Maybe I'm just too much of a goody two-shoes, and I have been away from the game for a year or two, but today is the first time I've encountered notoriety close-up.
I was given an assassination mission by an NPC to kill an NPC. So I went out there, found he'd moved, went to where we apparently immediately knew he was, landed beside his ship, stepped out onto the planet surface, shot him down, got back in my ship, and flew away.
Part of me feels a bit sorry that we can't have a little more in the missions than that. Say, to go to where he was last seen and ask around NPCs or something, check terminal records, do a little hacking or sneaking around to find information, which eventually leads us to a signature we can use shipboard equipment to pin down and locate the target. You know: investigate. Hunt.
(In the old Frontier games I used to like the bit where you could use a hyperspace cloud analyser - the old version of a wake scanner - to figure out where your target had jumped to, then use your longer-range witch-drive to arrive there before them and be lying in wait when they jump in. It was still simple, but it was pretty fun.)
Still, that's a different whinge. This whinge is about the notoriety point I got applied to me when I killed him (again, despite being alone on a desolate, uninhabited world, the galaxy's law enforcement system still knew immediately I pulled the trigger that he'd been murdered and that I was the one that did it. Anybody see that film Anon, with Clive Owen, where he was a homicide detective in a world where social media was so embedded in society, and even in people, that you couldn't do murder any more because it would all be recorded and uploaded immediately to the network? This is like that.)
So I get my notoriety and my fine/bounty/whatever and I go back to the base where I was given the mission, and I'm locked out of the stuff because of the bounty - but I can't pay off the bounty because of the notoriety. And the only way to get rid of the notoriety is to wait. Wait real time in the real world - but logged into the game, of course, because of course - until it goes away.
This makes no sense to me. I can see a use for notoriety as a means of hindering a griefing campaign or whatever: apply it to someone who attacks player ships, and it limits the amount of that that they can do, or at least inconveniences them more the more they do it.
But to apply it for missions targeting NPCs? Since it's a gameplay-hindering mechanic it seems odd to make it an intrinsic part of the PVE game over and above fines and bounties and reputation hits. Play the game and the game punishes you by making playing the game more difficult?
I'm sure this has all been debated to death already - I gather notoriety has been in a while and, as I say, I've always just been too law-abiding to notice it. Now I've noticed it, and it's frankly a bit odd.
I was given an assassination mission by an NPC to kill an NPC. So I went out there, found he'd moved, went to where we apparently immediately knew he was, landed beside his ship, stepped out onto the planet surface, shot him down, got back in my ship, and flew away.
Part of me feels a bit sorry that we can't have a little more in the missions than that. Say, to go to where he was last seen and ask around NPCs or something, check terminal records, do a little hacking or sneaking around to find information, which eventually leads us to a signature we can use shipboard equipment to pin down and locate the target. You know: investigate. Hunt.
(In the old Frontier games I used to like the bit where you could use a hyperspace cloud analyser - the old version of a wake scanner - to figure out where your target had jumped to, then use your longer-range witch-drive to arrive there before them and be lying in wait when they jump in. It was still simple, but it was pretty fun.)
Still, that's a different whinge. This whinge is about the notoriety point I got applied to me when I killed him (again, despite being alone on a desolate, uninhabited world, the galaxy's law enforcement system still knew immediately I pulled the trigger that he'd been murdered and that I was the one that did it. Anybody see that film Anon, with Clive Owen, where he was a homicide detective in a world where social media was so embedded in society, and even in people, that you couldn't do murder any more because it would all be recorded and uploaded immediately to the network? This is like that.)
So I get my notoriety and my fine/bounty/whatever and I go back to the base where I was given the mission, and I'm locked out of the stuff because of the bounty - but I can't pay off the bounty because of the notoriety. And the only way to get rid of the notoriety is to wait. Wait real time in the real world - but logged into the game, of course, because of course - until it goes away.
This makes no sense to me. I can see a use for notoriety as a means of hindering a griefing campaign or whatever: apply it to someone who attacks player ships, and it limits the amount of that that they can do, or at least inconveniences them more the more they do it.
But to apply it for missions targeting NPCs? Since it's a gameplay-hindering mechanic it seems odd to make it an intrinsic part of the PVE game over and above fines and bounties and reputation hits. Play the game and the game punishes you by making playing the game more difficult?
I'm sure this has all been debated to death already - I gather notoriety has been in a while and, as I say, I've always just been too law-abiding to notice it. Now I've noticed it, and it's frankly a bit odd.