Rage-quit level issues

[ahostofissues]

I almost just rage-quit (uninstalled) X4 due to an unfortunate cascade of problems with the game's interface. Not bugs per se, just "this is really f'd up" implementation decisions. Most, likely, the way they are due to there being limited time in the day for developers to implement things so they do the best the can and move on. No one issue that devastating, but combined they are really making me think to myself far too often "this is just not fun." It's a game. These are, for me, fun (and therefore game) destroying issues.

[Edit: for context: this is coming from a person with 480 hours in the game, who has made an effort to really figure out how to use the UI effectively. After that effort, these are the items I've identified as being the biggest UI problems for me that need to be addressed for the sake of playability of the game.]

I just hit an hour or so of dealing with one after another after another in a big string that nearly made me say "screw this *#$^, this game is supposed to be fun and is just not." Recognizing it as an episode of massive temporary frustration, I stepped back and decided to write this Love Letter to the developers instead...

1. Getting "stuck" inside the clip area of a station module in my ship. WTF. Can't get out, get bounced around, sometimes actually have to revert to an earlier save when I can't escape.

2. "I was told to drop my cargo!" I don't even know where to begin with this. Horrid system. The "limited time to respond" aspect is the core of this horrid bit of functionality. You have to interrupt whatever you're doing, ask to issue orders to the ship, then pick a choice (comply, flee, etc). You get ZERO context for this decision, and again you have only 8-10 seconds to make it. Who is making the threat?? (destroyer, fighter, etc). What cargo are you carrying? How close are you to a gate, or a station? Do you have any hope of escape? Who the f'k knows. You get ZERO information, but have to make an instant decision. Decide wrong... You maybe lose a 5 million credit ship when had you known the situation you would have just dropped the cargo. But do "always drop" as a global setting, or a standard decision, maybe you're throwing away 300k of cargo to some punk in a fighter.

[Edit: and note that the "limited time" applies EVEN IF YOU PAUSE THE GAME. You really get no chance, at all, to get any info before a forced decision gets made for you. Just remove the "time ticking down" while game is paused would solve this. Really pause when game is paused. Let me pause and go look, then unpause and apply my decision.]

3. Follow on #2: if you pick "escape" (either by manual choice or global default) there is, as far as I can tell, no way to reverse and "drop cargo" instead after looking at the situation and seeing escape will certainly fail. You drop the cargo, the attacker doesn't care; just keeps pursuing and killing your cargo ship anyway. So (a) time-limited forced decision, (b) with no context or information, and (c) no way to revise/change the decision once made. Speaking as a software developer, I have no clue how this feature got approved for release as-is.

4. "We found something out here" -- Clone of "I was told to drop my cargo" but at least with less severe consequences. Again, (a) limited time decision, (b) zero info (what kind of ship? are there any enemies nearby? what current orders would I be interrupting if I told you to guard/claim it?). At least "(c) no way to revise/change" aspect doesn't apply, as you at least can go back and revisit the orders for the reporting ship after you go look and get more info.

5. Select current ship to give orders to it. Unless I'm missing something, there's no way to do this without either going to map and manually finding + clicking on ship to select it, or going to owned-property list and manually scanning to wall of text to find the ship you're in. My kingdom and my entire bank account if you would just give me a key or on-screen button I can press to "select my current ship" so I can right-click on the part of the map I'm looking at to give it orders. This may seem small, but it comes up ALL THE TIME. In "importance = frequency * severity" equation, this may have low severity (you can select the current ship, with a few extra clicks and map movement), but is has MASSIVE frequency. All. The. Time. The whole damn game.

6. Scanning for data leaks... the "signal" indicator bars ARE PART OF THE SHIP HULL, not the HUD! Seriously? W.T.F. Again. When you're hunting around for a visual indicator of things in a false-color extreme close-up view of the station in front of you, definitely what you want is to have 1/3 of your field of view covered by the ship hull graphic. Awesome. Hide the hull so you can actually see the stuff in front of you while signal hunting, and the signal indicator goes away. Again, how did this make it into release??

7. Using trade overlay to give buy/sell orders a selected ship: often, the "selected" ship ends up de-selected in the course of examining possibilities (right-click on trade overlay trade item to enter speculative buy/sell parameters, change mind and cancel out, ship ends up de-selected). Which means when I right click on next possible trade item I'm no longer working with the ship I think I am. The ship I had selected got de-selected and now the "enter trade parameters" popup overlay is working with whatever ship happens to be at the top of the ship-list. The number of times I've had to go through and figure out "wait, what ship did I just give orders to?" is high and massively frustrating.

There are many, many other frustrations, but none that rise to the level of "this is really derailing my enjoyment of this game" level. For the team they have, and time they have, the developers in general have done a remarkable job building a very complex game that functions well in large part. Great achievement. But you can never do everything you want, and many things get left on the "we will never actually get to this, realistically" pile. That's normal.

What I'm saying is, take a serious look at 1-7 above and reconsider where they are on your priority list. If you're not ashamed of not being able to get to them because "they're really non issues" then you're not actually spending any time playing the game.

[jojorne]

Getting "stuck" inside the clip area of a station module in my ship.

There are ways to leave when you get inside the station mesh but... Yes, it's annoying... I believe that getting inside the mesh can't be avoided. Games don't do matter-level calculations. With each update the game teleports you to the next position and thus, with enough speed, you are teleported inside the mesh, going unnoticed by the collision system.

The "limited time to respond" aspect is the core of this horrid bit of functionality.

I believe that as long as you don't move he will wait for your response (you don't need to talk to him: run = escape / drop = comply). Yes, the monitor call will disappear or you don't get a call at all if you have the map open, this sucks but he will wait. For how long? I don't know.

Select current ship to give orders to it. Unless I'm missing something, there's no way to do this without either going to map and manually finding + clicking on ship to select it, or going to owned-property list and manually scanning to wall of text to find the ship you're in.

Yes, I agree, although there is a search box on the map that can be used to search any object. Multiples as a matter of fact. Naming them is crucial... Naming can even help knowing how many credits they make per time with the Transaction log.

Scanning for data leaks... the "signal" indicator bars ARE PART OF THE SHIP HULL, not the HUD! Seriously?

Don't they make noise? The noise indicator is below the oxygen meter on the HUD. Not sure if this works when you are inside a ship tho. Ah! Also you need to use the purple scanner mode, but again not entirely sure...

Using trade overlay to give buy/sell orders a selected ship: often, the "selected" ship ends up de-selected...

I totally agree... lol But you can use that window title to select a ship... But again I never do tho... It's just the way the UI is presented to you. You just don't use the window title to select ships... The UI as a whole needs improvements. I believe Egosoft is trying to hire someone to work on the UI, aren't they? I just wish I could select a bunch of ships instead of one by one and they would intelligently shop the wares at the stations I selected (No. Yes, I am aware that there are commands for this but I'm not talking about the commands that you can't even copy to multiple ships or easily interrupt them to upgrade the ship).

There are many, many other frustrations, but none that rise to the level of "this is really derailing my enjoyment of this game" level.

I got the game a long time ago... I actually stopped playing it, hoping that some bugs would be fixed and some features or quality of life improvements would be introduced. When I started you had to have ships side by side to transfer the crew, there was no teleportation or crew overview window. Now I'm playing again. Things like swapping captains, hiring managers is still a pain but 5.10 is much better compared to before.

[ahostofissues]

Mesh/object trapping: I don't expect this to ever be solved. Too hard from a development prospective, I'd bet. Any changes they try to make would likely mess up other important collision behaviors. But there's always hope. Once you research teleportation, if you have a combat ship auto-following the scout you're using to signal-leak-hunt in tight spaces (which is when I keep getting trapped) then you can teleport to the other ship and tell your trapped ship to "move to position" outside the station. Will get itself out. But requires advanced preparation to be prepared for this.

I believe that as long as you don't move he will wait for your response (you don't need to talk to him: run = escape / drop = comply). Yes, the monitor call will disappear or you don't get a call at all if you have the map open, this sucks but he will wait. For how long? I don't know.

Definitely not true in current version, which is the problem. If you don't respond, the default option gets picked (either per-that-ship override, or global behavior setting). Decision made and done, opportunity gone. There is no way to prevent this. Pausing the game, not moving, etc, has no effect on this behavior. It's a giant sh%# ball of blind choice because you're both forced and ignorant of context.

[Edit: it *is* true that if you press "interact" (F) key to get conversation menu with reporting ship, *that* you can leave sitting there as long as you want... unless you do anything that dismisses it, like going to the map, bringing up property list, etc. Sure, you can bring up the conversation and then take as long as you want to reply. But only if you exit whatever you were doing first, and even so it's still useless because you can't do anything to get more info without dismissing it and thereby forcing the default choice while still totally blind with zero information.]

Re: signal hunting:

Don't they make noise? The noise indicator is below the oxygen meter on the HUD. Not sure if this works when you are inside a ship tho. Ah! Also you need to use the purple scanner mode, but again not entirely sure...

You're not really understanding what I'm saying (or I'm saying it badly). What I'm trying to say is that the signal indicator ("equalizer" graph that appears in HUD)... that HUD item goes away when you use the "hide hull of my ship" option (ctrl-H, I think). So when you hide the visual clutter (ship hull graphic) to open up visual field, the "signal equalizer graph" indicator goes away with it. When you hide the HUD (shift-H), it does not. What I'm saying is that "hide with HUD" and "hide with ship hull" are the two categories. They put, for inexplicable reasons, the "signal indicator" HUD piece in the "hide with ship hull" bucket. Weird, and I don't think anyone can make any non-silly argument for current behavior being right. [And, good luck trying to track down a signal with just the audio indicator...] The ship hull graphic is non-functional, just for immersion; sometimes hiding it to remove visual clutter in your view is very helpful. Having the signal leak visual indicator go away along with it is... not.

And I agree, game in general is great. Could list 20 changes to UI behavior that would be better, but as mentioned there's an essentially infinite list of these and limited developer time. I'm trying to limit my list to just the "these are really seriously a problem for me" ones.

[jlehtone]

What I'm trying to say is that the signal indicator ("equalizer" graph that appears in HUD)... that HUD item goes away when you use the "hide hull of my ship" option (ctrl-H, I think). So when you hide the visual clutter (ship hull graphic) to open up visual field, the "signal equalizer graph" indicator goes away with it. When you hide the HUD (shift-H), it does not. What I'm saying is that "hide with HUD" and "hide with ship hull" are the two categories. They put, for inexplicable reasons, the "signal indicator" HUD piece in the "hide with ship hull" bucket. Weird, and I don't think anyone can make any non-silly argument for current behavior being right.

Agreed, that is weird. (I haven't hidden the hull, so haven't noticed.)

The visual indicator did not exist in 3.xx. All we had was the audio until we were close enough to see the sparkles. Finding leaks was not easy, but it was possible.

In current version I fly a bit away from station and look at it and/or go to target camera (F3) so that I don't have to fly around.

Spoiler

Show

The leaks blink blue flash with some interval that one can see from couple klicks away.

When I home in one, I turn left and right and the "histogram" reveals which way to go. If it is level, I roll 90 degrees and do the left&right again.


On the mesh trap, there might be three workarounds:

• Let co-pilot fly
• Activate auto-pilot
• Save game and reload. This could place your ship "outside"

I've been inside station, rock, and Mammoth, but many more times inside my own ship in spacesuit -- full throttle when you should exit airlock goes through the wall every time. Luckily, choosing "Dock" in suit gets one back to the ship.

[Socratatus]

I'll just answer my pov on a couple I've had experience with....

1. Getting "stuck" inside the clip area of a station module in my ship. WTF. Can't get out, get bounced around, sometimes actually have to revert to an earlier save when I can't escape.

I have sometimes boosted through a gate or just going too fast and literally somehow warped inside a larger ship. Can't get out. A trick I learned: Get your NPCpilot to take over and waypoint him anywhere. He'll magically find his way out. One of those rare gaming instances where an AI NPC is essential in getting the Player out of a game-breaking bug! Thanks, NPC!

2. "I was told to drop my cargo!" I don't even know where to begin with this. Horrid system. The "limited time to respond" aspect is the core of this horrid bit of functionality. You have to interrupt whatever you're doing, ask to issue orders to the ship, then pick a choice (comply, flee, etc). You get ZERO context for this decision, and again you have only 8-10 seconds to make it. Who is making the threat?? (destroyer, fighter, etc). What cargo are you carrying? How close are you to a gate, or a station? Do you have any hope of escape? Who the f'k knows. You get ZERO information, but have to make an instant decision. Decide wrong... You maybe lose a 5 million credit ship when had you known the situation you would have just dropped the cargo. But do "always drop" as a global setting, or a standard decision, maybe you're throwing away 300k of cargo to some punk in a fighter.

I always thought it was a cop demanding cargo dropped, so I'd usually just say, "Yes, drop it!" But it can be daunting trying to get to the command, make a decision, then hit it and there is indeed very little context or time before things get very violent. Agreed.

3. Follow on #2: if you pick "escape" (either by manual choice or global default) there is, as far as I can tell, no way to reverse and "drop cargo" instead after looking at the situation and seeing escape will certainly fail. You drop the cargo, the attacker doesn't care; just keeps pursuing and killing your cargo ship anyway. So (a) time-limited forced decision, (b) with no context or information, and (c) no way to revise/change the decision once made. Speaking as a software developer, I have no clue how this feature got approved for release as-is.

I disagree on this one. But say in real life, the cops catch you with drugs, you race off and during the chase, you throw out the drugs. Would the cops then stop? Nope. It's a felony to run from the cops. They still chase after you. many examples of this. It's why I never even considered dropping cargo once I order 'escape'. Once you run, you're in trouble, no matter what.
Now if it's pirates or an enemy Faction (not cops), you make a fair point.

4. "We found something out here" -- Clone of "I was told to drop my cargo" but at least with less severe consequences. Again, (a) limited time decision, (b) zero info (what kind of ship? are there any enemies nearby? what current orders would I be interrupting if I told you to guard/claim it?). At least "(c) no way to revise/change" aspect doesn't apply, as you at least can go back and revisit the orders for the reporting ship after you go look and get more info.

This one does not bother me, since there are no severe consequences. It's easy enough to find out what's happening.

[Imperial Good]

1. Getting "stuck" inside the clip area of a station module in my ship. WTF. Can't get out, get bounced around, sometimes actually have to revert to an earlier save when I can't escape.

Your co-pilot usually can fly you out after a few minutes of messing around. Get up from seat, wait for them to take over then order them to fly somewhere far away. They should twitch around a while but eventually phase out. Since pilots are manditory for all ships it is unlikely the player will encounter a situation where they do not have one outside of the very beginning of some starts (forgot to buy a pilot for their ship) or when flying some plot ships (limited exposure).

One of the developers said you can often clip out of being stuck by sideward strafing into the wall (A or D) and then rolling (Q or E). This can also be used to clip into walls to some extent.

2. "I was told to drop my cargo!" I don't even know where to begin with this. Horrid system. The "limited time to respond" aspect is the core of this horrid bit of functionality. You have to interrupt whatever you're doing, ask to issue orders to the ship, then pick a choice (comply, flee, etc). You get ZERO context for this decision, and again you have only 8-10 seconds to make it. Who is making the threat?? (destroyer, fighter, etc). What cargo are you carrying? How close are you to a gate, or a station? Do you have any hope of escape? Who the f'k knows. You get ZERO information, but have to make an instant decision. Decide wrong... You maybe lose a 5 million credit ship when had you known the situation you would have just dropped the cargo. But do "always drop" as a global setting, or a standard decision, maybe you're throwing away 300k of cargo to some punk in a fighter.

Always drop cargo is usually the solution for late game. 300k cargo here and there is worthless when you earn billions and hour. Still expect to lose a few ships an hour because pirates assume a ship stuck in a critical order, such as docking, failed to comply and so must be destroyed.

Early game you can usually pause to try and take evasive action. If your traders use combat engines there is a good chance they can escape as pirates are quite bad at their job. People using Boas with combat engines say they seldom lose any with them set to escape.

3. Follow on #2: if you pick "escape" (either by manual choice or global default) there is, as far as I can tell, no way to reverse and "drop cargo" instead after looking at the situation and seeing escape will certainly fail. You drop the cargo, the attacker doesn't care; just keeps pursuing and killing your cargo ship anyway. So (a) time-limited forced decision, (b) with no context or information, and (c) no way to revise/change the decision once made. Speaking as a software developer, I have no clue how this feature got approved for release as-is.

They will even shoot up your ship if it is set to automatically drop cargo if it is stuck in a critical order. Pirates just are very merciless so you should treat them in kind.

5. Select current ship to give orders to it. Unless I'm missing something, there's no way to do this without either going to map and manually finding + clicking on ship to select it, or going to owned-property list and manually scanning to wall of text to find the ship you're in. My kingdom and my entire bank account if you would just give me a key or on-screen button I can press to "select my current ship" so I can right-click on the part of the map I'm looking at to give it orders. This may seem small, but it comes up ALL THE TIME. In "importance = frequency * severity" equation, this may have low severity (you can select the current ship, with a few extra clicks and map movement), but is has MASSIVE frequency. All. The. Time. The whole damn game.

R should reset map to focus on currently selected ship. If dealing with stuff relative to the player, consider the local object list rather than player property list.

6. Scanning for data leaks... the "signal" indicator bars ARE PART OF THE SHIP HULL, not the HUD! Seriously? W.T.F. Again. When you're hunting around for a visual indicator of things in a false-color extreme close-up view of the station in front of you, definitely what you want is to have 1/3 of your field of view covered by the ship hull graphic. Awesome. Hide the hull so you can actually see the stuff in front of you while signal hunting, and the signal indicator goes away. Again, how did this make it into release??

You can try different S ships with different visibilities. Some of them have very good visibility (<<1/3 of screen is hidden). That said I mostly rely on the noise they make to detect them as they are sometimes inside station geometry such that they are not able to be seen visually.

[Ormac]

6. Scanning for data leaks... the "signal" indicator bars ARE PART OF THE SHIP HULL, not the HUD! Seriously? W.T.F. Again. When you're hunting around for a visual indicator of things in a false-color extreme close-up view of the station in front of you, definitely what you want is to have 1/3 of your field of view covered by the ship hull graphic. Awesome. Hide the hull so you can actually see the stuff in front of you while signal hunting, and the signal indicator goes away. Again, how did this make it into release??

Well I've just filed a Bug Report on the Signal H.U.D element hiding along with the cockpit.
so it will probably be fixed soon.

I'm sorry you've felt frustrated with your initial experience.

[Nanook]

... Since pilots are manditory for all ships...

No, they are not. Pilots are only 'mandatory' when buying a new ship. I rarely have an NPC pilot on my ship unless it's being used as a marine. I have lot's of spare ships sitting around with no pilots. With galaxy-wide teleportation, there's no need to hire pilots for my personal ships that are stationed at various points around the galaxy. When I have a task for a particular ship, I'll find a good, trained pilot to fly it. Otherwise, it usually sits empty.

...
6. Scanning for data leaks... the "signal" indicator bars ARE PART OF THE SHIP HULL, not the HUD! Seriously? W.T.F. Again. When you're hunting around for a visual indicator of things in a false-color extreme close-up view of the station in front of you, definitely what you want is to have 1/3 of your field of view covered by the ship hull graphic. Awesome. Hide the hull so you can actually see the stuff in front of you while signal hunting, and the signal indicator goes away. Again, how did this make it into release??...

I don't really see this as a problem. In 5.1, you can easily see the data leaks from a good distance away assuming you have the purple (local) scanner turned on (which you should). No way do you have to 'get up close and personal' with them just to see them. And once you see them, you shouldn't have a problem getting close enough to activate them. If you don't have the cockpit visible, it's quite possible to accidently trigger the inside-the-mesh issue you spoke of. You don't have to be going fast to do that; simply strafing can sometimes put you inside the mesh. My advice - use the local scanner and always have the cockpit turned on.

[jlehtone]

2. "I was told to drop my cargo!" I don't even know where to begin with this.

I do hit "Pause". Then I check from map what is the situation. Not completely realistic, but neither are the limits of the UI.

My default company policy is set to Flee. Most of the time I simply remove the auto-generated Flee order and the ship continues its voyage -- the threat is too far to catch a ship that does not stop. If demise looks unavoidable, then I cook up something.

When a freighter starts a Flee, it deploys a Lasertower (if it has any). One can order the ship to deploy more, while does some "fly" order. Lasertowers can distract enemies.

[ahostofissues]

2. "I was told to drop my cargo!" I don't even know where to begin with this.

I do hit "Pause". Then I check from map what is the situation. Not completely realistic, but neither are the limits of the UI.

My default company policy is set to Flee. Most of the time I simply remove the auto-generated Flee order and the ship continues its voyage -- the threat is too far to catch a ship that does not stop. If demise looks unavoidable, then I cook up something.

When a freighter starts a Flee, it deploys a Lasertower (if it has any). One can order the ship to deploy more, while does some "fly" order. Lasertowers can distract enemies.

Even after 480 hours, I didn't know that a freighter with a laser tower deployable would use it on a flee order. +1 to you for helping me learn this.

On flee... " If demise looks unavoidable, then I cook up something." My issue is that for L-class freighters (Helios, etc) they are slow enough that they're doomed vs a destroyer if it's in weapons range. If you (or the default) picks 'flee' then there's no way to get help to them fast enough. They just die. And, if I'm not mistaken, issuing a new order ("flee" override order) causes ship to come to a complete stop, then start new order. For a slow-starting L freighter, this is a death sentence.

In my opinion, there really, really needs to be an "ignore" option for global order defaults for "pirate harassment". I use "ignore" when fired upon for all my scouts, so they don't stop to issue themselves a new order ("flee") and then start moving again. "Just keep truckin' and don't stop for anything!" really needs to be an option for freighters hassled by pirates.

[ahostofissues]

6. Scanning for data leaks... the "signal" indicator bars ARE PART OF THE SHIP HULL, not the HUD! Seriously? W.T.F. Again. When you're hunting around for a visual indicator of things in a false-color extreme close-up view of the station in front of you, definitely what you want is to have 1/3 of your field of view covered by the ship hull graphic. Awesome. Hide the hull so you can actually see the stuff in front of you while signal hunting, and the signal indicator goes away. Again, how did this make it into release??

Well I've just filed a Bug Report on the Signal H.U.D element hiding along with the cockpit.
so it will probably be fixed soon.

I'm sorry you've felt frustrated with your initial experience.

Not my initial experience. I have 400+ hours in. I obviously think it's a good game. I'm just saying, as feedback from an experienced player, this is the distilled-down version of the issues that have the most impact on the actual causes-frustration level of the UI built to operate all the behind the scenes scripts and math.

In general, my experience with the game is very positive, after many many hours.

[Imperial Good]

No, they are not. Pilots are only 'mandatory' when buying a new ship. I rarely have an NPC pilot on my ship unless it's being used as a marine. I have lot's of spare ships sitting around with no pilots. With galaxy-wide teleportation, there's no need to hire pilots for my personal ships that are stationed at various points around the galaxy. When I have a task for a particular ship, I'll find a good, trained pilot to fly it. Otherwise, it usually sits empty.

You are basically going out of the way to make sure ships have no pilot, ignore the upkeep mission, and say a lot of people are doing that? I am fairly sure that most people have most of their ships with a pilot in them.

Given that pilots are as good as free I do not see a reason not to have them when possible. Even for the convenience of having them valet the ship from parking to somewhere in space.

Even after 480 hours, I didn't know that a freighter with a laser tower deployable would use it on a flee order. +1 to you for helping me learn this.

This behaviour is inconsistent. For example I have never seen my freighters do that, even though they have a lot of laser towers on them.

[jojorne]

Even after 480 hours, I didn't know that a freighter with a laser tower deployable would use it on a flee order. +1 to you for helping me learn this.

This behaviour is inconsistent. For example I have never seen my freighters do that, even though they have a lot of laser towers on them.

I have never seen my freighters do that either...

[HammerHead91]

I haven't rage quit the game just yet, but I came extremely close with the "Traverse the Maze/Bouncy Castle" mission.

Yet there are things I don't get which ... niggle at me.

My stations are all set for self-supply only. So why do they keep buying things from other factions?

And then there's The Big One that is very steadily driving me nuts. I can't stand having to click twice to take over as pilot of one of my ships. Once should be enough. And why does the pilot I'm replacing say, "Hello!" when clearly the whole intent of the interaction is, "Goodbye!"

[ahostofissues]

I'll just answer my pov on a couple I've had experience with....

3. Follow on #2: if you pick "escape" (either by manual choice or global default) there is, as far as I can tell, no way to reverse and "drop cargo" instead after looking at the situation and seeing escape will certainly fail. You drop the cargo, the attacker doesn't care; just keeps pursuing and killing your cargo ship anyway. So (a) time-limited forced decision, (b) with no context or information, and (c) no way to revise/change the decision once made. Speaking as a software developer, I have no clue how this feature got approved for release as-is.

I disagree on this one. But say in real life, the cops catch you with drugs, you race off and during the chase, you throw out the drugs. Would the cops then stop? Nope. It's a felony to run from the cops. They still chase after you. many examples of this. It's why I never even considered dropping cargo once I order 'escape'. Once you run, you're in trouble, no matter what.
Now if it's pirates or an enemy Faction (not cops), you make a fair point.

We don't disagree. I'm not saying you should be able to change how pirates are reacting to you *after* you make a decision. I was saying instead that "if the system for making a decision is broken (which, it is), then a workaround would be to at least let you fix the decision after it's made, when you have more context info."

The solution is not, as you pointed out, to make another bad decision by letting you suddenly alter your relationship with that pirate after you run.

The solution is to prevent the need for that by letting you make an intelligent (informed) choice about what to do based on being able to examine the context *before* you make a decision about "drop or flee." This is a case where "this is a game, game mechanics need to be Fun even if they're not real-world authentic" comes into play. Making this situation match the real world too closely reduces fun/playability of this feature of the game. Real world, you can't stop and have an extended conversation with the pilot about context and what to do. But in this *game*, being forced to make consequential choices blind is just needlessly frustrating. You can already be god and halt time whenever you want. Letting you do that here to get context info isn't too far a stretch.

[ahostofissues]

And then there's The Big One that is very steadily driving me nuts. I can't stand having to click twice to take over as pilot of one of my ships. Once should be enough. And why does the pilot I'm replacing say, "Hello!" when clearly the whole intent of the interaction is, "Goodbye!"

Oh. Yes. Yes yes yes. The number of times I've said to an empty room "Oh. My. God. Get the F'k out of the way!" after starting a conversation with my pilot by accident trying to take over the chair is... large. The two most repeated why-are-you-talking-to-yourself? phrases uttered while in X4 are "get out of the way!" and "get out of the damn chair already!" Good thing I don't live with anyone who can hear me.

[ahostofissues]

6. Scanning for data leaks... the "signal" indicator bars ARE PART OF THE SHIP HULL, not the HUD! Seriously? W.T.F. Again. When you're hunting around for a visual indicator of things in a false-color extreme close-up view of the station in front of you, definitely what you want is to have 1/3 of your field of view covered by the ship hull graphic. Awesome. Hide the hull so you can actually see the stuff in front of you while signal hunting, and the signal indicator goes away. Again, how did this make it into release??

Well I've just filed a Bug Report on the Signal H.U.D element hiding along with the cockpit.
so it will probably be fixed soon.

I'm sorry you've felt frustrated with your initial experience.

If at Egosoft "I've filed a bug" equals "... And so definitely it will prioritized highly enough to receive developer resources assigned to it and the bug will be closed" then I would like a job with Egosoft as a developer, please.

[Ormac]

Well I've just filed a Bug Report on the Signal H.U.D element hiding along with the cockpit.
so it will probably be fixed soon.

I'm sorry you've felt frustrated with your initial experience.

If at Egosoft "I've filed a bug" equals "... And so definitely it will prioritized highly enough to receive developer resources assigned to it and the bug will be closed" then I would like a job with Egosoft as a developer, please.

Well filing a Bug Report with the current version of X4 with a standard (unmodified) game at least informs the developers of the problem that they have a chance to debug.
They'll have a look at it and if it's a genuine bug they will fix it.

They're pretty good at fixing identified bugs.

[Prophet1]

Why get mad over dealing with demand to drop cargo? I never comply, and my npc traders don't ever comply. I lose a few, but not many. Losses are to be expected.

When I'm told to drop cargo, I view this as an opportunity to acquire inventory. I switch to map view, see what ship they are in, then target. If pirate is in a destroyer and it's not too early in the game and I have marines, it's an opportunity to acquire a destroyer. If police aren't around.

I would like to know how these pirates can scan my ship from 25 km away while I'm in travel mode though.

The only problem I have with signal leaks is when they are inside the station model and not visible from outside. This also sometimes happens with my own emp bomb. If in spacesuit, I can sometimes force my character into the station and then the leak can be seen. I then teleport out.

[Duncaroos]

My stations are all set for self-supply only. So why do they keep buying things from other factions?

Station Supply is not the same as Station Trades. You need to change the global order for Station Trades.

Trust me I feel you on this. Miners sUpPLy materials to the station for consumption....but apparently it's a trade.....I don't get it sometimes. I find supply is only for drone and missile production. These don't need storage modules.