I've been busy cleaning up the galaxy from unaligned bots of various kinds when this night, in a long quadrant sweep, i realized that something wasn't right with faction standing accounting. Someone was pulling an Exxon on me.

In the same long session, I went from -450ish to -200. Wanting to clear out the "dislike" faction rating in favor of "neutral", I hit a few more bots and ended up with -207. "Doh!" I thought, my eyes are playing tricks on me. So I did a few more bots and was up again to -200. One bot later, I was down again to -201!

It juggled likes this for a while between -199 to -201 until I settled for -199 and decided to leave it off for the night.

Anyone else seen this?

Are you sure there might not have been some nation bots in the mix? If you hunt in an Ion storm, you'll get occasional nation trader NPCs caught in it as well, and killing those will reduce faction. There might also be other circumstances involed. Where were you hunting, what, and when?

This is a new one on me. IRS might be on to something. Many of the traderbots end up in storms and are tagetable. In your galaxial cleaning frenzy, you may have inadvertantly destroyed one at in inopertune moment without noticing that it was a traderbot.

For some tactical reasons, I can't (yet) give out my location. You might say I'm on special assignment...

There *was* a storm last night in that particular sector. But I'm almost certain there weren't any trader bots. I regularly do a sector player list check (every 2 bots or so) because of possible retaliation/grieving due to the sector in question.

Let's say I did hit a transport (say, Xang bots wich also show up as white in player lists) and that alone pushed me back down to -207. From that point on, I'm 100% sure that I was only hitting unaligned bots because I was particularly paying attention to the faction rating/bots/player list. Yet, the count kept wobbling around -201, only occasionally going up to -199. Another "test" bot would bring it down to -200 again.

I want to make clear that I was purposely keeping an eye on faction rating because that's exactly what I was there for.

I'm not complaining about faction loss due to something strange (hey, what's 15 points or so when you spent hours downing 400 bots in only a couple of sessions). I'm just curious to find out if there might have been something else, like trader bots (I'll pay more attention to those, though I'll say it again, I'm sure they were all the same kind of unaligned bots).

Out of doubt because of the possible trader bot accident that might have been possible, I've just checked the error log in the Mac OS X application bundle of Vendetta.

I can confirm ALL bots I've killed were unaligned bots, and that ALL destroyed bots resulted in the

[Fri Feb 11 03:18:53 2005] 00ff00Serco standing increased slightly

message. None say that my rating decreased.

I can send you guys the full log if you want it.

For the record, I've done another 600-ish faction points since this weird behavior and have not yet re-experienced this.