Healing a fallen enemy makes them friendly and stops a fight

[Paul]

If you use first aid to heal a fallen enemy it immediately makes them friendly, causing their allies to stop attacking you. The way the faction relations works you can even end up with them liking you more after beating them up and then healing them since the negative faction instantly goes positive as soon as you heal them.

This allows exploits like surrounding a merchant and beating him unconscious, then immediately healing him before fighting any of the guys that rush to his aid. Since the fight was so short you actually gain relations with the faction. You can loot him of all his goods, then turn around and sell them right back to him after he heals up.

Even without the instant fight stopping, the big relation gain on healing is a bit silly. You can jump a group of guys, kill half of them, leave the other half naked, and bandage them up so that they heal; and in the end the faction likes you more than before you attacked them. "Well, he killed Bob, Joe, and Timmy; and left me and John naked and unconscious in the desert - but he bandaged us up real fine. What a swell guy!"

[Meynolt]

Yes, only way to currently increase your reputation with a faction is to heal them and/or place them in a bed. Ironically, this means that the best way to be able to gain faction is to repeated beat them up and heal them. (In fact, it's the ONLY PRACTICAL way of doing it).

I'd like to see some alternative methods of raising faction introduced (e.g. gifts of money. killing their enemies, etc), and THEN nerf the current method.

[Fatality81]

There is another way but its also kind of an exploit now :/ and thats no good.

[Paul]

It could be changed to slowly tick up the positive relations when bandaging someone and only stop combat if it becomes positive again. That way instead of instantly going from -30 to 19 the second you start bandaging, you would have to bandage for a little while to get rid of the -30 before they even stop attacking you.

That would prevent the exploit of beating up and robbing someone in the middle of town and instantly stopping the fight by bandaging him. Balanced right, it would also mean that you couldn't gain faction by beating up and then healing people. But you could still gain relations by healing injured friendlies while they fight bandits.

[Tolwrath]

The big relation boost you get from healing is mostly temporary. The system works with a short term relation and long term relation stat. When you heal them, the short term jumps up, and then gradually fades back down to only be a small gain in your long term relationship. Likely you're healing them enough to put the short term relation stat into the positive, but if you came back later, you find them to be hostile again.

Perhaps the fix to this is to make it so the short term relations boost isn't so high, but still results in the same long term relations change.

[Paul]

I understand how short term and long term relations work. Attacking them is a short term relation thing only too.

Here is the problem: Attack someone, beat them unconscious in 10 seconds. 10 seconds of relations being negative? no effect on long term, -1 at most if it takes you longer. Bandage them up. Suddenly, straight from negative to positive 19 or so temporary relations, the 50 guys rushing to murder you stop in their tracks, and as the 19 temp relations fall over time you end up with 1-3 bonus long term relations and the faction likes you more now than they did before you beat them senseless and robbed them.

I was suggesting that, as a way to fix the exploit, the short term relation change be made to add up rather than be instant. Currently it slowly ticks down after being up, if it incrementally ticked up when doing something good in the same fashion it would solve the problem. Instead of instantly getting from heavily negative to positive relations you would have to burn through the negative relations, taking some long term losses along the way as time passes, and then slowly add up to positive relations. It would also mean that doing more good (like, say, healing 10 guys) would provide a larger bonus than just healing one guy.