Player gets in a bus, and damages self into the red. player then proceeds to a monitored sector outside the NFZ, and DELIBERATELY rams into another player, popping him/herself, and lowering the other player's standing substantially.

Exploit?

This was happening today in Geira Rutilus. It was carried out successfully on one player, and attempted on me. This needs to be fixed before it becomes a major problem...

Known.

We just tried to reproduce this, and the faction hit didn't happen. There is already a check in the code to prevent it (if the weapon used to kill the victim is of class ship, skip the faction calc), but I believe it must not be working in some cases, or else there's more to it than we know. Any more info would be greatly appreciated, especially because its a PITA to test.

Does the code differentiate between damage done by a being rammed by a ship, and damage done by being within the splash radius of a ship /exploding?

Yes. Currently, an explosion is treated the same as any other weapon. But in the case of the "victim" being the one to explode, the explosion is not what causes the death, the "killer's" ship is (since they didn't explode).

Heh, yeah, I wasn't thinking straight, I had just woken up. I am smarter than that usually, I promise!

Don't feel dumb. I made the same mistake yesterday:)