So I am playing through NV whilst waiting for FO4

Problem 1:

I have Cass as a follower, as a character she is supposed to hate the Legion and yet when I 'steal' from the Legion she gets very uptight about it. This makes zero sense

Problem 2:

I can explore the wasteland and some things are up for grabs no penalty, other things have an arbitrary karma score against them. There is no consistency.

Problem 3:

It is ok for me to take anything I want from an enemies corpse such as the aforementioned Legion... but again I can't take it if it is in their house or in a footlocker etc. All of a sudden stealing from a dead mans corpse is fine but don't you dare take it off his shelf

Problem 4:

Getting bad karma/or reputation even when no one is there to witness you do it. I kill a group of Legion, all of them dead, no witnesses and yet my rep with the Legion is negated, this applies to any faction I am just using those Legion as an example because well everyone hates them anyway

For such a game this is a real mood killer and it takes you right out of the immersion the game is supposed to give

Either fix the system or remove it because in it's current state it is not fit for purpose and actually harms the game more than it helps. It makes no sense most times it is actually in use

Karma is a subjective thing.It does not depend on the presence of witnesses.In the game karma is your alignment.If you do bad thing you become a bad person.If no one sees you doing bad things you still are a bad person.

That does not explain the inconsistent ways in which it is applied in the examples I gave

The main problem I have with the karma system is that it lacks a purpose. Having good karma or bad karma changes almost nothing in the game. No matter how much they improve the mechanics of it, it will still be bad until they give the player a reason they should care about what their karma level is.

Cass does not HATE the legion, even she admits, for all its problems it DOES protect caravans. she will even join a legion courier as long as you do her quest before you make the NCR hate you.

that is easy, some of that stuff is things that person cares about, the stuff you CAN take, they do not care about.

games are not and cannot be programmed to be THAT specific.

Karma is not what people think of you, it is what the universe thinks of you, it is what you REALLY are.

the rep thing is that they have a VERY good network.

I'm guessing karma has been axed

In bethesda's engine items are either owned or not.It's a editor property of the specific references.Killing the supposed owner does not influence the ownership flag on the objects.

Yes she does, she says so in various parts of her dialogue which you can find a txt file for on the wiki if you want to check

"Much as I hate the Legion, caravan life would be a hell of a lot easier if they ran the roads."

"I don't trade caps or supply anyone who keeps slaves, and treats women like Brahmin in those... [censored] "camps" of theirs"

With regards to the Caravans she says as long as they are marked they are safe. In other words as long as they are in with the Legion they won't get massacred

Anyway this is not the issue at hand

meh to me the karma system is something I don′t mind if the axe or change, but I don′t really mind if it′s kept the same, then again I guess it′s because my immersion isn′t made out of thin porslin like other folks around here.

Again this does not answer why some items in the world are not owned where others are despite there being no clear difference why.

As I said before it is inconsistent

Had been pretty trivial to change bodies so they was faction owned containers.

It still don't change that looting enemy locations for weapons, ammo and other stuff you use during combat is OK even for very political correct western armies.

Best solution here would make looting enemies you are at war with have no karma effect,

Todd said there was 8/9 (cant remember which) character archtypes; sarcastic, serious, good, evil depending on your choices in speech and actions.
My guess is that'll replace the karma system, may work out.
Having a voiced character with it, it'll be hilarious

"We need you to blow up the institute and save the human test subjects there."
"Oh yeah? Well i need a bottle of whisky and my baby back"

The reputation thing is pretty easy to handwave. Say the Legion sends assassins after you, and they don't come back. Considering the Legion thinks you're an important enough target to send assassins after, it stands to reason that they'd assume you killed the assassins. Thus, they'd hate you more for it.

read your OWN thing!

She says EVEN there, that it would make caravan life easier, and...as she is a caravaner (or at least was), it makes sense.

Also, stealing from them means possibly ticking them off, which means a fight against an army, which is generally not the smartest decision in the world

Might want to take your own advice.

Whether or not the Legion provides for caravans wasn't the argument. You said she didn't "HATE" the Legion. The quote they provide says she does hate the Legion. She's still able to recognize that they protect caravans better than the NCR, but that doesn't mean she doesn't hate them.

yet she is perfectly fine with working with a Legion courier, if she hated them completely and never wanted to deal with them at all and wanted to ruin them, she would have left like boone or Arcade does, but she does not.

If you kill a random patrol they have no reason to send assassins after you because they should not know you've done anything. It's like the psychic guards in Oblivion.

Even when they do send assassins after you there is no reason even then for them to assume 'you' killed them. Numerous things could have happened most likely of which they ran into an NCR patrol and that is why they never returned

That is like saying screw it we'll side with ISIS just because you don't want to fight and want easy access through the wasteland and whilst that may make some degree of sense it does not change your feeling towards them.

My original comment was about how Cass hates Legion which is what she states and what my original point was about.

Doesn't change the fact that that isn't what the argument was about. All it means is that Cass is more willing to go along with a (good) Courier no matter what flag he fights under. It's probably more gameplay mechanics anyway, considering she already has a deal breaker check in place in the form of leaving you if your Karma goes downhill, and the fact that there's no followers in the Mojave that are definitely Legion aligned (the closest you get is Raul, but he's not the same as Arcade and Boone).

You'd still indirectly be the cause of their deaths, as if they hadn't been sent out to kill you, they wouldn't have fallen prey to whatever killed them. Ergo, you're still to blame.

That is why....

....a game that has a moral sentence of consequences is more interesting that a bad & good karma.

Just quoting both here, as i agree on both your points, yet i see a turn point in how the karma system was used in the past.

So lets say i go out, meet 3 legion scouts and shoot them dead (cause who doesnt shoot them on sight right? ). While i agree that it is a bad karma action and thus you should receive a bumb to negative karma, i can not understand how (telepathic legion maybe) the legion troops 40 miles up the road could have know I was the one to kill his mates when i left no witnesses. So a karma system should work slightly different, say;

Negative Karma if;

• You kill someone without provocation (he/she does not attack first, withraiders and creatures like cazadors being exempt from this)
• You steam and item, regardless of who from.
• You loot a corpse of someone you killed without provocation.
• You attack (not kill) random NPC's in a town or city.

Positive Karma if;

• You help out a stanger by completing a quest (solong as it isn't a criminal act you do for them).
• You lend a beggar money.
• You return a stolen item to it's owner.
• You save a stranger from raiders/animals.
• etc.

When you thus kill the said patrol of 3 legion troops without being provoked by them, you should get 3 ticks of karma loss (-3 karma) but when the last witness dies (and this includes anny NPC's nearby, even if it is a NCR trooper) you will gain back anny of the potentialy lost reputation with the legion, as they would not have know of your involvement unless a witness spread the word about your actions. So if there was a NCR soldier present, he may tell his story in a bar at sometime, and thus rumors of your work would reach Legion about what you did, thus resulting in a loss of Rep with them.

This is rather complex to implement though, but would be better then the cookie cutter Karma/Rep way it is now in FNV.

Killing Legion scum should not get you bad karma. They [censored], torture and murder all the time. You should get good karma instead.

because, legion was SUPPOSED TO be much more morally grey, but the writers failed miserably and just made them evil.............

I've never seen a game yet that handled reputation or karma or light/dark choices well. In every game I have ever played that included these things I have disagreed with the developers about what is a "good" action and what is a "bad" action. I've almost reached the point where I'd rather have the whole thing removed than to have it implemented in the half-assed way it has been implemented in games so far.

Absolutely agree with you, part of me wants it in, but part of me knows that in the long end i will be disapointed by its narrow viewpoint.

you CANNOT ever blame the devs for this, because there is never a right way to do it, no matter WHAT they do with it, it will have issues, you WILL disagree with it more often then not. a karma/lightside/darkside meter is simply not possible to do correctly in a video game.

Same reason why blaming a game "For lack of choice" is a dumb thing to do, because the devs can NEVER know what everyone is going to think and add EVERY possible small decision in the game.