I have a wingmate who has had a notoriety level of 1 since last night. I've read on the wiki that it decays by one point every 2 hours. Since he's still notorious a day later, I did some research and found people saying:
- 2 hour time limit
- 2 hour time limit from next login
- indeterminate time / encountered a bug
Is there a way to see the remaining time on your notoriety level?
If not, is there a hard and fast rule (possibly from Fdev?) governing notoriety?
Are there any known quirks with it, e.g. do you have to jump to another system to start the 2 hour timer?
Edit:
The problem was actually a 5k bounty that he couldn't pay off until he was at notoriety 0. A quick fix was to buy a sidewinder and have another wingmate blow him up. He had notoriety 0 when he respawned, but still could not pay off the bounty. But, after logging out and back in, he was able to pay it off and became clean.
Best Answer
To answer you immediate question: Post 3.0, you gain one point of notoriety for every murder (except for cases like murdering SpecOps targets in their USS) and lose one point every two hours being logged in; the countdown ticks while you remain in game... including just sitting in a station and being semi-afk(thanks @deathmagnet).
However, I have also encountered a bug (twice) where, being at 0 notoriety, the contact has refused to clear my bounty. The first time I just waited and it eventually let me pay my bounty. The second time I logged out and back in again and that also alleviated the issue. But neither of those times did I try to exploit the system by blowing up sidewinders ...