What causes a kill affecting the wrong faction's reputation?

The reputation change reads the player's currently targeted or last-seen faction from a shared variable instead of the faction of the unit that actually died.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Killing an Enemy Changing the Wrong Faction's Reputation

Quick answer: Resolve the faction to penalize directly from the killed unit's own faction field at the moment of death, not from any shared or cached targeting state.

If killing a bandit lowers your standing with the town guard, the reputation logic is reading a shared faction variable instead of the victim's. Read from the victim. Here is the fix.

How to fix it

1. Read faction from the victim

When applying a reputation change on death, take the faction id from the unit that died, not from a global current-target or last-hovered variable that may be stale.

2. Pass faction through the damage event

Carry the relevant faction and the killer along with the death event so the reputation handler has unambiguous, per-kill data rather than shared state.

3. Account for kill-stealing

Attribute the reputation change to the entity that landed the killing blow, and define how shared kills resolve, so credit and penalties go to the right party.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every GameMaker error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

The errors you never hear about are the ones quietly costing you players. Visibility turns them into a worklist.