In the PU, especially relating to PvP encounters, how will we know if an enemy player ship has hostile intent before getting fired upon? For example, if pirates are laying in wait within civilian traffic, setting up an ambush, and I'm escorting a convoy they want to raid, will it be possible to ID the pirates as hostile before or even after they open fire on my charge? Will there be an in-game process for this, or will the initiative advantage always lie in favor of the attacker? Further, in the example given above, would the presence of "AWACS" type ship like the Hornet Tracker help balance things in favor of the defender?asked by Zilch

It's a matter of scanning. At the heart of the question is that how much you can identify the ships around you. The Hornet Tracker definitely does have the advantage in resolution of scanning. But overall you'll be able to tell, if you're in a civilian area, you'll probably be within proximity to tell whether or not a given ship has their weapons powered. They're still fleshing out all those systems but there's also the element of... Keeping track of that is going to be hard. That's why you want somebody dedicated to it. That's part of the purpose of multi-crew is to be able to say, "Here is a minefield of potential attackers, go through them and flag for yourself what you believe to be a threat." If you have determined that this guy is on his way and not really a threat right now, you can mark him as such. And it's about... We want to allow a clever pirate to do this situation but we also are very focused on giving the defender the tools with which they need to defend themselves.

YeahCR: Not everything is about simply bringing a big enough convoy that nobody wants to attack you. You still need to be able to proactively work in your defense. The sensation that you're at the disadvantage, probably not going to go away. That's just how it feels to walk into an ambush. But you will be able to look out into the crowd and try to have the information to determine for yourself if someone is dangerous. One thing I forgot to mention is that we're also revisiting how we're interacting with the HUD, trying to make it a little more intuitive to move through the actions, and arrive at the thing that you intended to do. So whereas right now it's a little bit cumbersome to track multiple targets or switch between them and get more detail about those ships; we're hoping that as we drill down into each of these actions for the purpose of multi-crew we'll be able to also start looking at making that interaction a little bit more intuitive and natural for use. Because you want somebody in multi-crew to empower this gameplay. But you also don't want to be locked out of it if you're on your own. So you'll never be as good but we can make it better.

Yeah. And one other thing also, getting that tagged information on people is the ability to also share that information. So if you have a group of four or five ships, it's not going to be just on one guy or one ship to do all that scanning. Everyone can be scanning small packets of the traffic around and then sharing that data among their group. I mean that's one of the things for like a Herald, where you have Hornet Tracker and the Herald, that tracker's going to start spotting people, tagging them, passing that info into a Herald. That Herald can relay it to its other friendlies nearby. And so you can web out that information a lot nicer than just, everyone has to do it themselves. It won't be that tedious.