Something has always irked me about bullies. And however it's painted, that's always how I've seen 'Mittens' and his sycophants. Anyone who delibrately goes out of their way to hurt people is just... hateful to me.
Avoiding Group Control...
- Thread starter JeffRyan
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Something has always irked me about bullies. And however it's painted, that's always how I've seen 'Mittens' and his sycophants. Anyone who delibrately goes out of their way to hurt people is just... hateful to me.
How many members can Goonswarm field? 1,000? 2,000? 10,000? I have no idea of their membership size is, so let's take 10,000 as a figure to work with. My guess is that I've over estimating their numbers.
How many Goonswarm members does it take to dominate a star system? Again I have no idea, but just to pull a number of of the air, lets say 10. So that means that Goonswarm can dominate 1,000 star systems completely. That's not much of our playing area; we have 100 million times that number to play in.
If ED's Milky Way is modeled on the real Milky Way, and we can be pretty sure that it is, 1,000 stars can be enclosed by a sphere about 30 parsecs in diameter, or about 100ly. How big were the areas of space that ED were planning on fencing off for future events, like the Thargoids? Looking at the Galactic Map that's an area about the size of the Federation, or the Empire, or the Alliance.
To quote Douglas Adams:
If their role call and number of players don't permit them to control 1,000 star systems, then they become even less of a problem.
P.S.
I'm also a member of the First Great Expedition. I got the impression that there is some concern that any large group, such as ours, would be manipulating the game play to suit our ends. I would like to assure that is not the case. At least not in my case, or those in the FGE I chatted to about this.
We very much which to play in the All Player mode like the rest of you, and we intend to look at the group play mechanics so that we won't be dominating any instance we are playing in. At the time of posting this, there are only 166 members in the forum, we nothing like the size that I gather Goonswarm are.
How many Goonswarm members does it take to dominate a star system? Again I have no idea, but just to pull a number of of the air, lets say 10. So that means that Goonswarm can dominate 1,000 star systems completely. That's not much of our playing area; we have 100 million times that number to play in.
If ED's Milky Way is modeled on the real Milky Way, and we can be pretty sure that it is, 1,000 stars can be enclosed by a sphere about 30 parsecs in diameter, or about 100ly. How big were the areas of space that ED were planning on fencing off for future events, like the Thargoids? Looking at the Galactic Map that's an area about the size of the Federation, or the Empire, or the Alliance.
To quote Douglas Adams:
If their role call and number of players don't permit them to control 1,000 star systems, then they become even less of a problem.
P.S.
I'm also a member of the First Great Expedition. I got the impression that there is some concern that any large group, such as ours, would be manipulating the game play to suit our ends. I would like to assure that is not the case. At least not in my case, or those in the FGE I chatted to about this.
We very much which to play in the All Player mode like the rest of you, and we intend to look at the group play mechanics so that we won't be dominating any instance we are playing in. At the time of posting this, there are only 166 members in the forum, we nothing like the size that I gather Goonswarm are.
I completely agree with you. I don't get that type of mentality.
I don't want to be a pirate in ED, but I can see how being a pirate will be enjoyable for some. So long as the game mechanics don't allow privateering to dominate I welcome the priates, they only add to the game play.
But the bulling mentality, that is completely alien to me.
Goons never bothered me. Being in a cloaky HAC gang made them juicy targets. I never liked the large fleet crap anyway, I've always flown in the more technical guerilla style fleets of 10-20 ships. Onyx, Vagabond, Crow, Falcon, etc etc. All the interesting stuff. We often tackled larger fleets that were made up of the same ships; it was easy money.
It's not so much the Goons themselves that is the problem. It's other peoples perception of them that causes issues.
Developers actually catering to their playerbase, other groups of people unwilling to act in certain ways to avoid Goon retaliation, their history and habit of not playing the game, but the metagame.
They go out of their way to cause certain people/groups misery, "winning" is all that matters, and to be honest, their sheer arrogance is unpleasant. Personally I find it all distasteful.
Games are meant to be fun, or they would be chores. If a game intrinsically allows such behavior, then all is fine and good. If a game is metagamed or forumpwned into introducing allowances for such behavior - then something is seriously wrong.
Developers actually catering to their playerbase, other groups of people unwilling to act in certain ways to avoid Goon retaliation, their history and habit of not playing the game, but the metagame.
They go out of their way to cause certain people/groups misery, "winning" is all that matters, and to be honest, their sheer arrogance is unpleasant. Personally I find it all distasteful.
Games are meant to be fun, or they would be chores. If a game intrinsically allows such behavior, then all is fine and good. If a game is metagamed or forumpwned into introducing allowances for such behavior - then something is seriously wrong.
You are absolutely correct. The SA Goons have a long history of doing a mass exodus and either attempting to wreck a game (original goal at EVE) or to take it over and dominate it.
While I welcome their money for the project, I absolutely hate the idea of the Goonswarm 2.0 setting the tone for Elite. I hope Frontier are on their toes, and never give anybody the tools to dominate systems, stations or the economy by weight of numbers.
Help us David Braben, you're out only hope.
To be honest, I think David Braben made his choice thirty years ago. Elite is about one man in his ship, lost amongst the vastness of space. That's the opposite of the power fantasy inherent in many games, so playing the game to become top dog rather misses the point.
A while back I wrote a thread about the reasons people play. Assuming Goonswarm's reason to play is strictly about amassing territory to dominate other players face-to-face, it shouldn't be too hard for Frontier to combat them - here's a basic approach:
Find systems where more than double the average percentage of players are in a private or solo group, identify players in the "all" group that spend at least 80% of their time in those systems, and have the matchmaking algorithm reduce the probability of players in that set being matchmade with players not in that set.
Obviously the above would need all kinds of tuning to make it harder to game and harder to get caught up in by accident, but the mood music out of Frontier in the past few months has been increasingly positive about such advanced uses of the matchmaking algorithm.
er, 10,000+ .. typically.. 1000 stars is about 45 LY. 14 parcecs.
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980123d.html
Using the 0.120 stars/cubic parsec number, and using a volume for a distance 100 light-years = 100/3.26 = 30.7 parsecs
Number = density * volume
= 0.120 stars/cubic parsec * 4/3 pi (30.7 parsecs)^3
= 14,600 stars
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what are we talking about?... Battle tech and Clan invasions?
32 per instance, they say 10 instances per region? 300? by 100 systems? 300,000?
They cant maintain that, there no fun, and no profit.
A parasite which kills its host must seek another.
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Even if every person on the planet was a Goon, that would be just over 7 billion guildie sheep.
400 billion systems means that each member of the human race has to simultaneously patrol and "dominate" about 57 systems.
I can see that working out nicely for them
400 billion systems means that each member of the human race has to simultaneously patrol and "dominate" about 57 systems.
I can see that working out nicely for them
I deliberately didn't specify what could be meant by total domination of a region. Just given them that, assume that they can make good on their claims and calculate how big that region will be.
You came up with numbers that suggest that they couldn't even control that amount of space. I'm not going to argue. I have no way of knowing how accurate your estimates are; come to that I have no way of knowing how accurate my estimates are. Your analysis backs my own, any area of space the Goonswarm could control would be relatively small, and something that could be avoid by everyone else.
If the Goonswarm were to invade ED it would be like the little bully in the playground, the one that sits in the sandpit and keeps all the other kids out. Fine (s)he controls the sandpit. The other kids just go and play on the swings, the roundabouts, the seesaws, the climbing frame.....
By the why, I would like to point out that we both referenced the same NASA page. I'm old school. I link to things, but make those links part of my normal sentences.
So I believe you erred when you selected 0.120 as the density of stars per cubic parsec. That is the value close to earth, which is abnormally dense. As you expand the region of space you will note that that number falls dramatically. A 25ly radius region provides a number less than half the value you choose. It would have been better to go with that for you calculation.
But I picked a 30ly diameter region because the third (and broken) line of that table actually gives us a count for the number of stars in that region. It's 1008. I was not worried about 8 stars here or there, not on a back of the envelope type calculations.
But thank you so much for checking. To have something I wrote pear reviewed is awesome!
I feel just like a real scientist now.Even if every person on the planet was a Goon, that would be just over 7 billion guildie sheep.
400 billion systems means that each member of the human race has to simultaneously patrol and "dominate" about 57 systems.
I can see that working out nicely for them
400 billion systems is huge, but in this context there are only say 100,000 systems that are worth 'dominating'. And perhaps 10,000 that will cause 'grief'.
And there are going to be choke-point systems that due to typical jump range forcing people to use that system as a jump point. A group of 16 highly determined players can affect other players that get drop into the same instance.
However, the proposed Ignore function hopefully will work to bypass them.
The next area is economic dominance. We already seen how margins get compressed when trade route gets overused. It's foreseeable that a coordinated group of hundreds of players backing certain fractions or side in a conflict will affect the outcome. So, the Goons could manipulate and dominate the background simulation simply by being the largest, most focused group in determining the outcome of an event.
This is within the designed gameplay, but it will affect the enjoyment of others as a vastly larger group could make the outcome of an event inevitable.
That is very true. However, Goons suffer one slight problem - they have a hierarchy.
Individual pilots will not be allowed to perform tasks they are not assigned to - that breaks the metagame. Orders will take some time to be constructed and then percolate down. Nothing too surprising about that.
The background simulation itself should self-correct these factors. If it's truly a simulation - all trading events must have an effect on all other trading events. Goons buying up all the gold in the universe hoping to starve the market will find themselves holding a worthless commodity as immense platinum asteroids are discovered, or gold falls out of fashion, or they discover they were just sold painted lead.
It's going to be interesting
I beg your pardon - would you care to expand on this? I don't understand what you are trying to say.
There are a number of things that ED lacks that make it harder to dominate the direction and focus of the game. As posted previously chief amongst these are the fact that FD have tight control of their game and there is currently no reason/justification for any form of player represented council to dominate easily.
FD would appear to be remaining true to the ethos of the original games, one man , one ship and a hundred credits. The muliti-player equivalent would be I suppose , “you and a few mates against the universe”. That’s no good if you have a couple of thousand bored Clan members so they’ll need to change both the ethos and probably the direction of the game.
An external group must be a little more subtle in how steer the end result into the game they want - and not the game FD or the backers envisaged.
One metagame option is to take something good like the "Great Expedition" and use it to promote tools which would help them dominate in game. i.e Any enhancement to the grouping mechanism would help them especially if they could get FD to allow Corporations in game, as it would give them an identity. Once they have that they have a focal point. At the moment they may well dominate the game but they couldn't broadcast the fact.
In effect I won ED but no one can tell.
Just because you currently can’t win ED is immaterial they will try to nudge/steer the game into something they can play the way they want and all the backers, FD, other players who joined for the vision of ED as it is now – Tough.
Even worse as an identity they will be free to grandstand - agitate - and project force above their actual weight, (both in game and on the forums). At most you're probably looking at a couple of thousand - not many when detached against the 50,000 current backers but they will be organised, they will use sock puppets and alts to give the illusion of more. The counter of organising in the same manner just plays into their hands.
Just as dangerous though would be the reasonable request to implement player owned permanent or semi permanent assets such as stations or bases - good for the Great Expedition, it gives them re-supply bases - Great for the external group as it gives an opening for player owned territory and an Empire in Space.
There will be other ways good things are twisted but that’s a couple of easy ones.
Ultimately so long as FD remain true to the original vision, don't give in to the ego stroking or forum wailing the game should remain on track and rather than be pulled into a Niche like EvE, retain and improve of its position as 16th most anticipated PC game of E3.
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The having transponder off option does seem like it will be a disincentive to the Goons. They are not particularly into PvE and if most of us non SA types just appear the same as NPC's who are they going to dominate? There will still be all the forum meta-gaming and idea/word war on that level. I hope people are wise to it and don't get drawn in.
<edit> actually I just thought, probably one of the easiest client/network mods is going to be one that can identify and mark out other players from NPC's. I bet that will be one of the first Goon hacks.</edit>
<edit> actually I just thought, probably one of the easiest client/network mods is going to be one that can identify and mark out other players from NPC's. I bet that will be one of the first Goon hacks.</edit>
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I dont really share concerns about one group being able to dominate the game. As it stands ignore and single and private online group sessions mean people can play without interference from other players if they wish.
However, if people do wish to organise themselves to play in the all-group and manage a degree of control in certain areas then all power to them.
I've noticed amongst many players there seems to be a single-player mindset here, and fair enough, but nothing is stopping other people creating their own organisations outside the game and playing in concert with one another.
One of the problems with eve is that its almost impossible to catch up with established players who've been in the game for a long time. Provided thats not repeated in ED people will be able to respond if they choose to.
However, if people do wish to organise themselves to play in the all-group and manage a degree of control in certain areas then all power to them.
I've noticed amongst many players there seems to be a single-player mindset here, and fair enough, but nothing is stopping other people creating their own organisations outside the game and playing in concert with one another.
One of the problems with eve is that its almost impossible to catch up with established players who've been in the game for a long time. Provided thats not repeated in ED people will be able to respond if they choose to.
I dont really share concerns about one group being able to dominate the game. As it stands ignore and single and private online group sessions mean people can play without interference from other players if they wish.
However, if people do wish to organise themselves to play in the all-group and manage a degree of control in certain areas then all power to them.
I've noticed amongst many players there seems to be a single-player mindset here, and fair enough, but nothing is stopping other people creating their own organisations outside the game and playing in concert with one another.
One of the problems with eve is that its almost impossible to catch up with established players who've been in the game for a long time. Provided thats not repeated in ED people will be able to respond if they choose to.
So stop developing the game the majority of people would appear to have backed, play the Goons game but no doubt play it worse, and have EvE 2.0 with probably 50/60K active players at any one time (After 10 years). No thanks
As for the ignore mechanism as a level of protection - my understanding is that it's been steered into something thats fairly weak - to protect the PvP game style. But as with everything currently until it's tested there's no way to be sure.
really... if you blinkering people cant see it... let me spell it out... ED has a 32 person instance limit... The goons have a 5000+ membership list... the Goons.. break into 17 man squads.. (17 because 2x17 = 34 = new instance) they then swarm 20 systems with these 17 man squads and gank EVERYTHING that comes through..... AI PC.. doesn't matter... once they gank a few haulers, they then spread out a bit... pretty soon... they control a 100 system wide area...
in a 400 billion star game is that much?.. nope... BUT when they control 15-20 major star ports through sheer numbers....well... you have EvE 2.0 with joysticks
in a 400 billion star game is that much?.. nope... BUT when they control 15-20 major star ports through sheer numbers....well... you have EvE 2.0 with joysticks
And how long before FD decide it's damaging the game to the detriment of the 50K+ other members.
Then they have a choice, and unlike EvE have retained control of their game.
Let it happen, you probably can't stop it, then.
If I were FD I'd probably be a nasty sod:
Run a search algorithm on the server logs - build up a picture of who's goon and who's not.
Inject a rule into the background simulation - any time these players form a group bigger than "X" and remain static in a system longer than "Y" spawn NPC's of increasing number and strength until the group moves on.
Or they may choose to let it happen, call it emergent gameplay and see how it affects overall player recruitment and retention.
Good post. The discussion so far, mostly about exerting control over ships in an instance, is looking at the problem from the wrong angle. A competent group seeking dominance will not analyse the game by looking at its superficial play, but by thinking laterally about all of its mechanisms and resources.
Resources might be: combat dominance of a location in an instance (the obvious one Gen-H-S & co. used with their Station Quarantine action during Alpha), the persistent economy and its usefulness to players, ship availability, exploration rewards, NPC criminals to hunt, encounter locations and missions, new players and their formative minutes in the game.
Any mechanism which offers permanent control of some resource will be especially interesting.
Local control of some resource may be sufficient to achieve their goals. If all new players spawn around some locus, they'll try to control that and ruin the OOTB experience. If there is a chokepoint on the graph of possible hyperspace routes between systems, they'll use it.
They'll start with the persistent economy, as this allows one group to affect everyone not playing in solo offline in some way. They would try to tip a market one way, then observe what happens to balance that out, and try to manipulate that mechanism. Unless the background simulation of the economy is perfect and infinite, there will be some limits to the balancing mechanisms, and your hypothetical aggressor will detect and go and roost on those to see how they break. So perhaps the start point markets are depressed so that new players can't make an enjoyable profit with their 100CR and 4 ton holds.
Pilot's Federation bounties may be gamed by letting a sacrificial player who is not in the alliance always get the killing shot in, so the rest of the gang only get the 'assault' bounty, the executioner gets the 'murder' bounty and then burns their bounty level by flying into an asteroid, destroying the ship.
Injected events will also be a target; since they are artificially added to the game, their rules will be a lot simpler and easier to game.
It would be interesting to try to develop these tactics already in Beta so FD can learn to counter them.
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