> Be a ganker
> Fail to grasp this fairly simple network technicality
Really makes you think...
An idea that could fix logging?
- Thread starter besieger
- Start date
> Be a ganker
> Fail to grasp this fairly simple network technicality
Really makes you think...
This is kinda already happening if people are using the blocking feature as intended, that is to block people who annoy them. If used properly, it will separate gankers and cloggers into two separate groups that would rarely instance together. Problem solvedMy thought is to match loggers with other combat loggers in vicinity of each other... hashtag popcorn.
Creating a system that can accurately track and flag connection activity as potentially suspicious isn't hard but determining whether or not those disconnections were intentional is another thing entirely as there is simply no way to know for certain if an ungraceful exit was done manually, or was an ISP issue, or a router issue, or a host of other possible scenarios.
Not to mention the amount of additional manpower needed to handle the increased number of support tickets raised because innocent players felt the punishment they received was unwarranted after a pattern of false-positives was established and they were banned. Need I make mention of the fact that every single support ticket raised would need to be thoroughly investigated by somebody at Frontier to establish guilt or innocence?
That's a lot of unnecessary leg work when as a developer, you learn to take the path of least resistance; and yes, even if that path inconveniences your customer base. Sometimes it's simply not feasible to try to cater for every scenario as is the case here. Sometimes that's just the way the cookie crumbles, and sometimes the customer just needs to suck it up and deal with it.
The most sensible* approach here, is likely the easiest to implement:
If you get disconnected during a combat situation, your ship enters a "ghost" state. It's transparent, an icon appears above it showing a disconnect symbol, and you have 60 seconds to get back into the game. Failure to do so, forces the client to create a copy of your ships load-out and cargo, under the control of an AI of equal or higher rank. The outcome of that battle with the AI ship, determines what happens when you next log in; cargo stolen? So is yours. Escaped? So did you. Killed? So were you. And so on.
If you are able to reconnect at any point between disconnect, and conclusion of the fight, the AI ship is replaced with your own and you are immune to damage. You have N^ seconds to get yourself ready to continue the fight before the immunity wears off.
Will this inconvenience others? Undoubtedly, but as I said above, sometimes it's simply not feasible to try to cater for every scenario and instead go for the easiest, quickest and least expensive approach.
* "sensible" by development standards that is. Actually, the most sensible would just to be force your death if you D/C - but I decided for the "at least give players a chance" approach.
^ where 'n' is a pre-determined number set by the developer.
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Then we can agree to disagree; being a developer myself I prefer to fix a problem and then get my customers to adapt to it; not let the problem persist because it might inconvenience a small percentage of them.
Especially since a small problem with a minority of the users can become a big problem for everyone down the line if not fixed.
T'would have to be more than 60 seconds. I'm on BT fibre and the router can take several minutes to recover from a disconnect. Ruddy nuisance it is.
I sympathise; my LTE connection can go down unexpectedly and I usually have to reboot the router which takes over a minute to come back up.
Unfortunately, we can't expect the attacking players to sit around waiting for us to reconnect in such a situation; that's not fair on them. Yes, it's not fair on us either, but our connections dropping is not our attackers fault; as such, they shouldn't be penalised for it - right now, they are.
The suggestion to allow an NPC ( maybe set it to Elite skill level? ) to take control of your ship ( with it's complete load-out ) at least gives your ship a fighting chance whilst you try to get back into the game; but the reality is that you might not make it in time, or maybe your opponents were simply too powerful ( in which case you being online or not probably would not have made a difference anyway ).
Point is, random disconnects -and the inevitable bitterness of loss that comes with it, lol- are all part and parcel of online gaming. It's part of the risks we take; Frontier can only do so much before it becomes financially infeasible to invest even more time and money in trying to prevent CLogging. My suggestion, whilst not a fix-all-band-aid, should at least mitigate CLogging to a minimum because, at the moment, CLoggers know that nothing can happen to their ship and/or cargo. However, a system that pushes the result of a combat situation to their next log in, which could result in a rebuy screen, would -I think- make them think twice about taking the cowards way out.
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Awesome message, great idea [up]
In your opening post you only corrected the link text, not the link itself.
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So when you have a scenario where you can't cater to both sides you tend to cater to the minority of your customers, even if that inconveniences the majority? That seems like a fairly destructive business strategy.
The most sensible* approach here, is likely the easiest to implement:
If you get disconnected during a combat situation, your ship enters a "ghost" state. It's transparent, an icon appears above it showing a disconnect symbol, and you have 60 seconds to get back into the game. Failure to do so, forces the client to create a copy of your ships load-out and cargo, under the control of an AI of equal or higher rank. The outcome of that battle with the AI ship, determines what happens when you next log in; cargo stolen? So is yours. Escaped? So did you. Killed? So were you. And so on.
If you are able to reconnect at any point between disconnect, and conclusion of the fight, the AI ship is replaced with your own and you are immune to damage. You have N^ seconds to get yourself ready to continue the fight before the immunity wears off.
Will this inconvenience others? Undoubtedly, but as I said above, sometimes it's simply not feasible to try to cater for every scenario and instead go for the easiest, quickest and least expensive approach.
* "sensible" by development standards that is. Actually, the most sensible would just to be force your death if you D/C - but I decided for the "at least give players a chance" approach.
^ where 'n' is a pre-determined number set by the developer.
As said above, all of this caters to the PvP minority who demand that.
In the current state of the game with a wonky netcode, servers of questionable wonkiness and a possible wonky connection client-side the number of intentional logs is most likely absolutely dwarfed by the number of accidental logs.
Implement your solution and the support will get hundreds of tickets a day because "the dumb AI lost my ship when I had an accidental disconnect/the server kicked me/the netcode sucks, would have never happened to me. Rebuy pls.", now you'd either need somebody at FDev needs either to investigate this which results in more costs for FDev or FDev plain out says: "Our system makes no mistakes, all support tickets regarding that are refused." which would lead to quite a lot of peeved customers.
Even if your system would only apply to PvP fights, what I assume since PvE fights are handled client side with comparatively little traffic to the servers afaik, one of those possibilities is bound to happen. You can't just expect the majority of users to quietly swallow something they don't want.
I thought everyone had access to those early forums once archived, but maybe not. Quoting would be kind of pointless since you can't click on the source link to verify, but here's a capture.
The networking was horrendous in early alpha; those who complain about the constant issues today wouldn't believe it. FD did talk about detecting combat logging once the game went gold but they never made clear their plans on how it would be handled. Best guess is something very similar to the karma system they're currently proposing, a sort of statistical model.
If they do try this, they'll need to be careful. As soon as a network-related means of "punishing" players is introduced, some players will attempt all sorts of networking shenanigans to create false positives targeted at other players. If this turns out to be doable, and not detectable, word will spread. Comments further up this thread along the lines of, "Very few people know how to do that, or would be bothered," are naive in the extreme. If an undetectable means of remotely dropping the banhammer on another player emerges, step-by-step tutorials and software will emerge right along with it and it will become the number one griefing method. Virtual SWATting. It'll be called "Frontear harvesting" or something.
I sometimes wonder whether this is one of the reasons they've not done it yet, beyond their general foot-dragging.
I work for a company that provides practice management applications to hospitals, doctors, gynaecologists, oncologists, dentists etc.
A few months ago we discovered a loop-hole in our billing system that allowed a minority to inflate their prices and over-charge the medical schemes. So we changed the way the billing was handled, and we patched it in.
Because of two or three small (<10 people) practices, the changes we made to the billing system forced every other client ( over 3000 ) to change the way they were billing. It wasn't a drastic change, but it was sufficient to cause them to whine a bit.
So, yes, sometimes you have to make a change in your program, even if it inconveniences the majority (E.G: DRM). This is the reality of development.
Honestly not sure what wonky netcode/servers you are referring to. I
That said, disconnects are part and parcel of online gaming. You take that risk when you sign up with any online game. Literally, it's stipulated in the EULA/TOC that disconnects and such are bound to happen but the developer will try to minimise it and I'd say my up time for ED is in the 90% somewhere.
However an accidental log should have you back in the game with plenty of time to spare but if there is something genuinely wrong with your connection that takes you minutes to get back into the game - I'm sorry, but that's your issue to take care of, why should the attacking CMDR get penalised for it?
And if Frontier do get those tickets, they could simply apologise for the users loss, and inform them that their system is in place to make it fair for everyone engaging in PvP. Which is what, I believe, my solution does. Because the only way for that user to lose their ship, would be because they took too long to get back into the game, or their opponent was either crazy engineered ( so was bound to lose anyway ), or had help ( really had no chance ).
Alternatively, I would consider allowing the AI to hi-wake to the nearest system or something; which means you get 75 seconds to log back in (60 second timeout before AI takes control, 15 second FSD spool); if you aren't back in the game in under 75 seconds... well.. the attacking CMDR shouldn't have to lose out because of that.
However it works, it gives you the chance to get back into the action whilst giving your opponent the chance to get a reward for his efforts if you can't make it back in. Fair's fair.
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Well I honestly wish I saw this sooner... I wouldn't of brought into the game if these kinds of issues where in alpha and still not fixed... whats worse is multi-crew is a network heavy feature implemented on an already unstable network system, I can safely assume its not just incompetence now.
ughh fixed again... https://i.redditmedia.com/nAE-XQHLf3-HNU9Uw0ff-sBje8_wx9CQFpQXiJYc_2M.jpg?w=1024&
OP Updated too.
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I have no idea why the images are working for sometime and then stopping, I checked the links each time.
The images are combat logging now, too.
Maybe they are Blocking you. Blocking is the new Combat Logging. Didn't you hear?
It's pretty standard for the "best" hackers in any game to be rolling their own. Or in the case of team-based games, receiving them from the one member of their group who makes them. Combined with how subtle private hacks can be, it's unfortunately possible for a "skilled" user to go years without being conclusively detected, even under close scrutiny.
Glad to hear you don't do it any more. Hopefully there's nobody playing ED who still makes them, or who uses that skillset to find and take advantage of exploits.
While I agree with the general thrust of your argument, this is a rather poor choice of example. DRM is of no benefit to the users and only exclusively to the developer/publisher.
Yeah, because cheats are cool when they are home grown hacks. But, if anybody else cheats....
I still browse the community's and just like I used to create these cheats I attempt to deconstruct them just as you would with a game and report back to frontier, though frontier seem quite hot on most of the cheats in development, so that's a plus.
Home grown cheats are cool, you might not have noticed but business these days pay the big money for users able to find holes in their software, not saying games should do the same but its a shift.
I just don't understand all this angst about clogging. If you polled all ED players about problems they'd like to see fixed, my prediction is that clogging wouldn't even make the top 10.
Assuming FD does attempt to punish clogging via C&P, it wouldn't surprise me at all, to see that "cheat" tools are developed to trigger C&P punishments upon others. For example, it would be trivial to launch a DOS attack upon another player, which would likely trigger a disconnect. Using spoofing to trigger a disconnect is also likely to be possible.
Assuming FD does attempt to punish clogging via C&P, it wouldn't surprise me at all, to see that "cheat" tools are developed to trigger C&P punishments upon others. For example, it would be trivial to launch a DOS attack upon another player, which would likely trigger a disconnect. Using spoofing to trigger a disconnect is also likely to be possible.
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