Design 101 - Players must ALWAYS have choice to avoid or run instead of fight

[Max Thundercrock]

* In games where aggressive CC mechanics like stuns, etc. were largely _unavoidable_ and _uncounterable_, the players very often speak with their feet and their wallets and either leave or stay away. And those that stay complain bitterly.

Stun Lock was a huge part of WOW and that game seems to have done ok.

Also a pirate stands to lose a lot just not in upfront cost.
The price of his ship if he is destroyed plus insurance.
The bounties put on the pirates head and the bounty hunters that hunt them (see above).
The fines from being caught with stolen cargo.
The lesser value of the stolen cargo at black markets.
The moral/mental cost of living with your bad deeds (not a problem for some)
The lack of a mothers love.
Scurvy.
Termite treatment for the peg leg.

 

[Yokai]

On a positive note, although there has been a fair bit of wandering off-scope of the OP here--especially a lot of specific statements about _player_-based piracy and its rightness or wrongness--there have been a lot of GREAT suggestions and ideas about mechanics put forth in this thread by parties on all sides of the various fences.

I can only hope that Sandro and the other devs are mining this thread for ideas, because I've seen some very good ones that would solve even the specific issue I tried to keep this thread's scope narrowed down to.

Speaking for myself, I like @Skuli's thinking in post #325: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=114909&page=22&p=1789515&viewfull=1#post1789515

 

[AnnuverScotinExile]

I'm focusing on this point: I strongly believe the AI should be just as dangerous as any player, with the full range of ability (poor pilots like me all the way to superhumans), so solo / group should not be safer than open at all. Of course, you get some "Must interdict all human traders" psychos, but that's all the difference that should be felt in terms of risk.

Disagree.

We already have psycho NPCs, which we must do to 'balance' the psycho PCs in open. From where I sit, the ONLY difference between solo and open should be that all the ships in solo happen to be NPCs. It should be just as hard. Then we might get it to the point where people playing solo are doing it because they do not want to meet other players, whereas today most, I suspect, are doing it because it is easy.

I also want the ability to hide the fact that you are a PC if you want to. I want to make in game decisions based on n game information. I understand that there are plenty of people who think the other way around, and that is fine. But those who want to play the way I do, do not want to be told whether ships we see are PCs or not, and certainly do not want to be preferentially attacked by the pew-pew brigade just because we are PCs.

 

[kapitankev]

So what about people who used broken code to rake in 100s of Millions in credits, who now have the best ships and weapons the sim has to offer, and who have practically nothing to loose in an interdiction, wanting to pounce on defenceless Noobs T-6s........now the "pirate" wants it even MORE in their favour?
.....
It will just drive people to Solo.........I really begin to wonder if this is game breaking....I mean, the game works, but the Devs have dug them selves a hole here, and they keep digging.........so maybe community breaking is a better phrase.....
.....
I wanted a sim where I could park up in an asteroid field in the middle of nowhere and mine, trade up ships to then explore.......wanted to play in Solo.......it was "kind of" ok on release, but recent tweeks because of this and other debates, and lead to such an increase in NPCs and FightFightFight the only realy "fun" thing left to do, is load up for Bear and go killing.............
.....
May as well ditch all the exploration stuff, mining, trading, becasue if this keeps going the way it is, it is just going to be another empty game world............you can't FORCE people to be your targets, they will switch off, and just play something else............

It's just a trade off isn't it....you can still explore and trade and mine but it would be sensible to leave some cargo space for shields and guns. It would be even more sensible to have a buddy in a viper.

 

[Ydiss]

Every player can trade.
The fact that trading is the best money right now is irrelevant: no player is prevented from increasing their personal cash by trading.

It _is_ a strawman to argue that "because piracy is less cash flow than trading, there's your balanced risk-reward". Why? See the two statements made above. I can explain it to you, but I cannot understand it for you.

You argued only the first line of my post and apparently ignored the rest.

Not much better than a straw man.

I agreed it was a straw man argument. And you continued to argue the point.

 

[Zelos1983]

E is become more and more tedious..

The amount of interdictions is increasing, they are harder to get out of and when you submit, you even sometimes take damage.
Only to hit tab und jump out again.

I can understand that there are PvP players, but that's not the problem I have since I play solo. I'd like to explore, trade, do whatever I want in the game, but avoiding fights appears to become more and more the main aspect in the game - in terms of gametime. I would even understand if NPCs did it for a valid reason - but they do it because they are "programmed" to. No cargo to loot, no bounty to cash in, even the severe risk that the sun's vicinity and excessive energy use while interdicting blows them up. It's like "I'm sorry dude, there is nothing to gain for me by attacking you, but the script requires me to in order to pad out your game time".

Then there's the kill process option that a lot of people use. It's basically not a cheat because it mitigates the missing savegame function for the promised and never implemented offline-singleplayer mode. At least then the people with lower skills/ill equiped ships - or even those encountering bugs - can reload the game without the risk of being obliterated for no reason.
Instead of fixing the missing savegame feature, the bugs and the tedium, the only thing that the devs are doing is actively building an orwellian surveillence plugin to identify those who use that mechanic.

 

[Yokai]

* In games where aggressive CC mechanics like stuns, etc. were largely _unavoidable_ and _uncounterable_, the players very often speak with their feet and their wallets and either leave or stay away. And those that stay complain bitterly.

A. Stun Lock was a huge part of WOW and that game seems to have done ok.

Also a pirate stands to lose a lot just not in upfront cost.
B. The price of his ship if he is destroyed plus insurance.
C. The bounties put on the pirates head and the bounty hunters that hunt them (see above).
D. The fines from being caught with stolen cargo.
E. The lesser value of the stolen cargo at black markets.
F. The moral/mental cost of living with your bad deeds (not a problem for some)
G. The lack of a mothers love.
H. Scurvy.
I. Termite treatment for the peg leg.

A. Not any more. Blizzard wised up. Also, PvP is a tiny and...laughable... aspect of WoW. The prime example of this was DAoC. Remember the playerbase complaining about the unfair stunlock advantage of Midgard players? 90% of Dark Age of Camelot was about 3-way factional open world PvP. And one of the three factions had a HUGE mechanical advantage for a loooooonnnnngggggg time.

B. It's much lower than the typical traders. 6 minutes to recoup the cost of an A-class Viper/Cobra versus 102 minutes to recoup the cost of an A-class Python. Plus another 60 minutes to recoup the lost Python's cargo cost. You really think 6 minutes of recovery is equal to 162 minutes of recovery?

C. True, but negligible. And paid off safely by flying to any outpost. Gone. 3 minutes of non-safety.

D. True, but again, negligible. And paid off safely and quickly.

E. It's cargo they didn't pay for. Conversely, it's cargo the trader _did_ pay for, and lost.

F. Lulz. Noob. L2P.

G. See F. ^.^

H and I. but not in game.

 

[Yokai]

You argued only the first line of my post and apparently ignored the rest.

Not much better than a straw man.

I agreed it was a straw man argument. And you continued to argue the point.

You are correct. I apologize, Captain Tightpants. ^.^ I focused on your opening statement which is a "meta strawman", lol, saying the OP wasn't the right thing to argue at all.

It's only a strawman because your post missed the point in the first place.

 

[TeeWee]

I'm focusing on this point: I strongly believe the AI should be just as dangerous as any player, with the full range of ability (poor pilots like me all the way to superhumans), so solo / group should not be safer than open at all. Of course, you get some "Must interdict all human traders" psychos, but that's all the difference that should be felt in terms of risk.

Disagree.

We already have psycho NPCs, which we must do to 'balance' the psycho PCs in open. From where I sit, the ONLY difference between solo and open should be that all the ships in solo happen to be NPCs. It should be just as hard. Then we might get it to the point where people playing solo are doing it because they do not want to meet other players, whereas today most, I suspect, are doing it because it is easy.

?? I think you read me wrong: I did say that solo should not be safer than open. I'll just chalk this up to awkward wording on my part. But I think we agree completely on this point.

I also want the ability to hide the fact that you are a PC if you want to. I want to make in game decisions based on n game information. I understand that there are plenty of people who think the other way around, and that is fine. But those who want to play the way I do, do not want to be told whether ships we see are PCs or not, and certainly do not want to be preferentially attacked by the pew-pew brigade just because we are PCs.

Interesting and a valid way of seeing things. I don't mind either way; I understand that the worst of MMO will be solved by doing this (I don't think there will be a huge problem with griefing for example), you'd lose the human contact thing that makes the MMO attractive to a large part of the user base.

But as an option switch for the CMDRs, that might be a good idea.

 

[tagos]

You can never expect the financial risk of the pirate to be comparable to that of the trader though.

Not financial consequences, no. But weight of consequences, yes. I want a pirate career. I don't want to play Weekend-Pirate where what few consequences I face can be laughed away in one docking. That's not playing a pirate, that's just tooling around in consequence-free, pick your own targets easy-mode. At the moment neither piracy or the childish 'but I'm playing a psychopath' modes are worth my time. All I'd be doing is picking on people.

FD need to make piracy a challenging and rewarding game experience and doing that takes more than tinkering with FD timers. The first thing i'd do would be to give freighters teeth. There is no way a competent pilot should take a scratch from anything below a T9 when it comes to pure freighters. If traders cannot easily escape, and I'm okay with that notion, then it should be possible to mount and power some serious defences.

It would help if turrets actually worked properly and could actually track and hit something other than sector security. If an act of successful piracy was the outcome of a battle in which the attacker could lose then I think everyone (except the easy-mode weekend imitation pirates) would be happy.

The sort of pirate I want to play is one whose earned his notoriety by being a great pilot. The sort of pilot who can take on heavily armed traders, beat down their shields, blow the cargo hatch and cash in.

The sort of trader I want to be is the pilot who's good enough to take his battle hardened freighter into anarchy systems to make the big score. The sort of pilot pirates think again about tackling. Which is how it was in earlier games.

It's all too easy on both sides. Because i'm not an idiot I can fly my T7 laden with gold all weekend and not get interdicted and still make as much money as I would running around Lave.

I'm kind of having fun doing my own thing but the ED universe is basically so placid and tame you have to go out of your way to poke it with a pointed stick to get any real danger.

Danger and excitement has to start coming to us rather than being something we choose.

 

[Sim Maker]

It's just a trade off isn't it....you can still explore and trade and mine but it would be sensible to leave some cargo space for shields and guns. It would be even more sensible to have a buddy in a viper.

Oh I agree, if I fancy mining now, it is in my Cobra which I often take out just for shooting fun anyway......don't get me wrong, I love the combat in this.......I am just looking at the cold hard facts. The trading is a grind, no two ways about it.....The ...lets call them "short cuts" to riches for those so inclined have been closed off.........and now with NPCs through the roof, I am having trouble getting to a new a faction system in an empty hauler to collect bounties.............and I dont find that fun at all......I know for my part, I was looking forward to mining, exploring and maybe doing some fighting waaaaay down the road....but it has kind of forced me just to fight. Which I am ok with for now, but it will get boring in time.......
...
I see the NPC interdictions are already causing others playing in SOLO mode to leave the game, and these were all brought in to help out the PvP players.........its all out of wack, the balance is gone..........get your guns out, lets go to war is what we are left with.............sigh........
...
This is'nt like Quake or Streetfighter, where a One on One sort of involves skill and a balance.......this game is quite happy to pitch a week one noob in an empty hauler against The Biggest Baddest Player Craft in the Sim....anbd they have ZERO chance of survival..............so, they will get rid of the hauler, and buy something with guns.............its what I did, I wont be alone......have no desire to "grind" for a month, so that I can buy another ship, to grind on for another month to get the next one............Viper is good fun.........so as long as Elite stays like this, I will treat it as an awesome 80s remake of Asteroids.....nothing more.....saddly......A big beutiful Galaxy out there...........but us silly humans are just staying local mugging each other and blowing each others brains out.
...
2001 Cerebral, this aint.........

 

[Majinvash]

Could they not just create another game?

Elite - Not at all dangerous.
Carebear Edition

With innovative features such as

SUPER EXTRA LARGE Letterbox entrances to all stations.
Docking Computer that will guide you in from 1000ls
Interdictor drives that blows up anyone who uses it on anything but an NPC
Bigger profits on trade
More ships to collect. Gotta get em all!
Seeking Luxuries in every system.
Coffee Shop stations, where you can meet and discuss how much fake money you have created through trading and how you are going to kit out your ship against unshielded Eagles.
Automatic "warp into protected arm chair in station button", so if you make a mistake you don't have to go through the hassle of combat logging.
Only NPC Eagles that you might encounter in a threatening way but will message you asking you to agree to be interdicted. ( Auto Toggle for No is optional )
No Shield Cells
1 Small Hardpoint only on all ships.

 

[Aewarin Jameson]

Imho the interdiction mechanic is fine as it is. The problem is the way how systems and offensive behaviour is handled.

I agree.

An interdiction is a test of skill - if you submit then you accept some losses. If you fight the interdiction you might win.

Equally I agree the response from the game right now is poor - it's in part why players are able to go on killing sprees (against NPCs / players) with no regard to the consequences.

IMO:
- Implement the piracy role as per the DDF (rating / surrender mechanic) as this will differentiate the real pirates from the killers
- Beef up the bounty system (interdicting someone should be a low fine // shooting clean big bounty // killing a clean ship HUGE bounty)
- Change the response from the game. Rich / High Tech / specific government types should respond quicker and more heavily armed
- Lastly add in thresholds to the game such that once your notoriety reaches certain levels the number of NPC BHs increases*

*I found someone with a 5.5m bounty on their head after a KWS and despite thinking I would not win I had to have a go ... Surely more NPCs / Players would think the same if the bounty was suitably large

 

[Yokai]

Not financial consequences, no. But weight of consequences, yes. I want a pirate career. I don't want to play Weekend-Pirate where what few consequences I face can be laughed away in one docking. That's not playing a pirate, that's just tooling around in consequence-free, pick your own targets easy-mode. At the moment neither piracy or the childish 'but I'm playing a psychopath' modes are worth my time. All I'd be doing is picking on people.

FD need to make piracy a challenging and rewarding game experience and doing that takes more than tinkering with FD timers. The first thing i'd do would be to give freighters teeth. There is no way a competent pilot should take a scratch from anything below a T9 when it comes to pure freighters. If traders cannot easily escape, and I'm okay with that notion, then it should be possible to mount and power some serious defences.

It would help if turrets actually worked properly and could actually track and hit something other than sector security. If an act of successful piracy was the outcome of a battle in which the attacker could lose then I think everyone (except the easy-mode weekend imitation pirates) would be happy.

The sort of pirate I want to play is one whose earned his notoriety by being a great pilot. The sort of pilot who can take on heavily armed traders, beat down their shields, blow the cargo hatch and cash in.

The sort of trader I want to be is the pilot who's good enough to take his battle hardened freighter into anarchy systems to make the big score. The sort of pilot pirates think again about tackling. Which is how it was in earlier games.

It's all too easy on both sides. Because i'm not an idiot I can fly my T7 laden with gold all weekend and not get interdicted and still make as much money as I would running around Lave.

I'm kind of having fun doing my own thing but the ED universe is basically so placid and tame you have to go out of your way to poke it with a pointed stick to get any real danger.

Danger and excitement has to start coming to us rather than being something we choose.

This. It's outside the scope of this thread, but yes, so much this.

It might surprise some of you to learn that I have a rather bloodthirsty FFA PvP history going back to UO days. My all-time favorite was Asheron's Call 1 Darktide server, where the wars and political machinations among the PKs, Anti-PKs, and neutrals were just epic. I would _love_ to play a full blown pirate here. But not in ED as it stands today. Far too many things are imbalanced, and cheap hacks by the griefer types are too easy and too hard to find and ban players for, given the P2P networking model. I'm also a min-maxer, and when you put all that together it simply doesn't "pay" to be a pirate. Right now it does "pay" to be a trader, so that's what I focus on. But if the game designers make the proposed interdiction changes and suddenly being a trader means even in Solo mode you are subjected to repeated _unavoidable_ monetary loss from NPC interdictions with ZERO upsides? Screw that noise.

 

[Indy Original]

My first post!

Right, I've made an account specifically to comment on this thread, because I can't believe what I'm reading. Over the weekend there was a thread by a pirate, complaining that it was too easy for traders to submit + then quickly re-enter hyperspace, making piracy almost impossible... and that thread was full of traders deriding the pirate for daring to complain, even though this is a clearly broken aspect of the game! (It virtually gives the traders an auto-win option!) And now we have a thread where a trader is complaining that Interdictions are not fair, because the trader is automatically at a disadvantage... and when people try to point out that this is offset by the fact that traders make far more money than pirates, the OP dismisses that and says that this thread is only talking about interdictions, nothing else...
.
But you HAVE to look at the bigger picture! Yes, traders are at a disadvantage in interdictions (or at least they will be, when Frontier close the 'submit & jump away' loophole), but they are at an advantage in terms of overall profits! Pirates are at a disadvantage in terms of overall profit, but they should be at an advantage in an interdiction... when you look at it like this, it's actually pretty fair! A trader who makes a successful run makes a huge profit, but they risk being interdicted and potentially blown up, leading to an expensive insurance claim. A pirate will NEVER EVER make a huge profit, but they risk a lot less as well... even if they are destroyed, they don't lose much. It's as close to a level playing field as you can get with such asymmetric roles!
.
The traders say that if interdictions are fixed so that the pirates can actually win sometimes, then the traders will just stop playing in Open, which would be bad for everybody... but if the pirates do NOT get any kind of advantage at all, then no one will ever play as a pirate, and Elite really will become Eurotruck simulator in space - no joke! And that would be far, far worse in my opinion... as it is, traders have it all their own way, they practically cannot lose, so why are THEY the ones complaining?!

 

[kapitankev]

Tagos' suggestion of giving freighters some teeth sounds good to me....

Intediction should be easy fro a fighter against a freighter...a freighter should be slower than all but a Z spec sidewinder....
BUT, you should be able to pack a lot of arms and sheilds on a freighter...at the expense of cargo space....

This makes sense esp for folks who can't arrange fighter escort. Did I mention that fighter escort really is the key to all this?

I actually came across an NPC convoy with fighter escort in a USS the other day, it looked awesome...I accidentally fired on them when attempting to scan...they all turned on me...got out alive at 80%. First time I've seen anything like that, VERY COOL!

 

[Aewarin Jameson]

A trader who makes a successful run makes a huge profit, but they risk being interdicted and potentially blown up, leading to an expensive insurance claim.

As per FDs definition of a pirate a trader should rarely, if ever, be blown up - right now though there is no incentive to let them live which adds to the problem.

There are of course psycho NPCs / Players but again the repercussions for their chosen "life style" is negligible.

 

[Yokai]

Right, I've made an account specifically to comment on this thread, because I can't believe what I'm reading. Over the weekend there was a thread by a pirate, complaining that it was too easy for traders to submit + then quickly re-enter hyperspace, making piracy almost impossible... and that thread was full of traders deriding the pirate for daring to complain, even though this is a clearly broken aspect of the game! (It virtually gives the traders an auto-win option!) And now we have a thread where a trader is complaining that Interdictions are not fair, because the trader is automatically at a disadvantage... and when people try to point out that this is offset by the fact that traders make far more money than pirates, the OP dismisses that and says that this thread is only talking about interdictions, nothing else...
.
But you HAVE to look at the bigger picture! Yes, traders are at a disadvantage in interdictions (or at least they will be, when Frontier close the 'submit & jump away' loophole), but they are at an advantage in terms of overall profits! Pirates are at a disadvantage in terms of overall profit, but they should be at an advantage in an interdiction... when you look at it like this, it's actually pretty fair! A trader who makes a successful run makes a huge profit, but they risk being interdicted and potentially blown up, leading to an expensive insurance claim. A pirate will NEVER EVER make a huge profit, but they risk a lot less as well... even if they are destroyed, they don't lose much. It's as close to a level playing field as you can get with such asymmetric roles!
.
The traders say that if interdictions are fixed so that the pirates can actually win sometimes, then the traders will just stop playing in Open, which would be bad for everybody... but if the pirates do NOT get any kind of advantage at all, then no one will ever play as a pirate, and Elite really will become Eurotruck simulator in space - no joke! And that would be far, far worse in my opinion... as it is, traders have it all their own way, they practically cannot lose, so why are THEY the ones complaining?!

1. Ask yourself this: "Why, exactly, should combat be any less profitable than trading? Is that some law cast in stone?"

2. In the larger scope of the game, NO player is restricted from trading. Or combat. Or exploration. ALL players have EQUAL access to monetary income.

3. Why should someone who simply dislikes trading be _entitled_ to a much greater chance of both initiating and winning a PvP encounter with a player who enjoys trading?

PvP should be consensual. If you want to entice ALL players to consent to PvP, you need to make it worth everyone's while. EQUALLY WORTH.

Right now, this is not the case.

You cannot use the scope of one entirely different imbalance (the fact that trading makes far more money at present) as a defense against the more narrow scope of the imbalance for the proposed interdiction changes. Doing so is a strawman fallacy.

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

As per FDs definition of a pirate a trader should rarely, if ever, be blown up - right now though there is no incentive to let them live which adds to the problem.

There are of course psycho NPCs / Players but again the repercussions for their chosen "life style" is negligible.

A problem with FD's definition as you state it is that even if the trader is not "blown up", they still suffer a hugely imbalanced loss compared to the "pirate". A viper takes 6 minutes of trading to completely recoup the cost of a total loss, by the typical player. A Python takes 102 minutes to recoup the loss just for the hull damage. And another 60 minutes to recoup the cost from the lost cargo.

6 minutes versus 162 minutes.....

 

[Jordan Cobalt]

You're conflating the scope of the "reward". In the larger sense of the entire game, every player has equal access to "reward". Anyone can trade. Anyone can BH. Anyone can pirate. Anyone can explore. Yes, there is an imbalance in terms of the three main paths (combat, trade, exploration) having inequal income flow, but that is a completely different _scope_ of imbalance than what the OP or this thread is about.

This thread is specifically about interdiction mechanics and the risk-reward balance between the interdictor and the interdicted. Nothing more, nothing less.

You are correct I misconstrued the point to be about general reward as opposed to being about interdiction risk reward.

I don't understand why anyone would think interdiction should favor a trader? The pirate is the one pulling the trigger thus he has the advantage of choosing, when and whom to strike. Traders have to take a proactive defense against interdictions. They have to make themselves not worth the effort of a pirate. Pirates have the advantage of being able to choose who to pirate, that's why it's so unbalanced. I don't see any way of making it fairer.

Oh and you missed my point about how traders can fly combat ships. There's noone with a gun forcing them into flying lunch boxes.

 

[Sim Maker]

Right, I've made an account specifically to comment on this thread, because I can't believe what I'm reading. Over the weekend there was a thread by a pirate, complaining that it was too easy for traders to submit + then quickly re-enter hyperspace, making piracy almost impossible... and that thread was full of traders deriding the pirate for daring to complain, even though this is a clearly broken aspect of the game! (It virtually gives the traders an auto-win option!) And now we have a thread where a trader is complaining that Interdictions are not fair, because the trader is automatically at a disadvantage... and when people try to point out that this is offset by the fact that traders make far more money than pirates, the OP dismisses that and says that this thread is only talking about interdictions, nothing else...
.
But you HAVE to look at the bigger picture! Yes, traders are at a disadvantage in interdictions (or at least they will be, when Frontier close the 'submit & jump away' loophole), but they are at an advantage in terms of overall profits! Pirates are at a disadvantage in terms of overall profit, but they should be at an advantage in an interdiction... when you look at it like this, it's actually pretty fair! A trader who makes a successful run makes a huge profit, but they risk being interdicted and potentially blown up, leading to an expensive insurance claim. A pirate will NEVER EVER make a huge profit, but they risk a lot less as well... even if they are destroyed, they don't lose much. It's as close to a level playing field as you can get with such asymmetric roles!
.
The traders say that if interdictions are fixed so that the pirates can actually win sometimes, then the traders will just stop playing in Open, which would be bad for everybody... but if the pirates do NOT get any kind of advantage at all, then no one will ever play as a pirate, and Elite really will become Eurotruck simulator in space - no joke! And that would be far, far worse in my opinion... as it is, traders have it all their own way, they practically cannot lose, so why are THEY the ones complaining?!

Fine, have it all your way......in a few weeks, the galaxy will be empty of PvP traders, and you can hunt NPCs......it really is that simple. Be careful what you wish for.......you might get it......old saying......