Mark Abent · Lead Gameplay Engineer

Why not? The way that the data, we call it encoding, once the data is encoded, we don't have any information of what that target is anymore, because you're supposed to be able to have this information offline. So if you have a way of disrupting the data or falsifying the data, there's no way that other player would know. So it opens up that interesting gameplay if we could unlock that somehow.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Unless they somehow had a better scanner suite than your decoy. It's always a game of cat and mouse gamesmanship. I get a grade C asteroid decoy thing that I put out there and it transmits like it's an asteroid. And it'll fool all sensors grade C or below. But if I've upped my power plant so I can afford a sensor grade B, I'm going to see that asteroid, but it's going to be a little fuzzy. And if I have an A, it just tells me that's a decoy, you dumbass. Again, I'm theorycrafting here, but that's the kind of gamesmanship that we've been talking about.

Kirk Tome · Lead Systems Designer

Yeah, that seems super mean, but it's just data. So there's no reason why we can't give you the ability to manipulate that. So we could do things with hacking. You can spoof that data by hacking it, or you can maybe even hack the actual data you get back from your own scan, and so you're spoofing it on an item level.

Mark Abent · Lead Gameplay Engineer

Even more theorycraft, what happens if you scan something you're not supposed to? You have the information, and then someone comes onto your ship, corrupts all the data because you shouldn't have that information, and then leaves off into the night. It opens up some fun possibilities.

Kirk Tome · Lead Systems Designer

Actually, you know what, you brought up a point too. So one aspect of scanning that we have scheduled in the future is, I don't oftentimes want to be scanned, and so we need to inform anybody that's in a ship that's being scanned, hey, someone's scanning you. Right now, the ability to scan is automatic. Alarm bells should go ringing as soon as you're being scanned, because it's usually kind of a threatening gesture. So if you have a huge pirate ship that's scanning the contents of your cargo bay, I kind of want to know that information.