Consequences define victory and loss, success and failure. When the consequence to every choice, path, or eventuality is the same, those options and the gameplay they provide are trivialized.
I like one of the original ideas that as a 'gentlemans right of contest', if you're shooting someone, and they combat log... You WIN. You simply win without needing to lift finger. I call that supreme victory in any event. It's clean, it's so simple, so easy to referee, it's binary.
Victory is meaningless without a relative improvement (which may well be achieved through loss of assets or effort inflicted upon one's opponents), or at least loss mitigation, for the victor.
Instadeath suggestion would perfectly make sense in a no-death-penalty pvp-only game
But in a game where most people log in open for the social coop aspect and not specifically to kill other people and where the death carries a hefty penalty, nope.
'Death' is meaningless without the penalty.
All you can do is to report it. There is no technical solution on the horizon.
The solution has always been there...collect telemetry and look for patterns of abuse. There may not be any good way to identify and punish cheaters in real-time, but habitual behavior would not be overly hard to detect (with negligible false positives), and those engaging in it could be removed. Of course, the priority that has been given to enforcement of most rules that don't create legal liability or directly strike at Frontier's bottom line, and thus the effort they are willing to spend on them, seem to be quite low.
But I'm curious, really...wich kind of the playerbase are those who are shouting the most about punishing c-log till hell freezes over?
I can't speak for anyone else, but personally it's about in-game continuity and verisimilitude. When cause and effect are side-stepped by cheats it devalues legitimate contributions to this shared narrative.
I hate to be one of those "and this is why we can't have nice things" people, but if contributions and consequences are so easy to flub there is no way to provide more meaningful options. It's a large part of why we have a game with only superficial player agency, where the main plot is entirely on rails.
Basically stuff that someone who voluntarily engages in pvp will not have in their holds or in the left panel, but everyone else will do.
My CMDR is frequently carrying exploration data and missions for BGS purposes, as well as high-rank NPC crew (at least before 3.4.x introduced a bug that made using NPC crew problematic for other players). He still fights other CMDRs.
Of course, it's wise to mitigate one's potential losses if one goes into a situation where loss is likely, but PvP really should not be more of a threat than the rest of the game, even for those who do not avoid it, and combat logging cannot be viewed as just a PvP problem.
Exactly this...I prayed it down 2-3 times only in this thread here, that a c-log counts as a flawless victory on my side. I managed to hinder certain...uhm...pvpers to pvp unconsesually, to say it the complicated way.
