Your radar shows ships in your radar range. These ships are colored red or green. I would like to explain how the current system decides what color to use, but I'm not sure I know exactly how it decides. Perhaps someone better informed than I can post the details on the current system.

I know how I would like it to work.

Green: You can not damage or be damaged by that ship.

Yellow: You can damage and be damaged by that ship, but there is a faction standing consideration involved. It is your job to know which faction is concerned with your current location. Unless you are a practiced pirate, I wouldn't suggest you do anything rash.

Red: You can damage and be damaged by this ship. There are no faction standing concerns on your part, and any faction standing concerns on his part are his problem.

This would have differing effects, depending on location.
This would solve many of the current targeting problems in border patrol and border skirmish: If it's green, don't waste your time. If it is red, it might still be an ally, but even if it is an ally, you still need to watch out for their line of fire.
If your in a faction's protected space, and you see a red, you should pay attention, you might be yellow to him, but he is already hated by the local faction, and will have no qualms about killing yellows.
In non station grey space, there is no such thing as yellow, there is only green and red. You don't have to kill everything that is red, but you should understand that they can cause you damage, intentionally and/or incidentally.

VO currently calculates IFF status as shown below:

Assume two players: A, and his target B.

If one or more of the following is true, B will appear red on A's radar:
- A's standing with B's faction is less than -600
- B's standing with A's faction is less than -600
- A or B's standing with the local faction is less than -600

MSKanaka, that does not explain why all my Serco buddies are always red when I enter the BP missions in Deneb C-10.

Everyone, except one player strangely enough, is always red. There must be mission specific, or location specific rules in place that do this.

There are. Duels turn your targets red as well, if they have been green before.

I guess sercos appear red to other sercos in Deneb C-10, because they are hated by the local faction (Itani). Any chance that the one serco you see that is not red, is liked by the Itani?

This is exactly why I am proposing a change. If two players can not damage each other, they should always be green to each other. The fact that a given faction may hate one or both of them, does not change the fact that they still can not damage each other.

Serco, pl. Serco. capitalized and no plural -s.

And I think that the colour change on radar and the target display is a bug that has become a feature. That said, it would make sense to have Serco teammates still show as green, because otherwise the radar tends to get all-too red (what am I saying, I'm a Serco, I love red...).

"Green: You can not damage or be damaged by that ship."

I thought friendly fire was being removed soon(tm)?

If/when friendly fire is removed, then one color would become obsolete. But I would still want it the otherwise work the way I have described here.

An automated system should only represent relevant facts. In this case, ability to do damage, and standing considerations. Any other relationship is too complex for an automated system to evaluate. Give the player the immediate facts, to give them a head start on evaluating the immediate risks.

What do you think about friendly fire restrictions (for energy weapons only) becoming automatic for those grouped together?

I think that friendly fire makes grouping too easy. If you can't deal with coordinating your attacks with your wingmates, then you shouldn't be flying together anyways.

I think friendly fire restriction issues and ideas belong in another thread. This thread is about how to display targets in your radar, and friendly fire is only relevant to this thread in how it could/should affect that display. Namely, that any one you can not damage or be damaged by, should always be displayed as a single color (green), and that should be the only thing that color should represent.

That would be nice. If you want faction information, you can check their stats. If you want combat information, you probably need it at the glance of a radar.

SuperMegaMynt: In my original suggestion, yellow would represent high local faction standing. But if you can not damage or be damaged by some one, local faction standing is irrelevant. In fact, the whole point of my suggested system is that players you can not damage or be damaged by, be sorted out first and foremost, by a separate color. It is only players you can damage or be damaged by, that would be displayed as yellow or red, depending on their standing with the local faction. When you think about it, any considerations more sophisticated than these basic facts, should be evaluated by the player.

This is a system that is intuitive for new players (green=safe, yellow=caution, red=danger), and flexible enough to account for the advanced player.

This is going to be redone in-line with all the other faction/FF crap we're wading through (did I mention this would end up impacting a lot of stuff? heh). The concept I have been shooting for (and wanted for a long time) is the concept of "friend", "foe" and "uncertain". Basically Green / Gray / Red. What we will likely do is make people who are friends with your home nation (ie, higher than neutral) green. People who are less will be gray, down to Hate where they become red.

In addition, when you select a ship, the potential faction losses you would take by destroying said person would be displayed in the upper right-hand corner of the HUD (the selected target region), as well as in a less compressed form in the "k" character display.

The hope being, that with all the other factional changes (and removal of FF).. people who are your friend, will actually be your friend. If they get flagged for attacking/killing members of the same nation, they'll get stuck with a gray icon regardless of their standing. Anyway, getting any more deeply into that will require me to paste the entire new.. thing, which isn't done yet (still working on it, just added newbie stuff a few minutes ago) and is probably 10 pages long. So I'll go ahead and wait until that's ready, and then paste it into a separate thread.

So, anyway, I welcome feedback on this specific topic, although there's a bunch of other stuff that's intended to tie into the potential design I just described.

What I'd *really* like is the ability to set the actual colour of the dots. Like about 10% of men, I'm colour-blind and yellow and green look much the same to me. If I could select the colours off a pallette like when buying a ship it would make life so much better.

This thread is not really about what color is what. If incarnate wants to use green, gray, and red, that is fine by me. Nothing wrong with having those colors be user selectable, but that isn't my point. I am glad that the devs are making improvements to factions.

I do happen to disagree with incarnate over what facts are the most relevant in a radar display. What any given targets standing is with my home nation may not be the most relevant concern to either party involved. Many player will shoot at what ever they can get away with shooting at. A player's standing with my nation is not a good predictor of how a given player will behave. If we are away from my nation they are just about as likely to shoot me as anyone else.

I would much rather have the radar display targets according to the immediate consequences that they or I will face for engaging in battle. If I will take a standing penalty for killing someone, I want to see that. If they will take a standing penalty for killing me, but have an obvious history of ignoring that penalty, I want to see that.

I don't really care what a player's standing with my home faction is, if he is intent on killing me regardless. Weather you remove friendly fire (and I am all for removing friendly fire) or not, we still need to have the relevant facts available at a glance, of who is most likely to start shooting.