attack any them. Wanted = legally attackable. You'll just get the extra bounties like always, there just won't be any of the superpower extra ones. And apparently the code for working out the value of bounties on a ship won't change so in theory the total values should stay the same, so effectively there's no loss of income.

 

[wstephenson]

Powerplay creates such lovely distinct volumes of safety and danger on the galaxy map. I hope that the BGS changes for Anarchies and the new C&P rules motivate (hello, raymondo!) more players to base in Anarchies and they start to spread along lines of sparsely populated systems.

 

[NecasekO]

Hi Sandro,

Regarding this, I'm sure that is what the code says, however, I believe "Factions in the Current System" probably includes ships. What I've seen happen is when in a completely empty system (no factions), you usually get a "lightweight Interstellar bounty", but can also get a bounty for whatever faction the attacking ship happens to belong to. I can't say I've seen it in 2.4, but most certainly have seen this happen in prior versions.

I suspect that this never worked correctly - I definitely had situations when I scanned a ship, after killing it I saw a message like "Received 200k bounty for killing criminal" but there was no bounty or much lower bounty in my transactions panel afterwards. Now it seems that what actually happened was that minor faction bounties for different systems got lost and the only part that worked in uninhabited systems were the interstellar bounties (which are going away).

It does mean that it won't be possible to get any bounties in uninhabited systems in the future, where you could get some (unreliably) in the past.

 

[CMDR_Havok]

Let me see if I have this right.

A bounty hunter that normally plays in solo .....

I Stopped reading right there.....

 

[CMDR_Havok]

Goodbye to increasing your Federation\Empire\Alliance reputation via bounty hunting.

"Thanks".

I'm not really sure why you would expect bounty hunting to affect these things... It's just killing criminals for credits.....

 

[TeamGav]

Your post makes absolutely no mention of how the KWS currently obtains bounties for minor factions in other systems.
This functionality is being completely lost, so it'd be nice to not ignore that in the explanation, given that the KWS will only work at all in populated systems after the update.

That's because it does not happen unless the minor faction has a presence in multiple systems, in which case it's business as usual. We've looked at the code and it only generates (and has only ever generated) bounties for factions in the current system and what we're calling "lightweight Interstellar bounties" which we are retiring.

That you can't follow these individuals into a neighboring system after they were generated and still uncover the bounty though IS a loss in functionality though.

Here's the key info from the other thread that I think belongs in here:

Chasing fugitives across multiple systems and multiple governments is no longer an option for the Kill Warrant scanner. However This is something we will be looking to address in a future update, where we'd like to improve wake scanning and look at other modules, such as tracker limpets (No ETA, no guarantees, obviously).

I guess it was never clear whether bounties represented a kind of privatized commision-based local policing, or if the organizations who issued them were using the laws of their petty little space fifedoms to justify open assasination contracts on their rivals' agents abroad. Now it seems obvious. The pilot who crosses the powerful multi-stellar organization enough to get hundreds of thousands (or even 2 million minus one) credits on her head can sleep with both eyes closed unless she goes right into one of their centres of power. One h-jump and she can escape the law and the bounty. Except for targets wanted only with a faction controlling a secondary station in a system, bounty hunters won't be able to go any further than the local plodders and won't be chasing anybody who wouldn't be chased by the local paddy wagon on patrol anyway.

I can reconcile. After all, no organization is shy about offering good old murders on the bulletin boards anyway! But the part that hurts hurts hurts is this : so long as bounty hunting works this way, the Elite Dangerous universe becomes a place where Han and Greedo in the Cantina can't happen!
Han would probably rack up a small bounty with a local faction in every system and still have to live with his back to the wall, and he'd still have to face off against a formidable nemesis when Boba Fett took out a bulletin board contract with Jabba, but there's no "Price so large every bounty hunter in the universe will be looking for you" that isn't also legitimate criminal manhunt.

Can't we just retain our knowledge of and ability to claim a particular bounty on a particular target until we've lost contact with them for five minutes?

 

[Trekari]

But the limit of bounty per kill will still be limited to only 2mil, making all of this pointless. Maybe if you spent as much time discussing powerplay as you spend discussing some small utility item, it wouldn't be a dead wastleland riddled with 5C trolls.

Having never even seen a bounty worth more than 1.5 million, I think you're complaining about an extremely minor situation.

 

[Daniel Cloudsifter]

I'm not really sure why you would expect bounty hunting to affect these things... It's just killing criminals for credits.....

By that logic, why should doing missions (hauling cargo, passengers, etc.) for super power aligned factions affect your reputation with the superpower? Or selling trade goods to the controlling faction, which is aligned with a super power? Those are the only three ways you can gain super power reputation.

Bounty hunting should grant you the most (other than possibly assassination/wetwork missions with an aligned local faction) reputation, because you're putting yourself on the line and hunting down criminals that they want brought to justice. That makes more sense than getting rep for constantly delivering trade goods to their systems.

 

[sensai25]

Do i need a MBA to play now ?

 

[MadDogMurdock]

Do i need a MBA to play now ?

Only for preventing coffee rings on the table.

 

[znôrt]

Do i need a MBA to play now ?

a crash course in creative flowcharting will do

 

[znôrt]

Only for preventing coffee rings on the table.

why would you prevent a form of artistic expression?