Friendly Crosshairs

[Saronsen]

Why? You guys are ready to sanction friendly fire at the drop of a hat as it is, so why did we add friendly crosshairs to untargeted allies?



Please reconsider.

[Genocide Jill]

Those little crosshairs are attached to literally anything now, you can find one even on the static solars. And it's annoying.

[Lemon]

one guess was that it's a workaround to distance

but it's annoying, happens in missions, fights, everything

[Haste]

It's a workaround to IFF-less ships being incredibly difficult to deal with. Pirate ID ships, Freelancer ID ships, that sort of thing. Shooting a swarm of neutral targets as a capital ship requires constant retargeting and is absolute agony.

It's a double-edged knife, though, correct. The fact that it also marks friendlies and even little cargo containers is unfortunate. We've investigated a few things to see if we could make it more precise (neutral and below, for example, not including friendlies) but that's not how this change works on a technical level. Maybe we can somehow make it not appear on grouped players? We'll see.

We're aware of it but as of right now I think the positives outweigh the negatives, but not by much.

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[Lemon]

As a cap player I will tell you that it was a minor nuisance to have to manually select, in specific PvPs (most people are in fact hostile)

While this is an issue every fight and every mission

[Genocide Jill]

It's a workaround to IFF-less ships being incredibly difficult to deal with. Pirate ID ships, Freelancer ID ships, that sort of thing. Shooting a swarm of neutral targets as a capital ship requires constant retargeting and is absolute agony.

It's a double-edged knife, though, correct. The fact that it also marks friendlies and even little cargo containers is unfortunate. We've investigated a few things to see if we could make it more precise (neutral and below, for example, not including friendlies) but that's not how this change works on a technical level. Maybe we can somehow make it not appear on grouped players? We'll see.

We're aware of it but as of right now I think the positives outweigh the negatives, but not by much.

Retargetring as a capital ship is done either way - from my personal experience, at least, and it's not often in PvP we're facing a whole lot of freelancers of pirates to call this a crippling issue or agony, you know this well enough playing both snubs and capital ships. It was true before the 5.0 dropped and it still is. In fleet fights, faction forces are mostly composed of ships in possession of an IFF, while some snub occassionally making passes before the capital ship is an issue as it often enough sidetracks the crosshair.

The positives, which I personally haven't observed now - and I've been to quite a few fleet fights in the two weeks since the patch - definitely don't outweight the negatives of an annoying little crosshairs sticking out on literally any object in sight.

[Luminium]

I personally don't see an issue with this. Not everyone who shows up green in the rep sheet is an actual friendly.

Some of my ships list half of Sirius as green due to shooting too many NPCs, these crosshairs could come in handy for them.

[Traxit]

saronsen whenever something mildly inconveniences him on discovery gaming community

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The best Video Game OST
Just Got Better

[Erremnart]

I have my experience of being a target of FL-IFFed ships on a number of occasions with my LABC or lawful caps, and not having crosshairs was very frustrating for me for quick re-targeting.

I think that the middle ground would be their removal from grouped ships to prevent accidents.

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Captain Virginia Belle
Task Force Phoenix
Battlecruiser Roanoke
Feedback Thread

[Haste]

I'd imagine that in large fleet settings this change isn't very beneficial. But I can definitely say that for example a gunboat versus two bombers was a matchup where a skilled gunboat could fairly confidently win even against good bomber players, but if those bomber players had no (hostile) IFF it'd be about twice as hard and very likely result in the bombers winning. It's just very clunky to have to constantly swap for small range differences.

Cruisers had similar issues in smaller scale fights. Also, presumably larger caps would have similar issues against groups of gunboats, etc.

Again, I'm not going to pretend this is a perfect change, but it definitely has its pros. It shouldn't be advantageous to fly Aggressors on Pirate IDs or something to avoid having a Xeno IFF (people did exactly this in recent history) and get a very sizeable PvP advantage out of it. It's just dumb.

There are options here. We could force IFFs for every ID in the game including Freelancer/Pirate and allow people to forcibly set Freelancers to red. I'd definitely have them red on all of my larger ships.

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