I think that combat logging is something that can be handled without causing undue hardship on the players. When balancing things, it always comes down to patterns.
If you are architecting a system, you have to accept that there will be exception cases which will happen that throw a wrench in things. For example: an online game where two players are in combat and one leaves the game mid-combat due to what the client reads as a system failure. This happens to even legitimate players who are having a good time, so you can't exactly punish that, right? That's what a lot of players here seem to be concerned about: the "simple rules" people keep coming up with involve harsh punishments, and it's scary to imagine getting said punishments for something you didn't do wrong.
With that said: there's a way to have your cake and eat it, too. People who combat log are very unlikely to do so 1 time and never do it again. The reality is that it's an easy out, and once they've tried it they'll probably be more inclined to do it more often. And as frustrating to the individual as a single combat logging instance can be, it's peanuts in the grand scale of things and not worth trying to take action over... especially since you can't know their intent.
Now, the fun thing about combat logging is that it seems to me like it would be a very loggable event; as in: it would be an event that you could easily keep a record of happening. Was said player in a state of combat? Yes. Shields low or gone? Yes. Hull low or gone? Yes. Seems to me, and maybe I'm wrong based on how ED is written, that this could be an event you could keep track of.
While it's not unheard of for a legitimate player to get disconnected mid-combat with someone, and would be silly to punish them for that, it does start to become very suspicious if they keep doing it. If a player continually DCs during combat, and sometimes only during combat situations, suddenly you have a pattern. And patterns are actionable.
To me, the answer actually is sort of simple. If a player continually gets "disconnected" mid combat event, more than some minimal threshold that FDev decides upon in a given week/month/year, then a penalty should be applied. Maybe the ship stops disappearing when they DC, or some other penalty.
And for those concerned about players abusing UDP to do this to their opponents? I would imagine an appeal process could sort that out. Again, someone who is willing to try to DC their opponents from the peered instance to trigger this won't just do it one time. If there's a pattern of this person's opponents constantly DCing, or even just DCing when they are about to beat said person? That's a bit more serious and probably falls within perm-ban territory, IMO, but I doubt FDev would feel so strongly about it lol
Anyhow, just my $0.02 on the feasibility of such a thing. It's not something that bothers me too much, but I see a lot of folks struggling with whether it can be punished fairly or not, and at a minimum I at least believe the answer to that is "yes".
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