Fact: Dumb AI promotes and encourages the behavior of gankers.

[sollisb]

It's not luck. Morbad, for instance - that CMDR is a perfect example demonstrating luck has nothing to do with it, and I think could withstand 99/100 alpha strikes from some of the best murderers in the game. I doubt however he would even allow himself to get interdicted into such a situation, as he would have identified the danger within a few moments of entering the system.

It is rare I am accused of lacking brain cells. Thanks for a novelty, I suppose.

Yep, well Morbad is up the top of the player ability ladder.

You're welcome to educate me as to how any normal person would find fun in killing defenseless players and ruining their game.

What is the thought process?

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Because they have less meaningful gameplay to give them anything else to do.

Would good AI completely eliminate them? No, because the two activities aren't analogous. But the current options for gankers are this:


1: Spend an inordinate amount of time locating other players or organizing yourself for an proportionately smaller time of productive activity in the game.

Or

2: Completely waste your time shooting braindead NPC's.


It's quite obvious that if their options were to be changed to what's below, that gankers would actually have more than one option for enjoying the game.

1: Spend an inordinate amount of time locating other players or organizing yourself for an proportionately smaller time of productive activity in the game.

Or

2: Pop into the local CZ and be in the middle of a hairball within a couple minutes that's capable of challenging them for 90% of the reward they would get from Activity #1 instead of spending hours looking for 30 seconds of gratification.



I think it's pretty clear what the best set of options is, given first set of choices and the second set.

The way I play is when I stop enjoying a game I move onto another (I may still moan a bit of forums about it ) however I don't go out of my way to spoil other people's game.
But that said everything is fair game in open

 

[Windscreen Smudge]

am i the only one who thinks there is already an issue if 1 vs. 1 situations can already called a "gank" ? (=gang kill)

when one player can overpower another one so much, that the victim has no real chance to escape, the games balance is off.

i would like so see that the acronym PvP gets changed too. Its not Player vs. Player anymore, its Player vs. Prey

I don't think I've seen a single instance in ED yet where the target didn't have a chance to escape. They're just really, really bad at realizing the situation they're in and getting the fig out.

This isn't Eve where you hot-drop in on a target (literally physically on top of them) without warning and tackle their ship, rendering it completely immobile while you just pound away at it. If a fully loaded FDL drops in 5km away and you're puttering around in your DBX you should be high-waking before he can even orient himself.

KEEP LOADING UP THOSE EXPLORATION SHIPS WITH D RANK SENSORS BOYS!

 

[Feros-da-Grundig]

Whether they survived or not doesn't matter. They had a chance to survive. In a gank, you don't have a chance.

In a gank, by the time you realize it's happening, you're already dead.

Perhaps some visual aids will help.

First off, thanks for the laugh on the spoiler.

I will accept you have a consistent and logical position on the matter.

Let me point out a huge portion (vast majority on PS4, I can't speak for PC but assume many) of the kills on DG are 1v1 where situational awareness would have probably been enough to survive.

But almost no one is crying out that DG2 isn't really ganking people.

The few of us (even the white hats) who point out that the explorers have a chance to survive are often met with derision.

Even if what I do isn't ganking by your definition, I still feel every suggestion in my thread for new pilots improves their chance to survive, and is much simpler to implement than many other suggestions. I do not think your OP suggestion is bad, but have done a fair share of AI implementation myself and feel the simple tutorials and training I suggest would be a lot less work (realizing that improving victim chances is different from giving gankers something different to do).

I also suspect gankers (by either my or your definition) will have very little to no interest in battle AI, no matter what. But that's just my opinion.

 

[sollisb]

I don't think I've seen a single instance in ED yet where the target didn't have a chance to escape. They're just really, really bad at realizing the situation they're in and getting the fig out.

This isn't Eve where you hot-drop in on a target (literally physically on top of them) without warning and tackle their ship, rendering it completely immobile while you just pound away at it. If a fully loaded FDL drops in 5km away and you're puttering around in your DBX you should be high-waking before he can even orient himself.

KEEP LOADING UP THOSE EXPLORATION SHIPS WITH D RANK SENSORS BOYS!

Let's set aside some falacies...

An FDL dropping into the instance, and interdicting for a kill is not ganking.

A player sitting at the meeting point or in last weeks case some 7 or 8 players all waiting on a ship to spawn and then killing it, is ganking.

We called it 'camping' back in the Quake days.

No amount of 'teaching' is going to survive a player waiting for you to spawn.

Anyone who travels 1000s of LYs with the sole intention of griefing explorers on a Special Event, really is, in my opinion, a good subject for the local asylum to play with.

 

[Feros-da-Grundig]

Yep, well Morbad is up the top of the player ability ladder.

I have been playing approximately 1/10th as long as Morbad. I participate in prearranged free for alls where literally anything goes in anarchy systems. The most murderous ganker wings in attendence, no rules on station rams, 4 v 1s, 8 v 1s, etc. The PS4 gankers might not be quite as murdery as PC but nevertheless we're quite skilled at killing.

I am always in a wing of 1 and the only times I die are when I choose to not escape, even in non optimal builds.

It's not luck, and doesn't require having some top 0.1% skill level.

 

[sollisb]

I have been playing approximately 1/10th as long as Morbad. I participate in prearranged free for alls where literally anything goes in anarchy systems. The most murderous ganker wings in attendence, no rules on station rams, 4 v 1s, 8 v 1s, etc. The PS4 gankers might not be quite as murdery as PC but nevertheless we're quite skilled at killing.

I am always in a wing of 1 and the only times I die are when I choose to not escape, even in non optimal builds.

It's not luck, and doesn't require having some top 0.1% skill level.

Edit: Read the entire thing wrong

What has pre-arranged tournies got to do with travelling 10000lys to grief other players?

No-one, or at least not I, said anything about your killing ability.

EDIT 2: The big thing you guys are missing is that your average player who is primarily an explorer; 1. Doesn't care for combat, even less about PvP. 2. Build their ships for deep space where the chances of meeting someone are about as remote as my Granny suddenly rising from the dead.

 

[Feros-da-Grundig]

Sorry mate now you're sounding like the local school bully.

Yes, yes, those cruel bullies who write out pages of suggestions for the new students to survive and thrive out in the open playground.

Not the sort of bully who just makes personal attacks.

 

[Ian Phillips]

I'll step in here....

If you have a point to make - then do so without attacking/baiting other posters. This goes for everyone involved in the thread.

Thanks.

 

[Stealthie]

I suspect that it does not - simply because it was a statement to the market and there are laws in place to punish false statements.

https://www.londonstockexchange.com/exchange/news/market-news/market-news-detail/FDEV/13959476.html

I dont think you fully understand the quote I used in my reply.

Statistics can be both completely truthful AND utterly misleading, at the same time, when used inappropriately.

Frontier might have sold half as many copies of Horizons as they've sold copies of the base-game but that doesn't mean that half the people playing the game don't have Horizons.

I'd bet that the vast majority of "base-game but not Horizons" sales were made before Horizons was even released and I'd bet that they're mostly accounts that are no longer active.
More realistically, I'd also bet that less than 25% of active players don't have Horizons. Probably less than 10%.

 

[sollisb]

Yes, yes, those cruel bullies who write out pages of suggestions for the new students to survive and thrive out in the open playground.

Not the sort of bully who just makes personal attacks.

I am not attacking you. I'm attacking/questioning the entire thought process behind ganking. You admitted to doing it, so I thought maybe, you could offer us some insight.

 

[sollisb]

I dont think you fully understand the quote I used in my reply.

Statistics can be both completely truthful AND utterly misleading, at the same time, when used inappropriately.

Frontier might have sold half as many copies of Horizons as they've sold copies of the base-game but that doesn't mean that half the people playing the game don't have Horizons.

I'd bet that the vast majority of "base-game but not Horizons" sales were made before Horizons was even released and I'd bet that they're mostly accounts that are no longer active.
More realistically, I'd also bet that less than 25% of active players don't have Horizons. Probably less than 10%.

I'd take a step further and say a small amount of those with Horizons, have all engineers unlocked.

 

[Windscreen Smudge]

Let's set aside some falacies...

An FDL dropping into the instance, and interdicting for a kill is not ganking.

A player sitting at the meeting point or in last weeks case some 7 or 8 players all waiting on a ship to spawn and then killing it, is ganking.

We called it 'camping' back in the Quake days.

No amount of 'teaching' is going to survive a player waiting for you to spawn.

Anyone who travels 1000s of LYs with the sole intention of griefing explorers on a Special Event, really is, in my opinion, a good subject for the local asylum to play with.

Camping and Ganking are different. Quake predates ganking, if you need any help with that.

Perhaps another visual aide is in order.

[video=youtube;fnyB6kx1_xU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnyB6kx1_xU[/video]

 

[Phoenix_Dfire]

This is going to sound a little bit wierd but I think I agree with the OP (in a way).

Because the pirate NPCs don't attack as much as I feel they should, its let a lot of commanders get away with Min/Max Cargo running or Exploration builds which shouldn't stand a chance in a 'Dangerous' Galaxy. What the previous Elite games have got right (more or less) is that, yes you could have a Min/Max trade build but you'd better keep it running in the high security systems because pirates will rip it to shreds elsewhere. This has been missed in ED and when players take these min/max builds either into a CG or say on DW2, they will get ripped to shreds.

Nat's Wright, showed that just sacrificing a little jump range (about 0.3 of a ly) got her a ship that could outrun most of the gankers in DW2 (much to their annoyance) and had great fun in doing so.

 

[sollisb]

Camping and Ganking are different. Quake predates ganking, if you need any help with that.

Perhaps another visual aide is in order.

Both the same thing. Using a mechanic to gain a superior advantage over an enemy (gaming). Ie; Sititng with your pvp ship over a spawn point for players to spawn where you immediately open fire. Taking advantage of a scenario to gain an overwhelming advantage.

None of that is so bad until it's added to picking on Explorers.

Using 'Eve' as an example of anything to do with Elite is a joke. Eve is a dedicated PvP game where overwhelming force and gang warfare is the norm and expected. Ships are supplied in the game to be utilised to suppress and kill your enemy on a large scale. So I don't know what your point is in using it.

 

[Windscreen Smudge]

Both the same thing. Using a mechanic to gain a superior advantage over an enemy (gaming). Ie; Sititng with your pvp ship over a spawn point for players to spawn where you immediately open fire. Taking advantage of a scenario to gain an overwhelming advantage.

None of that is so bad until it's added to picking on Explorers.

Using 'Eve' as an example of anything to do with Elite is a joke. Eve is a dedicated PvP game where overwhelming force and gang warfare is the norm and expected. Ships are supplied in the game to be utilised to suppress and kill your enemy on a large scale. So I don't know what your point is in using it.

My point in using it was to teach you what the definition of "gank" is, and you conveniently ignored it and made up your own.

Thank you for excluding yourself from this conversation. The door is over there.

 

[jasonbarron]

Came for the (hopefully) stimulating conversation about the need for improved NPC's. Stayed for all the self comparisons to toddlers/puppies/kittens.

 

[sollisb]

My point in using it was to teach you what the definition of "gank" is, and you conveniently ignored it and made up your own.

Thank you for excluding yourself from this conversation. The door is over there.

2. (in a video game) use underhand means to defeat or kill (a less experienced opponent).
"that troll just ganked me"

If I want you to teach me something, I'll be sure to come ask you.

o7

 

[Windscreen Smudge]

Came for the (hopefully) stimulating conversation about the need for improved NPC's. Stayed for all the self comparisons to toddlers/puppies/kittens.

On Thursdays we have a slumber party where we get together in our jammies and eat chocolate malt balls while watching My Best Friend's Wedding.

Be there.

 

[Windscreen Smudge]

2. (in a video game) use underhand means to defeat or kill (a less experienced opponent).
"that troll just ganked me"

If I want you to teach me something, I'll be sure to come ask you.

o7

You googled a definition from a really bad urban dictionary. I gave you an example of the exact method in the game the method originated from 15 years ago, and hasn't changed since.

Your snarky little o7 also originated in Eve. Fitting eh?