A Simple Solution to Combat Logging

[Jack Schitt]

Spoiler

That's from 2016 but I'm not aware of any technical changes within the game's architecture that would render it no longer applicable.

They're talking about "ungraceful disconnections" or combat logging. There is perhaps an argument that this need not apply to "graceful disconnections" or menu logging, during which there might be sufficient time to provide all clients (and the instance host, if it was formerly the disconnecting client) with enough telemetry for them to keep a doppelganger of the disconnecting player's ship in the game.

But the problem with that is that as soon as some players started losing ships after menu logging, they'd switch to combat logging and we'd be right back to square one.

Bottom line: if you want a game where other players are forced by anything other than a de facto gentlemen's agreement to remain in the game long enough for you to destroy their stuffs, it's not this one. Technology, policy, history. Everything is geared towards direct PVP in all its forms being wholly optional in ED. FD could spend thousands of manhours tightening up various aspects of the PVP experience, balancing this, encouraging that, but at the end of the day if someone doesn't want their ship destroyed there are many ways official and unofficial for them to avoid it preemptively or reactively. It may be frustrating, but it is what it is.

If there was a simple solution, it would have been solved.

 

[BDelacroix]

There's a reason why one of my favourite tags I've seen on a git repo is "harder to implement than you think" and it's reserved for these sorts of simple suggestions.

All of my customers need to see that tag.

 

[DNA-Decay]

I think we just need to end the lame policy of “NO NAMING AND SHAMING”

Combat Loggers and Griefers should be famous.

 

[B.Roberts]

I think we just need to end the lame policy of “NO NAMING AND SHAMING”

Combat Loggers and Griefers should be famous.

Yeah this whole "NAMING / SHAMING" thing is something I never understood. It shouldn't be seen as a "SHAMING". If you're famous and very successful griefer or cheater and you've been able to destroy everything around and you able to engineer your Anaconda so it is faster than the Eagle and yet absolutely understandable, let the galaxy know your name and wear it with pride. If you feel ashamed it means you believe that you doing something wrong and yet still doing it. Doesn't make any sense.

 

[M00ka]

Yeah this whole "NAMING / SHAMING" thing is something I never understood. It shouldn't be seen as a "SHAMING". If you're famous and very successful griefer or cheater and you've been able to destroy everything around and you able to engineer your Anaconda so it is faster than the Eagle and yet absolutely understandable, let the galaxy know your name and wear it with pride. If you feel ashamed it means you believe that you doing something wrong and yet still doing it. Doesn't make any sense.

It isn't those proud of their achievements that FD are protecting, it is everyone else. If the 'naming and shaming' policy is removed how long do you think it will take for this forum to be full of false allegations. Every Commander that beats a PvP interdiction will be named and labeled a cheat. Every Commander who low or high wakes out of a battle will be labelled a Combat Logger. Yeah it would be great fun - NOT!

 

[Madrax573]

I have the simplest solution to combat logging...

Stop giving a hoot and go fly your ship

 

[B.Roberts]

I have the simplest solution to combat logging...

Stop giving a hoot and go fly your ship

Best solution so far

 

[Riverside]

Griefers CLog too.

 

[Stabby_Dave]

In Freelancer Discovery, if you think someone has Clogged against you, you file a report. This gets looked at and if it's determined that it's a Clog, they get sanctioned. If you legitimately lose your connection, you can post up a justification which will be taken into account. The penalties are quite harsh.

Not sure whether ED's architecture would allow for this, but if it does....... I know that some people have very iffy connections, but sadly, you can't cater for everyone.

 

[Old Duck]

...

I'm sorry for all the hate you're receiving, OP. Welcome to the ED forums.

I think your idea has merit. IIRC, there's a game that causes an AI to step in to control a player's character / vehicle should that player disconnect from the server in the middle of PvP. In ED, the AI could be the standard NPC AI matched to the player's combat rating.

This seems both an elegant and relatively easy-to-implement solution (yes, I was a software developer in a previous life). This would not only improve the situation around combat logging, but also with common network-related disconnects.

 

[Stealthie]

Combat logging is a major exploit in player versus player combat, and a timer is not enough to mitigate this issue. Some players have suggested to increase the timer, but this does not prevent exiting by pulling the network cables. The ideal solution is as simple as allowing the player to quit the game, but for their ship to remain in that instance unless they are docked at a station or there are no hostile players/NPCs in that instance. To prevent the server from flooding, a time limit could be implemented - eg. the ship remains in that instance for 10 minutes before being removed.

This mechanic is present in many multiplayer games and I don't see this as being too hard to implement. There may be better solutions out there, but the current state which allows you to exit and your ship disappears immediately is inappropriate for a game with PvP combat.

Oh my giddy aunt!

Do people NEVER learn?

P2P connectivity means it's possible for people to interfere with the connection of other players.

I interdict you.
I open up a bit of dubious software (which is easily found after reading the appropriate sections of Reddit), twiddle some settings and the game thinks you've disconnected from it.
Your ship remains in the instance and I'm free to destroy it at my leisure.

The only reason griefers don't already use this technique is that there's nothing to be gained from it BECAUSE a player's ship vanishes when a player disconnects.
Adopt the OP's suggestion and you CREATE an incentive for every griefer out there to start meddling with P2P settings and create a gigantic cheating problem for FDev to solve.

This idea is, and always has been, utterly moronic and should be crushed without mercy whenever it's suggested.

 

[Nadreck]

I'd support an "AI-controlled doppleganger fights on" solution (though I also agree that FDev have more important things to work on than this: I'm with the "call it a win and move on" sentiment).

Of course, once reality has bifurcated like this and the instance has broken, contradictory outcomes are possible. Both participants might beat both dopplegangers, or both might be defeated by them.

It also gets rather complicated in multiship battles. In a battle involving 12 ships, what if A combat-logs, and B and C lose contact with all the others but remain in contact with each other? A is up against 11 AI-controlled ships, but for the others it becomes a bit of a headache to work out which computer should be the "driver" of each doppleganger in the still-shared instances.

 

[Hossi]

Sometimes I really wonder why all the people with a 'simple solution' don't just google them first to check the last 20 times this solution was suggested.

Long story short: Elite Dangerous uses a p2p netcode. Your ship runs on your machine. Your machine disconects, your ship stops existing, since it was only on your machine. End of story. You cannot keep the ship in the instance, because its physicaly not connected anymore. There is no server that could run your ship after you disconnected.

The disconnect is between the two peers, you cannot detect which side dropped the connection (or if something inbetween happend), so you cannot just move over one ship to a server (that doesn't exist is the first place).

Yes, other games do this, but this other games use a client-server architecture. In this case the ship would run on the server, and can continue to run there as long as you like.

But ED has p2p, and this is not going to change. Therefore the 'simple solution' is a 'complely impossible solution'.

 

[Jack Schitt]

In Freelancer Discovery, if you think someone has Clogged against you, you file a report. This gets looked at and if it's determined that it's a Clog, they get sanctioned. If you legitimately lose your connection, you can post up a justification which will be taken into account. The penalties are quite harsh.

ED's architecture would allow for this, kinda, because it sounds like a largely manual process and FD have access to a lot of telemetry. There are three main problems with it though:

• It would be a very time-consuming process on the part of Frontier Support.
• It's impossible to determine whether an individual network disconnect in ED was deliberate or not, nor which client caused it. Statistical analysis of previous disconnections might swing the weight of probability in one direction or another, but it would ultimately be up to an FD staff member to arbitrate each and every case and they would not always get it right.
• Even if the process were to be miraculously made 100% foolproof, FD are not renowned for their harsh penalties. The likelihood of disappointment following an incident would remain high for both the reporter and the reported.
  

I think your idea has merit. IIRC, there's a game that causes an AI to step in to control a player's character / vehicle should that player disconnect from the server in the middle of PvP. In ED, the AI could be the standard NPC AI matched to the player's combat rating.

It has merit as an idea, sure, but it is simply not implementable in this game as it stands. Given the way things turned out I'm sure FD would be over the moon if that wasn't the case, but it's the price they paid for having an inexpensive, scalable yet non-subscription networking design.

Given that there are some big changes supposedly coming and FD are playing some of their cards quite close to their collective chests at the moment, there is a possibility -- perhaps more so now than at any point in the game's history -- that FD might be planning a major overhaul of ED's networking model. So we may yet see improvements here if FD can rise to the challenge of making the system more robust while not adding to the cost of play.

Either way we're not looking at a "simple solution".

 

[Stealthie]

It's impossible to determine whether an individual network disconnect in ED was deliberate or not, nor which client caused it. Statistical analysis of previous disconnections might swing the weight of probability in one direction or another, but it would ultimately be up to an FD staff member to arbitrate each and every case and they would not always get it right.

That's a non-starter too, for anybody with a bit of brains.

Sure, if somebody was a moron then a statistical analysis might show that they only ever disconnect from the game when they're in combat, and losing.
If I was a habitual CLer - or, in the event of a system like this, a cheating griefer - I'd simply task-kill the game whenever I wanted to stop playing, as well as when I'm in combat.

The result would be that any statistical analysis would show that I'm simply a player with an unreliable connection that drops when I'm travelling, doing missions, mining or whatever else as well as during combat.

 

[Old Duck]

But ED has p2p, and this is not going to change. Therefore the 'simple solution' is a 'complely impossible solution'.

I disagree. A ship is only a series of variables, variables which everyone in an instance has access to. If a player disconnects, the game code can EASILY spawn an NPC ship using the variables it has for the player's ship, thus magically causing what appears to be the player's ship to continue on under AI control.

The only hard part (relatively speaking) is updating the server with the results of the battle against the NPC ship, since damage / death needs to be attributed to the player for whom the NPC AI took over for. This would require some work because it makes another player's computer responsible for the stats of the player that went offline (which introduces some security issues). Worst-case-scenario, you could decouple the stats and not worry about it. This means that in a battle between two players where one clogs, the remaining player continues the battle and may even destroy the other player's ship, but the player that clogs doesn't actually lose his ship. Probably not the best solution, but at least it gives the one player the satisfaction of seeing an explosion rather than a disappearing act.

Either way, it's not impossible, and it might even be simple depending on how Frontier handles the server side of things. ED is more of a server-based game than many people realize.

 

[Raino]

Either way, it's not impossible, and it might even be simple depending on how Frontier handles the server side of things. ED is more of a server-based game than many people realize.

There is a valid point, but, because I am an old coder as well as You (40 years by now) I am happy about EVERY line of code which is NOT added...

 

[Ezren]

It isn't those proud of their achievements that FD are protecting, it is everyone else. If the 'naming and shaming' policy is removed how long do you think it will take for this forum to be full of false allegations. Every Commander that beats a PvP interdiction will be named and labeled a cheat. Every Commander who low or high wakes out of a battle will be labelled a Combat Logger. Yeah it would be great fun - NOT!

I had somebody spam multiple threads about how I "combat logged" on him back on Xbox, which was just me logging out at the end of my night but he had wanted to attack me but didn't get to.

The fact that people immediately assume the only people affected by "naming and shaming" are cheaters is exactly why the policy exists.

 

[Brrokk]

Oh my giddy aunt!

Do people NEVER learn?

P2P connectivity means it's possible for people to interfere with the connection of other players.

I interdict you.
I open up a bit of dubious software (which is easily found after reading the appropriate sections of Reddit), twiddle some settings and the game thinks you've disconnected from it.
Your ship remains in the instance and I'm free to destroy it at my leisure.

The only reason griefers don't already use this technique is that there's nothing to be gained from it BECAUSE a player's ship vanishes when a player disconnects.
Adopt the OP's suggestion and you CREATE an incentive for every griefer out there to start meddling with P2P settings and create a gigantic cheating problem for FDev to solve.

This idea is, and always has been, utterly moronic and should be crushed without mercy whenever it's suggested.

What? Why would you destroy his ship when you could make a video of him clogging and get him banned from the game? ;-)

 

[Agony_Aunt]

In a peer-to-peer connection, there's no way to determine who broke the connection. So both must die.

Now this would be funny. FD should make it happen.