Why do bounty hunters still have the god marker on player targets?asked by Hodo

Well, years ago now, we tried having it turn off when they left monitored zones, but everyone thought it was a bug, quite rightly, I guess. Especially at that point, missions were quite buggy, and some of them still are, but if they accepted the mission and then didn't immediately get a marker, they assumed it was broken. And there wasn't the backup feedback there to say, no, actually, you do have to hunt as a bounty hunter. But there wasn't enough feedback for them to even hunt. They just had to hope that they were going to come into a monitored zone, which eventually most players do, but an AI wouldn't. If an AI was spawned somewhere where, say, the comm array was turned off, then you just would never know about it. So that's why right now the god marker is on all the time. Now, next year at some point, we'll be looking at Bounty Hunter V2 as a proper career. But between then and now, I've already got some things underway to hopefully allow us to not only just have that marker on when things are in a monitored zone, but to give you the last known position of it when it went out of the monitored zone. So you can read into that things like, if you were there when he jumped away, you'll get a really good idea of where he went. And I've just talked to my coder about this. It seems all possible that we can even add on there the time, how long it's been since he was at that marker. Now, again, that's going to make bounty hunting maybe impossible if these guys stay at Grim HEX all the time, or stuff like Levski. So it's something we're going to test internally and see if it actually adds anything to it. But the direction we're going in for bounty hunting as a career, there'll be all these things that the bounty does that give his position away. And it will really mean you feel like you're on the run, just like in real life.

You feel like you're on the hunt.

Oh, I'm talking about, say, the bounty feels like he's on the run as well, because he can give himself away if he does the wrong things. Kind of the TV shows version of it, where they triangulate your position if you're on the phone for too long. You can imagine how we could do that with a mobiGlas, or certain things like when you buy something in a shop, or if you decide to park your ship properly, that might give you away. So you have to start living life like, okay, I have to just get out of my ship without parking it properly, float over, I have to buy something and then run away quickly, get to my ship and leave, because I've just put a marker down on that position that my bounty hunters will be heading towards. But at the same time, give the bounty hunters enough information so that they can maybe see a pattern, like, this player always tends to head back here after going to Yela. What are they doing there? Are they selling the stuff they steal in the asteroid belt? That kind of thing. So I think that answers the god marker thing. It's because we don't have all these other things. If I just turn off that marker, you'll be lost. You'll assume it's a bug. There's a lot more that's got to back that up to allow you to hunt.