Whilst I don't approve of anybody pulling the plug midway through an encounter...do People genuinely WANT a software development company to be THAT involved in the trivia and minutia of people PLAYING the game, that they'll ACTUALLY intervene?
Crazy...game players can be idiots...it's a shame...move on...
DON'T expect Frontier to behave like "teacher" and make everybody "play nice" in the schoolyard or it's detentions all round!
Crazy...they're a real company staffed by real people with real things to do...not deal with this sort of nonsense...
What exactly are you asking, should a game company enforce their own rules? Yes of course they should. That is one of the critically important things that a 'real' online game company staffed by 'real people' should be doing if they expect to have any credibility whatsoever. It is in fact one of the things that most online game companies do as a matter of course.
As someone pointed out in another thread, just to give one example of how cheating (as defined by FDev themselves) is treated in other games, PUBG have banned
one and a half million accounts for it. Not 'shadow banned' for three days, or sent a mild rebuke via e-mail, banned them. There are plenty of games where players who did something like the engineering exploit would have been eating a ban too; FDev's position on that was
extremely generous.
You're talking like enforcing their own rules is some kind of imposition on their time that they might devote five minutes to if they don't have anything more important to do. That's a ridiculous point of view, do you do much gaming?
You can have whatever opinion you want about the rule itself, but there is no argument from a position of logic that having been set, a rule should not be enforced.
It's probably worth noting that there
have been players who have had action taken against them in the form of warning e-mails and short shadow bans, we know that for certain because at least one player has posted the text of his e-mail about it on the forums.
It's also worth noting that we're never going to know definitively what proportion of people who do it get away with it, what proportion get a minor punishment and what proportion get a major one - that's the problem with experiments like the one here, no matter what had happened, in a game with over two million units shipped
any single account is statistically insignificant. It could be that not one player received a ban, equally it could be that every account other than this one received a ban - neither of those extremes is likely, but there isn't really any way to know where the line falls between them. I get that it's frustrating but game companies generally don't reveal much about bans and punishments, it is what it is.
Edit: Also worth noting that in the list of play styles affected by combat logging in the OP there is of course one glaring omission:
Prime examples of gameplay styles that are hard-countered by combat logging include:
* PvP piracy
* Powerplay undermining defense/attacks
* Inter-faction warfare
* Player bounty hunting
* Hunting newbie-killers
* Blockades
* System protection
* Ganking and general salt-mining
and frankly, why not just say it because everybody knows it to be the case anyway.
However that is
NOT in
any way mitigation for combat logging, despite the fact that it's the most frequently declared reason for doing it. There are numerous legitimate ways to avoid that outcome and not liking the way another player plays the game
within the rules isn't any kind of excuse for cheating.
Put simply, there is never an excuse for cheating and anyone who thinks otherwise isn't someone that I would ever want to game with.
