So I wanted to explain a little about the intent behind the bandit changes. Basically, there was a sort of “gap” in the previous system where you could follow people around and scavenge their loot if they died in the Wilds e.g. due to an Aberration attack. After you did so, the only way that the original person could recover that loot was to attack you, becoming a Bandit themselves. The scavenger could then run to the guards and the guards would attack and kill you. Obviously this whole situation didn’t make a lot of sense.

At the same time, we want loot that’s dropped in the Wilds to be pretty free-for-all by nature, so we didn’t want to fully punish you the same way that we would for killing another player. This “Bandit With No Bounty” (or BWNB for short I guess) is a compromise to hopefully solve that problem.

Now when you do some actions in the Wilds that are bandit-like, but shouldn’t carry the full penalty, you will still become a Bandit, but with no bounty on your head. The guards will only attack bandits that have bounties.

In our original scenario, when the scavenger picks up the loot bag they would become a bandit with no bounty. That means another player would have a short time (5 minutes) to find and kill them and get the loot back without needing to become a Bandit themselves. It also means the scavenger can run near the guards if they want but the guards will do nothing to them or the person seeking revenge.

This also allows us to make another change so that if someone in your party becomes a bandit, you become a bandit without a bounty, that way someone can’t for example lure you into the Wilds and then attack someone else and wait for the guards to kill you (since the guards wouldn’t attack you without a bounty on your head). But at the same time, if you’re a group of bandits prowling the wilds, you can’t have one person in your group start attacking and the rest hold off until later, it’s either all or nothing in terms of other players being able to attack your group.

At any rate, these changes should mostly just add some nuance to the Bandit system and close up some of the “gaps” that have been identified since EA began. If you were a straight-up Bandit before, and you’re totally cool with attacking and killing other players and getting a bounty on your head as the system was intended to function before, this should have no effect on you.