PvP An Investigation Into Frontier's Actions on Combat Logging, Part 2

How many times in one month is so few that you would give the benefit of the doubt?
How many times in one month is so many that the maximum penalty should apply?
What do you think the maximum penalty should be?

A) 3
B) 6
C) Restricted to Solo for 1 month (not shadowban).

There you go, I've put my cards on the table. Now show me yours :)
 
Who would report it? The NPC isn't about to report a combat log against them. Expecting Frontier to devote resources to monitoring ALL combat activities just to catch those who combat log on NPCs is a ridiculous notion.

It would further the interest of FD to develop a mechanism that can detect this on its own,
as this would be required to field an automatic "ticket".

Data is required to have an automatism or semi-automatism
assist with detecting these issues.
I am sure that the telemetry data can be searched for key states like:

- Is not in Supercruise or Glide
- Is not alone in Instance
- Is not in SRV or SLF
- Connection loss occurred via task-kill or router reset or network loss or network issues (blocked ip)
 
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Presumably the preconditions would be:

- disconnect occurs in combat
- that combat is with another player (we're not going to punish for logging on an NPC, surely.....are we?)
- such disconnects by the offender occur repeatedly (time period to be determined)
- such repeated disconnects are observed to be primarily, but not necessarily exclusively, during combat situations?

You'd also need to eliminate false positives.
 
Well let's assume they are to be applied to theoretically 100% accurate data otherwise this is never going to get anywhere. We can real-world test it later.

If we assume that
and it is considered a cheat do this:

Tolerance = 0 (Zero/Nada/Niente)
Actions:

First infraction -> mail to the customer + additional info about the "cheat" to info panel ingame
Second Infraction -> Shadowban 2 Weeks to Solo
Third Infraction -> Shadowban 1 Month to Solo, all Reputation with faction looses 2 steps (allied -> cordial)
Fourth infraction -> Shadowban 2 Month to solo, all Reputation set to hostile for the duration
Fifth Infraction -> Account ban

How do these diminish?
Loose 1 infraction point every three months,
except for account ban.

- or 24hour disconnect including an automatic forced IP change from your ISP. Quiet common here where I live. I'm curious how you want to detect such an incident from an external network. Your lapidary 'network loss' or 'network issues' are the problem if you want to distinguish them from a task kill. I'm by for no network expert - no understatement - but from what I seem to understand there's currently no way for ED to detect a task-kill on a level of hard evidence. From here it's getting ticklish as you'll now start fiddling with statistics and fuzzy assumptions...

Yes the 24hour disconnect still is a thing,
and even in IPv6 where it no longer is part of the
basic protocol hardware manufacturers have gone to the
point of allowing the router software to acquire a new IP after 24 hours.

The only way to help with detecting these matters
is to have anti-cheat software that acts as a watchdog,
see VAC or such.
 
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- that combat is with another player (we're not going to punish for logging on an NPC, surely.....are we?)
That is very dependant on the context and frequency of a player logging on NPCs. A lot of the game's mechanics and especially the BGS side of the game revolve around balancing the difficulty of certain activities so that they are not trivially abuseable, such as the security ship killing method used in rock bottoming a controlling faction's influence.

CGs, in particular combat ones, are also another activity that can be exploited by combat logging. Essentially that player is circumnavigating the rules the rest of us are abiding by and thereby creating "assets" that should have existed otherwise if the game's rules were abided by. If said player had to eat a rebuy for example and lose their bounty vouchers/combat bonds/cargo/explo data/any other CG required item. Them combat logging prevents that and skews the CG numbers in the same way the BGS influence numbers can be skewed be this.

I outlined a lot of the ways that combat logging affects the PvE side of the game in this thread here:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/398295-It-s-Totally-Fine-to-Task-Kill-on-Thargoids
 
I am sure that the telemetry data can be searched for key states like:

- Is not in Supercruise or Glide
- Is not alone in Instance
- Is not in SRV or SLF
- Connection loss occurred via task-kill or router reset or network loss or network issues (blocked ip)

There are still far too many problems with the game stability that makes any sort of automated system pointless. I frequently have the game crash on me:

-When transitioning between normal space/SC/glide/system jump, which hangs and requires a task kill. Many of these circumstances (particularly a low-wake to SC) are used to legitimately escape combat and would likely appear to be a "combat log" when the game itself has crashed.

-When mission updates cause the game to crash, which requires a task kill. The best example here is when a massacre mission kill count gets past a certain number (usually 30 ships) and the game crashes, I have had this happen numerous times and had to task-kill the client to close the game.

-When being interdicted and the interdiction mini-game fails to "end". This also requires a task kill as you're "stuck" in SC indefinitely.

-When multicrew disconnects. This happens to me all the time and the connections are very unstable, even when multicrew accounts are being played on separate computers in the same household.

-All sorts of other game bugs that you can't get out of without a task kill. One of my favourite examples is when fighting in a CZ and your ship gets "stuck" in the hitbox of a capital ship. You can't move, you can't boost, you're "stuck" in their hitbox much like when an SRV gets stuck in terrain. The problem here is that the collision hitbox is much larger than the visual size of the capital ship and you can easily collide with it when the capital ship tries to maneuver and glitches into your ship despite visually being well outside the capital ship's mesh. Now capital ships have gone back to being stationary but it was an issue that required me to task-kill my client to get my ship out.

All of these issues can occur in combat situations and in most cases the game "hangs" from the crash but the client doesn't close unless you task kill the process. This would appear to be a "combat log" to another CMDR in the same instance. None of them are actually combat logging however as the game has crashed or caused some other bug that requires the task kill. There are quite simply far too many stability issues that Elite still struggles with to have any "definitive" solution to combat logging detection at this point and until the above issues are all fixed (which will likely never happen as they are very longstanding problems) FD will need to give players the benefit of the doubt unless a very clear and consistent pattern of combat logging behavior is apparent.
 
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If we assume that
and it is considered a cheat do this:

Tolerance = 0 (Zero/Nada/Niente)
Actions:

First infraction -> mail to the customer + additional info about the "cheat" to info panel ingame
Second Infraction -> Shadowban 2 Weeks to Solo
Third Infraction -> Shadowban 1 Month to Solo, all Reputation with faction looses 2 steps (allied -> cordial)
Fourth infraction -> Shadowban 2 Month to solo, all Reputation set to hostile for the duration
Fifth Infraction -> Account ban

How do these diminish?
Loose 1 infraction point every three months,
except for account ban.

Shadowban or solo, they are not the same :) Please clarify.
 

See above answer,
possible solution is a watchdog service
or anti-cheat system.
It will require some good coding, but be worthwhile.

Shadowban or solo, they are not the same :) Please clarify.

What is there exactly to clarify?
Shadowban to solo = no matter which mode the player selects, as long as he has outstanding infractions he will be playing solo.
Bad behaviour on his ends leeds to exclusion from multiplayer modes.

In short:
Revenge of the PEGI 7!
 
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Well let's assume they are to be applied to theoretically 100% accurate data otherwise this is never going to get anywhere. We can real-world test it later.

That's the thing though isn't it, if they could spot it reliably this thread probably wouldn't exist. It's the biggest issue there is in relation to clogging.

Theory crafting punishment scales is fun, but pointless without anything to hang it on.



Edit : I might have to change back to my original avatar Alan is looking far too smug in this one.
 
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There are still far too many problems with the game stability that makes any sort of automated system pointless. I frequently have the game crash on me:

-When transitioning between normal space/SC/glide/system jump, which hangs and requires a task kill. Many of these circumstances (particularly a low-wake to SC) are used to legitimately escape combat and would likely appear to be a "combat log" when the game itself has crashed.

-When mission updates cause the game to crash, which requires a task kill. The best example here is when a massacre mission kill count gets past a certain number (usually 30 ships) and the game crashes, I have had this happen numerous times and had to task-kill the client to close the game.

-When being interdicted and the interdiction mini-game fails to "end". This also requires a task kill as you're "stuck" in SC indefinitely.

-When multicrew disconnects. This happens to me all the time and the connections are very unstable, even when multicrew accounts are being played on separate computers in the same household.

-All sorts of other game bugs that you can't get out of without a task kill. One of my favourite examples is when fighting in a CZ and your ship gets "stuck" in the hitbox of a capital ship. You can't move, you can't boost, you're "stuck" in their hitbox much like when an SRV gets stuck in terrain. The problem here is that the collision hitbox is much larger than the visual size of the capital ship and you can easily collide with it when the capital ship tries to maneuver and glitches into your ship despite visually being well outside the capital ship's mesh. Now capital ships have gone back to being stationary but it was an issue that required me to task-kill my client to get my ship out.

All of these issues can occur in combat situations and in most cases the game "hangs" from the crash but the client doesn't close unless you task kill the process. This would appear to be a "combat log" to another CMDR in the same instance. None of them are actually combat logging however as the game has crashed or caused some other bug that requires the task kill. There are quite simply far too many stability issues that Elite still struggles with to have any "definitive" solution to combat logging detection at this point and until the above issues are all fixed (which will likely never happen as they are very longstanding problems) FD will need to give players the benefit of the doubt unless a very clear and consistent pattern of combat logging behavior is apparent.

You are right that identifying intent is hard, the solution I propose handles all of these simply by having the player rejoin in the mode they were in. CLogging from SC is functionally no different from double-tapping J or switching off the FSD or Thrusters.
 
Who would report it? The NPC isn't about to report a combat log against them. Expecting Frontier to devote resources to monitoring ALL combat activities just to catch those who combat log on NPCs is a ridiculous notion.
FD are the ones that created this game with a shared BGS and with CG's and the ability to put your name on first discoveries if you can make it back with the explo data, which they purposefully designed to be forfeit should you die on the way back to a cash-in point. If they aren't prepared to monitor and protect the integrity of the rules they designed for their game then why should they expect us to play their game? If it's all up for grabs most of the cooperative and competitive PvE content in the game (BGS, CGs, etc) becomes a meaningless facade in my opinion.

Could they not automate a process that informs them once a certain threshold of disconnects during combat is reached? By all means be more lenient with logging on NPCs and a bit stricter with logging against people but surely a method of detecting a certain threshold of disconnects isn't too much of an ask for the sake of maintaining the integrity of their game's BGS/Powerplay/CG/Exploration discoveries mechanics.
 
That's the thing though isn't it, if they could spot it reliably this thread probably wouldn't exist. It's the biggest issue there is in relation to clogging.

Theory crafting punishment scales is fun, but pointless.

Not pointless, it is something we (the community) can provide feedback on. How a karma system works is up to FDev, we can only assume it will work as intended.
 
Presumably the preconditions would be:

- disconnect occurs in combat
- that combat is with another player (we're not going to punish for logging on an NPC, surely.....are we?)
- such disconnects by the offender occur repeatedly (time period to be determined)
- such repeated disconnects are observed to be primarily, but not necessarily exclusively, during combat situations?

Why not? As a reminder, the exploit we are discussing here is combat logging and it is the ship loss and rebuy mechanic that's being exploited when a player does it.

Players eat a rebuy regardless of whether their ship was blown up by a player or an npc, so the exploit has the same effect in both situations.

Why wouldn't it be punished in the same way?

Note - I'm actually glad you said that because it's a really good example of what went wrong on the first page of this thread and never really got back on track. We're not talking about an 'open' issue or a 'PVP' issue here, regardless of who made the thread. It's simply a game rule issue. Game rule says 'Don't do X'. Player does X. Player is punished.

That's the logic that is applied to any other situation regarding cheating on here. In particular it's exactly the logic that (correctly) saw players generally pleased with the fact that FDev took action about the 5-1 exploit. Didn't matter whether you god-rolled your mods for pvp or pve, didn't matter whether you'd ever even used them after rolling them; the exploit was rolling them, if you rolled them you were punished.

A bit of logical consistency wouldn't go amiss here.
 
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That is very dependant on the context and frequency of a player logging on NPCs. A lot of the game's mechanics and especially the BGS side of the game revolve around balancing the difficulty of certain activities so that they are not trivially abuseable, such as the security ship killing method used in rock bottoming a controlling faction's influence.

CGs, in particular combat ones, are also another activity that can be exploited by combat logging. Essentially that player is circumnavigating the rules the rest of us are abiding by and thereby creating "assets" that should have existed otherwise if the game's rules were abided by. If said player had to eat a rebuy for example and lose their bounty vouchers/combat bonds/cargo/explo data/any other CG required item. Them combat logging prevents that and skews the CG numbers in the same way the BGS influence numbers can be skewed be this.

I outlined a lot of the ways that combat logging affects the PvE side of the game in this thread here:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/398295-It-s-Totally-Fine-to-Task-Kill-on-Thargoids

I don't disagree that combat logging on NPCs can have an impact on PvE - although not all such actions do to equal degrees. I just think it would be much lower priority for Frontier dev resources, even to inject some form of automatic detection that would then likely still require dev intervention to verify combat log from legitimate disconnect - and confirm a pattern of behaviour to boot. I couldn't see that process ending in anything more than warnings, not as far as bans, so why bother? In any event, by far most of the complaints about presumed combat logging come from PvPers so that's what the focus should be I would think.
 
FD are the ones that created this game with a shared BGS and with CG's and the ability to put your name on first discoveries if you can make it back with the explo data, which they purposefully designed to be forfeit should you die on the way back to a cash-in point. If they aren't prepared to monitor and protect the integrity of the rules they designed for their game then why should they expect us to play their game? If it's all up for grabs most of the cooperative and competitive PvE content in the game (BGS, CGs, etc) becomes a meaningless facade in my opinion.

Could they not automate a process that informs them once a certain threshold of disconnects during combat is reached? By all means be more lenient with logging on NPCs and a bit stricter with logging against people but surely a method of detecting a certain threshold of disconnects isn't too much of an ask for the sake of maintaining the integrity of their game's BGS/Powerplay/CG/Exploration discoveries mechanics.

I'd appreciate it if you could move on from this, you've laid down your stance, it's okay for others to disagree. There are valid reasons either way. Would you agree PvP Clogging is a higher priority at least?
 
Why not? As a reminder, the exploit we are discussing here is combat logging and it is the ship loss and rebuy mechanic that's being exploited when a player does it.

Players eat a rebuy regardless of whether their ship was blown up by a player or an npc, so the exploit has the same effect in both situations.

Why wouldn't it be punished in the same way?

Note - I'm actually glad you said that because it's a really good example of what went wrong on the first page of this thread and never really got back on track. We're not talking about an 'open' issue or a 'PVP' issue here, regardless of who made the thread. It's simply a game rule issue. Game rule says 'don't do X'. Player does X. Player is punished.

Not so much that it shouldn't be punished but rather from the practicality of policing PvE actions to do so - it would take dev resources I believe would be better utilised elsewhere.
 
Why not? As a reminder, the exploit we are discussing here is combat logging and it is the ship loss and rebuy mechanic that's being exploited when a player does it.

Players eat a rebuy regardless of whether their ship was blown up by a player or an npc, so the exploit has the same effect in both situations.

Why wouldn't it be punished in the same way?

Note - I'm actually glad you said that because it's a really good example of what went wrong on the first page of this thread and never really got back on track. We're not talking about an 'open' issue or a 'PVP' issue here, regardless of who made the thread. It's simply a game rule issue. Game rule says 'Don't do X'. Player does X. Player is punished.

That's the logic that is applied to any other situation. In particular it's exactly the logic that (correctly) saw players generally pleased with the fact that FDev took action about the 5-1 exploit. Didn't matter whether you god-rolled your mods for pvp or pve, didn't matter whether you'd ever even used them after rolling them; the exploit was rolling them, if you rolled them you were punished.

A bit of logical consistency wouldn't go amiss here.

I don't think anyone is arguing that PvE CLogging is fine, just not as important (that's my stance anyway).
 
I have been reading this thread as long as possible but it is huge so forgive me if I missed something.

First off I am not SDC but I hate clogging, I agree it does a lot of damage to the game. What I am not seeing is someone willing to make the sacrifice to see if FDis really doing "Nothing". I play on the PS4 and am willing to get banned, send me a PM if you want to record me combat logging a few times in an hour and report me. Lets put this to bed gentlemen.
 
FD are the ones that created this game with a shared BGS and with CG's and the ability to put your name on first discoveries if you can make it back with the explo data, which they purposefully designed to be forfeit should you die on the way back to a cash-in point. If they aren't prepared to monitor and protect the integrity of the rules they designed for their game then why should they expect us to play their game? If it's all up for grabs most of the cooperative and competitive PvE content in the game (BGS, CGs, etc) becomes a meaningless facade in my opinion.

Could they not automate a process that informs them once a certain threshold of disconnects during combat is reached? By all means be more lenient with logging on NPCs and a bit stricter with logging against people but surely a method of detecting a certain threshold of disconnects isn't too much of an ask for the sake of maintaining the integrity of their game's BGS/Powerplay/CG/Exploration discoveries mechanics.

Where would you set the threshold though.

In one of these threads a while back shortly after a patch (which always triggers connection issues) while I had a shaky connection due to geography and weather I was updating the thread with my disconnects. I was getting booted about once every fifteen to twenty minutes IIRC, and most were in combat (with NPC's).

It was NPC wings spawning into the CZ that was triggering it I think.
 
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