Accidental Hostile action (gates and ?escape pods?)

**dctrjons** · 09-01-2011, 11:32 PM

Again my MD use getting me in trouble.

Hitting a gate with one shot of them puts me hostile with the local Trade Station and customs folk. Is the faction hit necessary on the gates? If it is needed for some reason for the way you guys 'build' the universe then so be it. It seems MDs are the only way other than spending 30 min shooting at the shields intentionally for this to happen. So I would dub it a small issue.

However, not sure if in some way related or even if what I think is happening is happening. Very hard for me to reproduce without dying alot (poor alot

).

WARNING long, stop me if you've heard this one.
Giving too much detail since I'm not entirely sure what I can do to reproduce the scenario. Don't feel like reading skip to last line.

BUT, in a recent furball with a mixed bag of pirates m5-m6 (might have been an m7 in there...it was a mess). Also included where the local authorities and they were packing heat. This was a "very hard" patrol mission so I was not about to let a fleet lead by an M2 steal my thunder. Was flying a MD loaded Split M4 and was appreciating the fact that the patrols were there to be a distraction at least.

Well I had to reload the game 8x because for the first 7 times I became more and more careful on how I killed the pirates. I had to start the battle over each time since there was no way I was going to save during the mess. But every time on the death last 1 or 2 ships I would become hostile to the police. At first I didn't get it since they were sending m5's after me and I would pop them one after another then I noticed that they were the locals, not a new batch of pirates.

So what I noticed is that the last few ships I would go after were the big ones. And it was often a race of my MD's taking the hull down while the locals were taking the shields down. So I thought I must be going at it too hard and hitting friendlies, but I know I'm very precise with my MD and have never had this problem.

And the only thing I could think of is I started to notice that M5 icons seemed to appear from the fireball. They were way to fast for me to ID and I assumed they were crazy cops that flew threw the wreckage and I was tagging them. Then I noticed they were escape pods.

So I'm not sure but I think my last volley of MD is killing the escape pods of the dead ship and for some reason these are tagged as friendly.

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**Heteran Leticron** · 10-01-2011, 03:38 AM

yes, destroying m6 and above now spawns escape pods, and they are spawned as friendly race. one could say, its unmoral to kill someone who cant defend himself. so basically its like shooting sailors in the water after their ship was sunk.
so im totaly on the side of the police that trys to punish you for your babaric actions

edit: oh and yes, jump gates are very old, fragile and komplex mashines, damaging them can cause them to malefunction. which can cause all sorts of terrible things. they are incredible valueable so if some cowboy cant aim properly with his MD and blows little wholes into it, he deserves some punishment!

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**dctrjons** · 10-01-2011, 01:46 PM

Originally Posted by Heteran Leticron

yes, destroying m6 and above now spawns escape pods, and they are spawned as friendly race. one could say, its unmoral to kill someone who cant defend himself. so basically its like shooting sailors in the water after their ship was sunk.
so im totaly on the side of the police that trys to punish you for your babaric actions

edit: oh and yes, jump gates are very old, fragile and komplex mashines, damaging them can cause them to malefunction. which can cause all sorts of terrible things. they are incredible valueable so if some cowboy cant aim properly with his MD and blows little wholes into it, he deserves some punishment!

I understand you are role-playing this, but I'm trying to provide some feedback on possible game mechanic problems.

A) There was no sailor in the water shooting, these pods spawned in the stream of fire that was already inbound to the pirate vessel. These sailors jumped into the gunfire. I understand the logic of not shooting them, however I think their mechanics are dangerous. When ship explosions are fixed, won't these guys be toast?
A couple ideas for mechanics changes
-Give them a second(ish) of time of invulnerability to get away from AOE missiles that may have just hit the hull, or incoming fire, or the fireball of the ship itself.
-Have them leave sooner and have it be the entire crew that leaves (abandoned ship) or all but the captain (still fighting)
-IF pods leave early (at 0.5% or so) then abandoned or not there might be a distinct possibility they set the ship to auto-destruct.
---Of course some of this might already happen when Caps fail their bail check, haven't tested it.

B) I'm not familiar with X-lore but it sure seems to me they are designed to be anything but fragile (in fact in-game I believe have infinite health), and as far as I know are not capable of communicating an attack on themselves at least not in any form that the races yet understand. But I only brought it up as a question of design intent, just in case it may cause future problems. If it is needed then there is no problem. Fighting around a gate is dangerous, getting though its shields requires a great deal of firepower, and avoid hitting it with MD (HMD) is not hard to do.

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