Spreading the News
Certain actions the Player or AI does is newsworthy. This includes witnessing
- a murder
- someones defeat
- a murder during a fight
- theft (pickpocketing or stealing from someones house)
- someone running away from a fight (out of reach or chasing for too long)
- using a forbidden interactive object (ie. when it belongs to someone)
Depending on whether other NPCs have seen who the evil-doer is, the news includes the responsible character. If nobody saw who did it, the news will include "We don't know who did it" instead. In total, a news-entry can store
- Victim
- Offender
- Witness
- What happened (Murder, theft, ...)
Spreading
When something was witnessed by someone, a News-entry is created for that witness. After some time, that news may spread inside the guild or to characters the witness is friends with.
Depending on the news, the script function C_CanNewsBeSpread() determines whether the news should be spread and to who.
Warning
As you can see in the actual script sourcecode, the complete function contains only code which is commented out. Therefore we can deduce that the whole system is not actually used in the game.