I'm all for human contact; the fun of piracy like that! It is those who just interdict and kill, or kill ships on landing pads, who are cannibalising the spirit of the game!
Could griefers be turned into a feature?
- Thread starter Wily Rites
- Start date
Im a new player, talking about my experience of it, is all.Don't mate, the game is just fine
O7
Mind you, with game mechanics such as, 'can you follow me as I drop out of supercruse' then the character drops down into normal space, right on BBQ horizon of a star, is arguably, a very dark pattern, if intentional 
also if you were to implement this, people would start complaining that they have to murder people to unlock the cannibal holocaust cosmetic pack instead of being able to buy it with arx
HAHA!
Not to my mind, it is not, I think it's making what could be a completely stellar game into just a great game. My first few weeks I played only in the main mode, the multiplayer, it was magic, there was something really magical about knowing that your connected with all these other folk, even though you might not meet them often, you could.Don't mate, the game is just fine
O7
Being forced into solo mode, is, well its crap.
This is one of the things that bugs me about the game. Interdicting, if you don't have a damn good reason, like a warrant on a pirate (we'll call it a kill mission in the right jurisdiction) should be a crime, or at least a fine. Evading interdiction from a lawful source should at least be a fine.
Starting an unsolicited conversation in chat should definitely be a crime.
It is a shame but then some people are like that.
I second the suggestion of Moebius/ElitePvE groups, with something like 40,000 members and 17-18 thousand on their forum you could well find like minded people to chat with.
There are some here that play in Solo some in Open personally I rarely play in Solo now my machine can handle multiple commanders but generally when in the bubble I will be in one of the PGs I am signed up to outside the bubble I will play in open if only because it is fewer clicks to launch.
FDev have indicated time and again that griefing behavior will not be addressed. Their solution comes in the forms of player blocks, private groups, and solo. There will never be effective crime/punishment mechanics, nor will the security level of a system ever mean anything beyond a vague, temporary nuisance. While many of us wish this were different, none of the suggestions or complaints have ever resulted in positive change. Refusing to accept this only diminishes your overall enjoyment of the game and “the griefers have already won.” They feed on your tears.
If you want to have a role play / immersion restoration mechanic, consider PGs and Solo to be incredibly effective cloaking devices. Laugh to yourself as you quietly slip through the “reaver” blockade. Imagine the griefers as historical reenactment aficionados while you read their highly intelligent chats where they emulate the verbal repartee and debating skills of 21st century 13 year olds playing their warfare simulators like Fortnite or Call of Duty, with that ultimate ancient battle cry, “git gud!”
The thing that is actually more immersion breaking for me is being in the far depths of space, coming upon a beautiful dance of physics in the form of a binary ringed gas giant pair, each with their respective satellites and shepherd moons, all orbiting a trinary star cluster only to find that these miracles were already discovered by Fartknocker69.
If you want to have a role play / immersion restoration mechanic, consider PGs and Solo to be incredibly effective cloaking devices. Laugh to yourself as you quietly slip through the “reaver” blockade. Imagine the griefers as historical reenactment aficionados while you read their highly intelligent chats where they emulate the verbal repartee and debating skills of 21st century 13 year olds playing their warfare simulators like Fortnite or Call of Duty, with that ultimate ancient battle cry, “git gud!”
The thing that is actually more immersion breaking for me is being in the far depths of space, coming upon a beautiful dance of physics in the form of a binary ringed gas giant pair, each with their respective satellites and shepherd moons, all orbiting a trinary star cluster only to find that these miracles were already discovered by Fartknocker69.
The problem is, that the measures a power would need to take to prevent them would interfere so much with normal gameplay that it'd be far worse than they are.
For example, take the simple statement "people shouldn't be allowed to blow you up as you're leaving a high-security station". Now think about what actually needs to be done to prevent that, assuming you're flying a ship which can't take much actual fire before exploding.
- waiting until they open fire isn't going to protect you; they can have enough munitions in the air to destroy a weak ship before any of them actually hit (with something heavy enough, they wouldn't even need to open fire, just ram!)
- resettable alt accounts, the rapid ways to obtain cash and materials if time efficiency is all you're after, the lack of need for engineering to destroy a really weak ship quickly, plus inter-player trading mean that any protection can't just be limited to restrictions on "known" accounts - they have to apply to everyone.
- so what's needed is to make sure that they can't get into weapons range of you in the first place
- that's easy enough in theory - just make the no fire zone about twice the current radius and very strictly traffic controlled: any deviation from your assigned flight path is rapidly met with lethal force, and only one ship at a time (other than authority enforcer vessels) is allowed to be taking off or landing at once
- are you willing to take several minutes every time you want to take off or land (unskippable, if you try you're shot down) just to stop people occasionally shooting at you, though?
Sure, the ultra-lax traffic and security enforcement around starports is highly unrealistic, and does allow you to be shot at by other players. On the other hand, when not being shot at, which is most of the time, it's way more fun to be able to boost out of the station, weave past the NPCs waiting to dock, and jump to hyperspace than Queuing And Customs Declarations Simulator 3300 would be.
Interdicting a locally-clean ship does give you a fine. It'd need to be a bounty offence to give your target the right to pre-emptively open fire on you for it, though, which would have odd interactions with the KWS and bounty hunting (since you can't use the utility scanners in supercruise); you might have a target which it's perfectly legal for you to shoot at in normal space, but it's a crime for you to bring them to normal space in the first place.This is one of the things that bugs me about the game. Interdicting, if you don't have a damn good reason, like a warrant on a pirate (we'll call it a kill mission in the right jurisdiction) should be a crime, or at least a fine. Evading interdiction from a lawful source should at least be a fine.
In fairness, Elite Dangerous goes very much down the route of "space mercenary power fantasy" where having consequences for your actions would be an inconvenience, so shooting down pirates doesn't even harm your reputation or legal status with the pirate faction in any way [1]. The response to crimes has to be similarly weak for the same reason - otherwise most Odyssey missions would be permanently making you hostile with half the factions in the system in very short order, and that wouldn't be much fun.
With the gameplay designed around not having consequences for the 99.99% of PvE, there's not really a way to introduce it for PvP without destroying the balance of the PvE game far worse than occasionally being shot at might.
[1] Compare with X4, which is hardly avoiding power fantasy design either, where shooting back at a Syndicate pirate in Argon space is perfectly fine from the Argon point of view - they'll probably help you out! - but it will definitely wreck your reputation with the Syndicate, even though they started it.
It is a fine.This is one of the things that bugs me about the game. Interdicting, if you don't have a damn good reason, like a warrant on a pirate (we'll call it a kill mission in the right jurisdiction) should be a crime, or at least a fine. Evading interdiction from a lawful source should at least be a fine.
Unfortunately ED doesn't have a concept of "legal to shoot but doesn't have a bounty". Back when bounties expired on a timer, certain things did come with trivially small (and short-lived) bounties specifically so that it made it legal for their targets to return fire.
There's a few places where such a flag would be insanely useful - getting shot while you have report crimes turned off, for instance, shouldn't result in you getting a bounty for returning fire. It shouldn't matter that you're technically firing on a clean ship if the only reason they're clean is, say, archon's rank 5 bonus or you have crimes off yourself.
At the very least, certain actions (interdicting, committing a bountyable crime even if the actual credit value is zeroed by the kumo crew, shooting a clean ship that has crimes off) should disable your crime reporting until you leave the instance.
if you're suggesting that it should be legal for me to atomise spam callers with an 8 ton grapeshot cannon... I'm listening.
Your not forced into Solo, join a PVE Player Group and its Open without the muppets, as i said the game is fine.
O7
It's fun!
Its up to you to change mode- but you can also try and use whats in game to overcome or mitigate the problem.
