Items from evidence chest are not considered to be stolen if player is allowed to use the chest
Items confiscated to evidence chests in OpenMW 0.40 have their "stolen" tags decremented, which may cause unpredictable vendor behaviour.
To reproduce:
Console> tfh Steal X items of the same ID that belong to vendor Foo (crime has been reported or not = no difference) Get caught by guard for any crime Pay gold/Go to Jail locate evidence chest open it
The confiscated item will have its "X stolen from Foo" removed If you steal the item at this point it will just have "X stolen from imperial legion" However, you can now sell the item to a vendor who was the original owner
Other cases:
Steal 2 items of the same ID = 1 from Bar, 1 from Foo (the stolen tags seem to be ordered alphabetically)
Get caught with 1 item on you and go open evidence chest The stolen item will have "1 stolen from Foo" The first tag has been removed when the item was placed in the chest
Steal 2 items of the same ID = 2 from Foo
Get caught with 2 items on you and go open evidence chest The item will have no "stolen" tags
The system seems to decrement the "stolen" tags on item IDs. It subtracts "stolen" tags based on the number of items of the same ID which have been confiscated It removes the "stolen from" tag from the item ID, if the counter on the tag reaches 0
Problem:
If a player steals a bunch of items and gets caught, they may be inclined to visit the local evidence chest to get the stuff back.
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Selling some of the stuff back to their original owner may work peacefully, as the "X stolen from ..." tag has gone from X to 0, and disappeared entirely from the item.
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Multiple item copies that were stolen from a single owner, or a single copy stolen from multiple owners, may trigger a hostile response upon sellback. It all depends on how many of the stolen items have been confiscated.
Exploit:
Advance in the Imperial Legion:
high enough to loot the evidence chest legally without getting "stolen from imperial legion" tags repeatedly get caught and loot the items reset any "stolen" tags on all items down to 0 sell everything back to their original owners.
The original game preserved "owner" tags on the items (seems similar to "stolen from" tags in OpenMW), even when they were confiscated to evidence chests.
(RM-3609 from redmine: created on 2016-11-01 by Hla Mas, )