As I said, that was a useless discussion and I’m done talking to you about it.
Crimewatch and suspect is only about CONCORD. Faction police doesn’t care about suspect, pirates don’t care, trigs don’t care, and if you insist, automated upwell actions don’t care either if you are suspect or an outlaw.
Additionally, when you undock, campers can catch you on the undock and kill you, but not when you are tethered because you don’t break tether while aligning, but you do lose your undock invulnerability as you align.
Structures, stations, ships, and other objects are not characters.
The mechanics of tethering are not related to Crimewatch in any way. Crimewatch strictly applies to whether or not CONCORD arrives to blow up an aggressor, and the Suspect, Criminal, and Outlaw flags remove CONCORD response when players with these flags are aggresed by other players.
Tethering is affected by weapons timers, as is docking and ship-swapping, to prevent easy escape from combat the pilot is already engaged in, which is distinct from the vulnerability to CONCORD-free combat that the Suspect, Criminal, and Outlaw flags confer.
The OP is asking for a change to the restrictions that these flags apply to players with the flags, but treating it as though it is not a change to Crimewatch. The flags are part of Crimewatch, and thus one cannot change the flags without looking at the Crimewatch system overall to say ‘is this a logical change’?
Is it logical for player-controlled structures to stop helping players on their access lists because the player went suspect or is an outlaw? No, because CONCORD does not control the structures, and does not prevent suspects/outlaws from deploying structures in the first place. CONCORD also doesn’t block these players from docking in stations. It would be inconsistent to apply different rules to tethering than to docking when it comes to legality flags.
And a further no, because tethering is a mechanic controlled by players, not NPC factions, and players should remain able to choose whether or not an individual is their friend or enemy based on their own relationships with the other player, not based on the relationship between the flagged player and the NPC security forces.
Tethers are one of the benefits of the expense of managing an Upwell - your friends (defined by the ACL) get more protections using your structure than they get when using a station. It’s an intentional state of greater security for players in the ACL compared to NPC structures.
Yet you can’t dock in a structure/station when you are criminal (besides egg).
That’s a reason to believe, that NPC in general should respect the suspect timer as much as they respect the criminal timer.
Just because other people have a different opinion from yours, does not make it a “useless discussion”.
They are entities in the grid, those that are controlled by a character are called “PC”, those that take actions non controlled by players are called “NPC”, those that take no actions are non characters(rocks, stations, gates, beacons…).
Your ship is the avatar (representation) of yourself in the game, that you control, making it a PC.
If you consider that your ship is not a PC, then concord and pirats are not NPC.
A character, in a game, is just an entity that takes action. An action is something that has an effect on the environment (or itself).
A useful discussion leads to new insights. When we both just keep repeating the same thing it’s a useless discussion. As we are both wrong according to the other we might just as well talk to a wall.
It’s not that you have a different opinion that the discussion is useless, it’s that we keep repeating those same different opinions over and over.
And that stance is not relevant to the point I was making. Crimewatch is about relationships with the NPC security forces. Tethering is about relationships with Player-run corporations. The former has no reason to impact the latter - and the Criminal flag has its own special rules in order to trigger CONCORD properly, which again is not related to player-to-player relationships.
And yet you learnt that a non manned structure is an NPC.
For me you got a new insight.
Also I tried to explain you why the original idea could make sense - not that I do agree with him that it would be better.
Tethering is about a structure that prevents a player from being attacked.
Crimewatch makes it legal to attack a player when suspect.
Therefore tethering makes suspect useless.
That’s a reason to impact it.
I think no, because it would be too harsh. What’s more it would be too annoying to code since outlaws could not dock in LS to kill rats, so it should be adapted. But still maybe !
Then if it’s not a character, then concord drones are not NPC either but yes that’s exactly what I told you already but you just ignore it. So yes we are just repeating because once prove you are wrong you refuse to admit it and rewind to the original false claim.
Then a structure is also a character in space, that tethers friendly when they come and point baddies who start shooting it, without any direct control from a player. That is, an NPC.