We have one person, Slither, who understands the codebase enough, but he has little free time to fix bugs here.
We know that it can be frustrating when bugs like this occur, but understand that we are an extremely small team with limited resources at this point in time, so it might take a little longer to get things fixed.
If you have anything to add to this, please add comments to the bug, including as much information as you can, i.e., what you were fighting (NPC, player, critter), what weapon you were using, and whether it happened with the same weapon or different ones, etc.
I've personally had difficulty isolating instances when it happens in an 100% reproduceable way so if anyone is able to document one in the @bug comments (rather than here) it would probably be very helpful to getting it diagnosed/fixed. Players who do a lot of fighting each week especially.
The correlating factor seems to be, as originally stated, NPCs that need to retrieve their weapons for combat (as opposed to holding them indefinitely). The NPCs in question, if they do not already have their weapon out, will (as far as I have observed) force the target of their attack to put everything they are holding away. This will happen once for every NPC that is attacking you, so if you attack five gangers, all of which have weapons they need to pull out, you're going to be forced to effectively 'freehands' five times. If the NPC already has a weapon out, it will not occur.
If you attack an affiliated PC, and an NPC wields their weapon and jumps in to assist, this does not occur. An affiliated PC attacking you and being assisted by an NPC does not appear to cause this.
Initiating combat from a state of 'aiming' appears to prevent this from happening (it still attempts to stow the weapons, but cannot due to the state of your bit, but you will have to manually 'stop aiming' after all instances of attempted forced 'freehands' have occurred. I do not know if you will incur penalties as a result of this, but unlikely to be worse than repeatedly stowing your weapons.
Again, I'm stating this on the thread for player visibility so they can be prepared for this going into a fight instead of dying as a result of the bug. Hopefully this helps until the bug can be effectively identified and resolved.
Correction on this point, as I was restructuring the paragraph and unintentionally said the opposite of what I intended.
Attacking a PC that will be assisted by an NPC that needs to wield a weapon WILL result in your weapons being 'freehands'd.
