Pinned Fingerprints

[cyan ore]

I've seen a few people here and on the Steam forums talking about the issue of having too many fingerprints collected and stored, so many that it makes solving cases too easy.

An idea to help fix this could be for the player to only store fingerprints that have been pinned to the board and when the case is resolved all prints pinned to the board can be wiped/forgotten. This way you can pin as many prints at the scene as you find appropriate so that you can compare them to prints found during the investigation, but you won't be holding on to unnecessary prints after the case concludes.

Seems like this would be an easier balance to implement than making fingerprints more complicated.

[peak sail]

so I'm playing the "specially crafted mission" which really just changes it's killer based on the lead you want to follow. randomly I was taking peoples fingerprints on the street by a new scene.. there is the dead mans fingerprints, or his wife... whoever.. point was the game was recycling fingerprints I knew about and planting them on a scene they could never have been at.... fingerprints have daddy issues

[lusty marten]

I think some sort of system separation/agnosticism could be a thing to consider with fingerprints. Remove fingerprints from the info card for individuals, and potentially only let them be connected by specific records pairing a person with their print, like arrest records or such.

It's effectively just one step of separation between that and the current system of being able to identify a person's prints on sight, but it gives us something to do and said records could potentially be incomplete with the archives only having them for individuals that have committed a crime previously.

Fingerprints are in a weird spot right now where if you have the print connected with someone it's an instant-win, but if you only have a print to work off of then there's not much it can do for you. Arrest records could let you solve easy cases by just letting you search the database by print and getting the arrest record, harder cases could have someone who isn't in the system (yet).