Walking the way of bombs

It isn't exactly news that various towns in the wasteland are racked with the crazy nature of suicide bombers. In real life and in FOnline: 2238. This particular way of entertainment is in almost all cases only entertaining for a very small minority of people and due to this, discussions internally and externally are kind of an unofficial sporting event by now.

Anyway, to make it short: In the future we want to change the way explosives are working and used in the game, to limit (but not totally remove) the amount of suicide runs. To accomplish this, we internally agreed on the following ideas:

• Guards can "sniff" activated explosives (C4, Dynamite, and placed Landmines).
• The player can't activate explosives (C4, Dynamite, and placing Landmines) whenever a guard is around or if the player is in guard range. (It simply doesn't work, with an entry in the message log.)
• The player can activate explosives (C4, Dynamite and placing Landmines on the ground) whenever a guard is not around or if the player is not in guard range.

The few rules should result in harder suicide runs, without making them impossible, because the players action now will be as the following:

1. The PC has to activate the explosives far away from guard NPCs,
2. then the PC has to run up to their targets (NCR bazaar....),
3. and then hopefully explode there before a guard can kill the bomber and take the explosives (disarming them).

These simple changes should make the game better than with the current system (guard NPCs attack players with active explosives), which is pretty much useless, as especially dynamite can be triggered in around one second and nobody is able to react on it this fast.

Of course, the subject is still open for discussion and suggestions in the forum (for example, there were ideas about involving demolition expert profession in this process). Also we aren't quite sure about when exactly we are able to take this over into the game. It probably won't happen before the next wipe, but I'll hope we can push it afterwards.