Unauthorised Kill, where? Help us help you!

[Scoob]

Hey all,

As my empire grows once again after a fresh start, this becomes an issue once more.

I just lost rep TWICE in a row with a close ally due to an "Unauthorised Kill". Why did this happen? Why did an ally attack one of my assets forcing it to retaliate? Why was an ally already hostile, causing one of my patrols to engage? Why?

The message in the log is useless. I need to know WHERE it happened, let it take me to the thing my assets supposedly killed at least. That doesn't explain WHY it was hostile to start with, how about some reasoning for that too. The game knows a ship was killed, and it knows all parties that were involved and it should also know what caused hostilities in the first place. It's all there, in the game somewhere.

When these events occur, I scan my assets to see if I can find where. Sometimes I can figure it out, one of my ships was asked to stop for a scan just as it transitioned a gate, causing Police to falsely go hostile. Later, another ship of mine innocently wandered by and was attacked. I've SEEN these events play out. It's a BUG and it's been reported, not sure if it's still present as of v7.1 HF3, but it was a known cause of these events. However, out side of rare situations like this where I happened to be watching at the time, how can we demonstrate potential bugs like this?

My ships don't haul illegal cargo, so there's never a legit reason for a scan to fail. Even if a ship of mine was carrying illegal cargo - say it "collected" it by flying through it while I was near by - well, they'll just eject it, no harm done, the moment they're scanned. My ships also won't attack anything that doesn't first initiate hostilities. A ship HAS to be the aggressor for my ships to respond.

It's frustrating to have an unknowable event - given the lack of information - set back hours spent gaining good relations with a faction. I know myself, and others, have posted about this before, but it's important! An entire play through can COLLAPSE or turn into the reload game when things kick off. There might be a genuine cause, more information in the notification would allow us to respond and take action, or at least know what's to blame for the bug report.

The point of this post is to once again highlight the issue, and ask adding additional information to the log entry be considered. Finding WHERE it happened is the first step, that alone might help us determine the why. However, more information like "FRF Fighter Squadron Dragon" ATTACKED [player ship] due to [reason] and was destroyed". Or "Player Station X opened fire on HOSTILE ZYA Asp" but why was the Asp hostile??

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

I was sitting in a Nemesis, right next to a ZYA ship unloading at my build storage.

The ship turned red and was instantly a target for turrets on my station.
It had not been fired upon and I could not see any reason why it should have turned red.
The inevitable rep loss occurred.

Left me wondering why it had become an enemy in the first place... I reloaded and the ship happily finished trading and off it went.

[Edit]
Its really annoying that you can't talk to the pilot and apologise.

[vvvvvvvv]

Here's me requesting an improvement for this:

viewtopic.php?t=466182

[Joe McCracken]

Oh man... I am with you Scoob... it would be wonderful to know WHERE it happened...

[Scoob]

I ended up installing the "Apologise for attack" mod, which really helps in the event of genuine accidental friendly fire. However, for those "What? Where? How?" moments, we NEED more information.

My most classic example of "that didn't happen" was less than five minutes into a fresh start. I did the "Young Gun" start. I used my meagre starting credits to hire a Pilot for the Elite Vanguard we start with. I then jumped into the Pilots seat myself, and exited the dock. I then get an "Attack against this Station" message, followed by a "Confirmed" message and a reputation drop. Local Security forces then went hostile. I'd not fired a single shot. I don't know what the game thought happened, but it was wrong! There were some Pirates (FAF I think) attacking the station / nearby ships, but I wasn't involved.

I think that now, years after launch, Egosoft are well aware of this request for more clarity. It might not fix whatever is causing these issues when the game gets it wrong, but it will help us understand what the game thinks is happening. It'll of course also be really useful in genuine situations. I mean, I started getting a load of Temp rep losses vs. YAK ships the other day, but I had no clue where. They kept coming in, every few seconds. I check EVERY SINGLE location where I have assets and eventually found some YAK ships had attacked one of my Defence Platforms guarding a gate to XEN space. Just wrecks were left as the event had actually happened some time back, due to message delay. I'd looked at that location and see no combat, so move on and more rep loss notification came in. Of course, it was all delayed messages and I was looking for an ongoing battle.

Edit: I just want to add how game-breakingly frustrating this issue can be, especially now we have the message delay issue on top of it. We can now get notified of "events" - either genuine or totally spurious - that occurred ages ago and have long since escalated into "Reload is the only option" territory. When you get really into what you're doing, you might not have saved for the past hour or so. Sure, we have autosave which can be set to given intervals, but it's so VERY intrusive. It's a shame the game cannot "snapshot" the game state and save it in the background, seamless to the player. This is the only way an auto-save would be viable to leave enabled for me.