An idea that could fix logging?

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.

Agreed; however my point was sometimes you need to make a change that unfortunately inconveniences a majority because of the actions of a minority.
 
I have no idea why the images are working for sometime and then stopping, I checked the links each time.

Thanks to my experience of the great Star Citizen petty online argument 2014-2017 I know that repeatedly vanishing images could indicate people gaming the report function of imgur so they get auto-deleted.
 
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.

Yet what's the top demand? Crime and punishment improvements. So what happens when folks just CL to avoid legal ramifications of nefarious activities? You're right, it doesn't matter everyone should just CL every time something bad happens because how cares it's not important to hold people accountable... wait.

Frontier could knock most of this on the head by simply not making ships invulnerable on a disconnect; like most other multiplayer games where in-game assets are vulnerable to damage if there's a loss. Just keep timeouts short and ensure assets are unloaded in a timely fashion. IMHO the artificial delay and chucking ships on rails isn't really having the desired outcome.

It just shouldn't be overly beneficial to exploit disconnection, and the reality is, it's very beneficial to exploit disconnection. If it wasn't just so patently beneficial, it'd be pretty much an irrelevant debate. Instead it's endlessly defended; people don't really endlessly defend something that's not very important. no? :)

But this is frontier's game, and so they do what they do, and apparently it's in the too hard basket, more politically than technically, I'd humbly suggest.
 
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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.

I see the need for that here, but is this problem really on the same scale as combatlogging? Depending on the legislature of the country you're selling/working in such an abuse of the billing system could've led to damage and/or legal consequences for the company + it led to active damage for third parties if they were overbilled because of this. My point here is simply that this led to real damage unlike CLogging.

Honestly not sure what wonky netcode/servers you are referring to. I almost never rarely have any issue with the servers; most certainly not on the level you are inferring exists.

Take a long look at the PS4 servers then. After every update and occasionally after patches there's a period of increased dcs on the other versions, too. To counter your anecdotal evidence: Comparatively little time ago I had rather big issues with the servers and got booted several times a day. Sometimes mid-PvP. That's not nice but happens.

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.

Of course they are. I don't deny that. My connection and game have become a lot more stable and the networking has improved undoubtely.

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?

How is the attacking CMDR penalised? The attacking CMDR has no active loss, apart from the ammunition cost, and eventually missing out a bounty. If the inflicted loss is simply not seeing your opponent rebuy his/her ship, then I don't see a reason to do any of this.

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.

Combatlogging is an out of game exploit. It should be punished out of the game, too.

Taskkills are easy to detect. Shadowban those who do in their own PG with more Loggers and no effect on BGS/PP/CGs. There they can have their fun logging at each other.

Disconnects are a bit trickier. You said it yourself, there's no method to determine whether the dc was accidental or forced when that happens mid combat. FDev could simply log the overall dcs of said account and create a statistical model to see when those disconnects happen the most. If they only happen during PvP --> Shadowban. If they happen regulary regardless of the situation, then I'd be willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

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.

You have the same chance by simply logging back in. If your opponent is not the stereotypical ganksquad with the only goal of making you rebuy, then they'll wait a bit.
 
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Yet what's the top demand? Crime and punishment improvements. So what happens when folks just CL to avoid legal ramifications of nefarious activities? You're right, it doesn't matter everyone should just CL every time something bad happens because how cares it's not important to hold people accountable... wait.

Frontier could knock most of this on the head by simply not making ships invulnerable on a disconnect; like most other multiplayer games where in-game assets are vulnerable to damage if there's a loss. Just keep timeouts short and ensure assets are unloaded in a timely fashion. IMHO the artificial delay and chucking ships on rails isn't really having the desired outcome.

It just shouldn't be overly beneficial to exploit disconnection, and the reality is, it's very beneficial to exploit disconnection. If it wasn't just so patently beneficial, it'd be pretty much an irrelevant debate. Instead it's endlessly defended; people don't really endlessly defend something that's not very important. no? :)

But this is frontier's game, and so they do what they do, and apparently it's in the too hard basket, more politically than technically, I'd humbly suggest.

I agree with this.

Players have regularly & loudly stated that they don't understand why ganking is happening, what motivates the ganker to play the way they do. Here in this thread we have probably the most notorious player of the last year or so openly describing why as well as they are able. I've seen this several times from other players too, and it's clear to me that removing that motivation is important.

Yes it will still happen, it will always happen to some degree, what we have here is the opportunity to remove a big chunk of the motivation to do so. In previous discussions about CLogging it's boiled down to agreement that it's a problem but it can't be fixed. I posted a link to a workable solution (in a thread FDev said they would be monitoring) so that challenge has been overcome, and now people are saying it's not a big deal?

It's the same big deal as it ever was, even if the forum is relatively quiet on the topic right now this flaw in the basic rules of the game hasn't gone away. If you're playing a board game, one of the players gets frustrated & walks off they still lose the game. CLogging isn't playing the game, it's refusing to play the game.

CLogging is still a problem, we have a workable solution, let's get this one fixed & move on to the next one.
 
I wonder what the appropriate message would have been to those guys that lost Modifications? FD lost a golden opportunity right there too.

The real appropriate message would have been "You've been banned and your account has been deleted for bug exploiting and cheating" (whatever, some sort of that) nothing else ! Removing only the cheated engineer mods wasn't enough and too weak.
 
I agree with this.

Players have regularly & loudly stated that they don't understand why ganking is happening, what motivates the ganker to play the way they do. Here in this thread we have probably the most notorious player of the last year or so openly describing why as well as they are able. I've seen this several times from other players too, and it's clear to me that removing that motivation is important.

Yes it will still happen, it will always happen to some degree, what we have here is the opportunity to remove a big chunk of the motivation to do so. In previous discussions about CLogging it's boiled down to agreement that it's a problem but it can't be fixed. I posted a link to a workable solution (in a thread FDev said they would be monitoring) so that challenge has been overcome, and now people are saying it's not a big deal?

It's the same big deal as it ever was, even if the forum is relatively quiet on the topic right now this flaw in the basic rules of the game hasn't gone away. If you're playing a board game, one of the players gets frustrated & walks off they still lose the game. CLogging isn't playing the game, it's refusing to play the game.

CLogging is still a problem, we have a workable solution, let's get this one fixed & move on to the next one.

It's not motivation, it's lack of motivation I think. As Harry has said in this thread he uses credit exploits for space cash so there's nothing at all for him to achieve in the game. He's not supporting any factions he's not working towards rep or an upgrade or a new ship or modules he's not working on or opposing a community goal he's not trying to improve his piloting skills and there's no risk involved in anything he ever does as he's effectively exploited himself infinite lives and buying power.

He broke the game for himself by exploiting and now he's trying to irritate people because he's bored.

Remember Itchy Nipples and his station griefing ?, exactly the same situation he was a bored multi-billionaire right at the start of the game thanks to the bounty/scan credit exploit.
 
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It's not motivation, it's lack of motivation I think. As Harry has said in this thread he uses credit exploits for space cash so there's nothing at all for him to achieve in the game. He's not supporting any factions he's not working towards rep or an upgrade or a new ship or modules he's not working on or opposing a community goal he's not trying to improve his piloting skills and there's no risk involved in anything he ever does as he's effectively exploited himself infinite lives and buying power.

He broke the game for himself by exploiting and now he's trying to irritate people because he's bored.

Remember Itchy Nipples and his station griefing ?, exactly the same situation he was a bored multi-billionaire right at the start of the game thanks to the bounty/scan credit exploit.

Don't disagree with any of that, but I don't see any of it as reason not to address CLogging. Then once that's done move on to the next one.
 
I had a CMDR clogging in front of me lately. First time. He had 44% hull left.

I shrugged.

In the end, it only ment that I won the fight. I don't really Need to see him blow up for confirmation. Neither do I Need those 11.000 credits bounty he had on him.
 
I had a CMDR clogging in front of me lately. First time. He had 44% hull left.

I shrugged.

In the end, it only ment that I won the fight. I don't really Need to see him blow up for confirmation. Neither do I Need those 11.000 credits bounty he had on him.

I've never had someone CLog on me at all, doesn't mean I don't want to see it discouraged.
 
It's not motivation, it's lack of motivation I think.

This about covers it. It includes the developer, to be fair. There's a lack of motivation. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of things they work very hard on. Very very hard.

But making consequences 'stick' is not one of them. It's not that this cannot be solved; it's the willingness of the Developer to solve it. And the problem is, if they don't, it doesn't matter what they do for karma or anything else crime and punishment wise; it's unenforceable whilst the situation remains; because CL'ing is so rampant as to be endlessly defended despite it running counter to any semblance of consequence.

All that increased karma costs will do, is increase the degree of CL'ing. It's just going to make a bad situation, worse. The developer is being far too lenient; which is just entrenching behaviours.
 
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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.

Hypothesis:

Two players A and B are in combat and are the only two players in the instance. Their P2P connection goes down for several minutes and in that time A wins against the B AI and B wins against the A AI. Now you have the situation there they have both won and both lost. Since there were only two players in the instance it is not possible to determine who caused the disconnect of whether the disconnect was either's fault.

And therein lies the problem with any C&P, Karma or any other system that tries to determine who disconnected. Leaving out the fact that it is impossible to determine if the disconnect was intentional.
 
So I was playing Splatoon 2's splat-fest thing and am loving the game but browsing reddit I saw a post that talked about players pulling their connection during a game they where losing, much to their surprise the game greets them next time with the message below.

https://i.redditmedia.com/nAE-XQHLf3-HNU9Uw0ff-sBje8_wx9CQFpQXiJYc_2M.jpg?w=1024&
Link for broken image: https://i.redditmedia.com/nAE-XQHLf3-HNU9Uw0ff-sBje8_wx9CQFpQXiJYc_2M.jpg?w=1024&

Thoughts?

Hey, look guys, the king of Engineer Exploiting seems to be whinging about players dropping out on him in Elite because he can't grief them.
 
Hey, look guys, the king of Engineer Exploiting seems to be whinging about players dropping out on him in Elite because he can't grief them.

Hey, look guys, a massive oversimplification to justify why a player's input is not as relevant as anyone else's. I am no fan of Mr Potter, sir, but this is just a garbage statement. I really is.
 
This about covers it. It includes the developer, to be fair. There's a lack of motivation. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of things they work very hard on. Very very hard.

But making consequences 'stick' is not one of them. It's not that this cannot be solved; it's the willingness of the Developer to solve it. And the problem is, if they don't, it doesn't matter what they do for karma or anything else crime and punishment wise; it's unenforceable whilst the situation remains; because CL'ing is so rampant as to be endlessly defended despite it running counter to any semblance of consequence.

All that increased karma costs will do, is increase the degree of CL'ing. It's just going to make a bad situation, worse. The developer is being far too lenient; which is just entrenching behaviours.

The thing with the karma system is that people will rapidly work out how to "game" it. Need some positive points ?, hang about in supercruise drop into a few distress signals and rescue the traders. Need cash to pay another CMDR's insurance due to bad Karma ?, credit exploits are the way forward.
 
Hypothesis:

Two players A and B are in combat and are the only two players in the instance. Their P2P connection goes down for several minutes and in that time A wins against the B AI and B wins against the A AI.

AI don't combat log, nor do they disconnect. They're a product of the server and client. I have no idea what you are even trying to say. AI don't combat log, they don't ALT-F4, they suck it up like good little AI soldiers. The problem isn't the disconnect, it's that frontier have decided to toss player ships on rails when there's a disconnect, and cause the player's ship to become invulnerable.

The Player's ships do not suddenly become controlled by AI in a disconnect state; they go onto rails and become impervious to damage, until the game clients finally give up waiting and de-spawn the assets involved (ie the ship). This is incredibly handy if you want to avoid consequences, which is the actual thrust of the problem.

Frontier can't necessarily tell if the connection was legitimately dropped or the client killed. But I'm not sure that's really sufficient enough reason to keep a system that actually rewards CLing. Very very few multiplayer games do this on impervious on-rails business though, because, oddly enough, it's incredibly abusable.
 
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Hey, look guys, a massive oversimplification to justify why a player's input is not as relevant as anyone else's. I am no fan of Mr Potter, sir, but this is just a garbage statement. I really is.

As opposed to a garbage thread, created by a guy that treated the game like garbage, and the players he griefed like garbage? Sure.
 
I've never had someone CLog on me at all, doesn't mean I don't want to see it discouraged.

Cannot disagree with that. I was simply saying that it's surely not the biggest issue in the game.

The Thing with PVP is that it's not the winner who gets a reward (or only a ridiculous bounty, if at all) for victory, it's the looser who gets a rebuy "fined" for loosing. So if the looser evades his fine, in the end, it's not at the winners disadvantage. So I don't see why the OP makes such an big issue out of that. OK it's cheating the game, it's bad, but it isn't remotely as serious as, for instance, the cheating said OP used to be engaged in, and the Networking issues, the design issues etc... And I can think of many more urgent work to do for FDev.

OP likes to hurt Players. That's what he does. And he's salty about some Players not getting their rightful share of hurt delivered when he was about to blow them to bits. That's the lowest form of whining one can reach.
 
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The thing with the karma system is that people will rapidly work out how to "game" it. Need some positive points ?, hang about in supercruise drop into a few distress signals and rescue the traders. Need cash to pay another CMDR's insurance due to bad Karma ?, credit exploits are the way forward.

Depends how it's implemented. I don't think there are any current plans to have positive karma, just a cooldown.

CLogging can be discouraged without needing the karma system.
 
AI don't combat log, nor do they disconnect. They're a product of the server and client. I have no idea what you are even trying to say. AI don't combat log, they don't ALT-F4, they suck it up like good little AI soldiers. The problem isn't the disconnect, it's that frontier have decided to toss player ships on rails when there's a disconnect, and cause the player's ship to become invulnerable.

Very very few multiplayer games do this, because, oddly enough, it's incredibly abusable.

His hypothetical case has both players lose the connection to each other but not to the server.

Thus the server initializes AI opponents replacing the players for both of them. Both players win against the AI, server updates and results in an exception.

Although that'd be easy to solve by simply backchecking with the server prior to creating an opponent AI whether the server is still connected to the other player or not. If it's connected to both the matchmaking could simply try to recreate the session. If not the unconnected player gets booted by his/her client anyways.

Cannot disagree with that. I was simply saying that it's surely not the biggest issue in the game.

The Thing with PVP is that it's not the winner who gets a reward (or only a ridiculous bounty, if at all) for victory, it's the looser who gets a rebuy "fined" for loosing. So if the looser evades his fine, in the end, it's not at the winners disadvantage. So I don't see why the OP makes such an big issue out of that. OK it's cheating the game, it's bad, but it isn't remotely as serious as, for instance, the cheating said OP used to be engaged in, and the Networking issues, the design issues etc... And I can think of many more urgent work to do for FDev.

OP likes to hurt Players. That's what he does. And he's salty about some Players not getting their rightful share of hurt delivered when he was about to blow them to bits. That's the lowest form of whining one can reach.

That comes fairly close to my own position.
 
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