Bots hostile to you (orne guardian etc of a given faction) can be in a station sector that you are friendly with and shoot you in the NFZ. Them shooting you doesn't trigger your ability to defend yourself. Instead, you trying to defend yourself triggers an NFZ violation against you.

The bots should have triggered an "you have been fired upon, you can defend yourself without faction reprecussions" and the station guard attacking the bots.

This occured in Bractus C-5
Fri Dec 5 22:10:40 2014

Bots was an Orne Guardian, of Itani faction. Station was ineubis. I was Serco

The Itani CtC type bots in Brac C-5 or any where along their route WILL shoot anyone that is Hate by Itani anywhere they find them. What was shooting you was Itani bots and had nothing to do with the Faction of the sector you were in.

This is NOT a BUG.

Actually it is a bug. The Serco bots in Sedina L-2 that congregate there also have the same problem.. Bots in general just shouldn't be exempt from the NFZ.

Yeah. Re-read the OP, Crusader. He knows exactly what was attacking him. His complaint is not that he was attacked. His complaint is that when the bots attacked him, they did not get hit by a faction penalty and cause the SF to go after them.

This applies to all bots that are mad at you for whatever reason. I mostly encounter it with convoy bots that originated from a faction I'm hostile with and arrived at a faction I am not hostile with.

it's not just that they didn't incur NFZ penalties, it's also that defending yourself against them does incur penalties.

That is most definitely a bug. You can't allow bots to shoot ships in the NFZ and not allow someone to defend themselves against said bots.

My suggestion for the fix is to treat everyone equally (regardless of npc or player) with these nfz rules. The hostile bots should have incurred nfz penalties and I should have been free to defend myself after being shot.

The proposed solution of the OP isn't the best way to handle this problem. Giving NPCs temp-KoS for NFZ violations would provide an easy exploit for players to allow themselves to be hit in the NFZ and let the strike forces destroy the NPC (i.e. NPCs are stupid).

A better solution is to program NPCs to obey the NFZ. An Itani cargo transport has no business initiating combat against a Serco pilot in an Ineubis NFZ. The NPCs should respect the laws of the local faction and only return fire when attacked first.

Even that is a tricky implementation because of the case where the player initiates combat outside of the NFZ, then the player moves into the NFZ. The NPC would have to calculate whether the impact point of its shots would occur in the NFZ.

It might make sense to have certain combat-oriented NPCs intentionally violate the NFZ, but for that situation, the NPC should be programmed to either evade or counter-attack the strike forces and not simply be cannon fodder.

The CtC transports will never attack you. The escort only attacks you if you've shot the transports or if the transport has left/died and they're just patrolling the sector.

I agree with meridian, NPCs other than Station Guards and Strike Force should obey the NFZ and not open fire unless shot.

"The CtC transports will never attack you."

True, but any similarly "peaceful" craft that has turrets will use those to attack you (mainly thinking of convoys here).

The other possible solution is to not enact faction penalties for the random bot (and to a lesser extent, normal npcs) that shoot players in the NFZ but to also recognise defending yourself as not violating the NFZ rules either.

So, ok, i'm being shot at after undocking by an orne guardian of some hated faction in a system that is in high standing. He hits me, because he's a bot, nothing is done about it. But the game knows i was hit by this bot so me returning fire on him is not treated as violating the nfz. No faction reprecussions.

This is at least a compromise between any issues arrising from temp KOS and strike force being used to abuse NPC's etc.

I dont see how someone could game allowing proper defense in this case. The npc/bot would have to open fire on you and hit you before you could protect yourself and no temp kos / strike force is in play.

Yeah convoy moths will fire their turrets.

Wouldn't the easiest way to fix this just be to make the NPCs not fire when they're in the NFZ? That way there would never be huge NPC vs strike force battles clogging up sectors, and they won't seem to play by a different set of rules when facing players.

They have to not shoot anything regardless of position while in the NFZ and not shoot at things that are in the NFZ in the case where they themselves are not within the NFZ. If you wanted to avoid strike force issues, which is a decent way to address that aspect of the problem.

I still think part of the problem is punishing the victim defending themselves if they are attacked and still in the nfz. You are given a message about it being ok to defend yourself but not told that the NFZ rules are still very much in effect.

Alternative: the station disables the weapon systems of ships who violate the NFZ. The effect would only occur while in the sector the violation occurred while temp kos is active. This would negate the need to defend yourself and solve the issue of the rare occurrence of NPC's violating the NFZ. No battle would occur, the station guard would kill them or the turrets would unless they left the system.

-1 to magic disabling of weapons.

we magically disable weapon damage if you're the same faction in capital systems which makes magnitudes less sense and requires way more magic than some technology that can be shoehorned in to explain weapon systems being disabled within a sector.

That retarded workaround does not in any way justify further retardation.

It's what the devs have decided to implement and are apparently ok with existing. Going by that, the suggestion that a station that controls their sector may have the ability to override a ship's systems if deemed to have violated local law is pretty much the least magical thing in the game. We have that shit today, it's called Onstar. A similar tech hundreds to thousands of years in the future could easily have something similar.

On the list of magical things that exist in the game, this suggestion doesn't even come close.

It's still retarded, and I don't like magic locking of ANYTHING, including weapons in a NFZ.

in what way is it magic? You break the law, the station is aware that you broke the law, that's why the strike force is sent. This technology to remote deactivate electronics exists _today_, not only that but is used by law enforcement. No magic is required.

Not sure how you can manage to play the game and not think nearly everything is retarded if you're so against magic anyway. The asteroids provide infinite material, magically. The weapons dont do damage in cap sectors to same factions, magically. Space acts like it has friction but its only affect is on thruster acceleration, magically. The trident takes a vast amount of resources to build but the insurance company can whip one up for half a mil nearly instantly, magically. A ship can be billowing fire and degassing out but all systems are otherwise at 100% functionality, magically. Turrets can fire an infinite supply of consumable ammunition, magically. I can re-arm my ship anywhere i dock with whatever weapons I have regardless of their availability in the station, magically. Ships are apparently piloted by people (as noted in deneb war missions about the loss of lives etc) but there is no explanation of how we survive our ship's destruction, magically. The game is full of magic explanations (or simply no attempt to explain) for all kinds of stuff. Stuff that you wouldn't even be able to sci-fi explain, hence magic.

What makes you think I didn't just disconnect that shit? This is the wild west of outer space. Why would I let some random schmuck who operates a station turn off my weapons systems at will?

In that case cellulosemode, why can people who are KOS for any reason shoot people in station space they are KOS with? There are reasons this game is designed to permit and punish rule violation rather than to make it fundamentally impossible. In-game rules literally exist to be broken.

Also, everything ARF just said, but with more "Corvus-Tech is Freedom, bitch!" and "Stay in nation space if you like having Big Brother ram his remote control up your backdoor!" sprinkled throughout.

we were discussing an issue involving just NFZ violations. The fact that you become temp KOS after had nothing to do with the topic. We could start another thread to apply the same logic to other violations, but the disabling of weapons was in response to the NFZ violation.

I'm not sure what's more funny. The fact that you are arguing that rules were made to be broken and not realizing that what is being discussed is a response to _breaking_ a rule, not removing the ability to break the rule or the fact that you think i'm mainly referring to players shooting other players and that somehow the bug only exists in grey space.

Nobody is saying a device couldn't exist that you could equip to jam the signal and not be affected. But it could be easy to imagine such onstar-like-tech would be built into the fundemental systems of the ship and not be disconnectable. The same way they are building black boxes and other devices to be non-disableable in cars. Only space ships would be infinitely more complex and last time i checked there weren't hot rod shops in VO to rebuild your factory spec ship. Corvus maybe.

This suggestion to fixing this bug wasn't meant to end the ability to shoot people in the nfz, it was just the most up front and least special case way to deal with NPC's shooting you and not being treated like a player and as a bonus, it is completely grounded in common sense tech and not arbitrary magic.

I'm all for treating npc's exactly the same as players. But if that's too complicated or causes more issues than it fixes, then the other suggestion is just as effective, and if you want to give corvus the added bonus of being able to circumvent it, then that's fine too. Adds uniqueness.