I'm certainly sure - but I think the quotes got a bit messed up there
Sorry, the whole this was intended as a reply to Mr Sole.
I'll try and tinker.
PvP An Investigation Into Frontier's Actions on Combat Logging, Part 2
- Thread starter Rinzler o7o7o7
- Start date
Sorry, the whole this was intended as a reply to Mr Sole.
I'll try and tinker.
Sorry, the whole this was intended as a reply to Mr Sole.
I'll try and tinker.
Naah - save the effort. His rich dad will be here soon to either show us the true way or pay us off with heaps of cash!!!!
Sole Hunter
Banned
I suggest you to look at your quotes, you are confused.
The server structure is irrelevant. I am pretty sure Frontier knows when someone is combat logging. They generate logs for every events in the game.
They are just being lazy and simply don't care about combat logging anymore because too many people do it and they just don't have an efficient system to prevent people from doing it.
Source : https://lavewiki.com/technical
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I wish the game developers solve the problem then it comes to Combat loggin but it's simelary around that like strangle your own internet speed but that is parhaps another threat to discuss
I wish the game developers solve the problem then it comes to Combat loggin but it's simelary around that like strangle your own internet speed but that is parhaps another threat to discuss
The thing with Elite - is that internet speed doesn't really matter.
You can have a 128Kbps connection, a 1Mbps connection, a 10Gbps connection - they are all functionally the same.
You only need to maintain a minimal connection to three of FD's servers, and normally they are very forgiving. Linerates of 30Kbps will manage it - what you would get from an old dial-up modem from the 90's.
Now - where that all goes pear-shaped is of course where other players are involved. Traffic increases by n+n*n-(1) and with dozens of players in an instance, that can overwhelm poor connections very quickly.
It also doesn't help that some poor players will deliberately sabotage connections for the lulz.
All you can do really, is just play the game, and have fun
The thing with Elite - is that internet speed doesn't really matter.
You can have a 128Kbps connection, a 1Mbps connection, a 10Gbps connection - they are all functionally the same.
You only need to maintain a minimal connection to three of FD's servers, and normally they are very forgiving. Linerates of 30Kbps will manage it - what you would get from an old dial-up modem from the 90's.
Now - where that all goes pear-shaped is of course where other players are involved. Traffic increases by n+n*n-(1) and with dozens of players in an instance, that can overwhelm poor connections very quickly.
It also doesn't help that some poor players will deliberately sabotage connections for the lulz.
All you can do really, is just play the game, and have fun
So you cant put your print screen button on autofire and fly like UFO today ?
I'm no networking expert but I'd expect Frontier can tell when someone disconnects, what they were doing at the time (and leading up to it) and whether that disconnect is via the menu, and little more if anything. To prove combat logging, you need to prove INTENT to do so (and I suggest a repeated pattern of behaviour if some action is to be taken such as a ban). Intent is more difficult to prove than the actual disconnect itself and that's where the pattern of behaviour comes in. A single event could be an aberration. Repeated disconnects in combat, but not regularly observed in other gameplay might indicate a combat log assuming there's not some hardware complication at the user's end (such as some bug that causes a crash when in combat or an instance with other players - presumably Frontier would know if such issues existed in their code but it would need to be categorically eliminated before progressing to a ban).
I backed ED in 2014 when it was supposed to have an offline single player mode, then they dropped offline so I read up on how the online modes worked and the block function (as in the words of David Braben "I just want to play a great game without being griefed by teenagers") and decided not to refund even though they'd Darth Vadered the deal.
I live in a remote area with sometimes terrible broadband due simply to geography. When it's bad it's really bad I get as many disconnects in an hour as SDC reported over a five month period in their "investigation". I play solo when It's playing up, in order to know it's playing up I have to get disconnected a few times first. When it's good I'll still get disconnected maybe once in every three hours. That's the reality of rural UK broadband. My electricity supply is also frequently patchy to the point where I use clockwork clocks as winding them is easier than resetting electric ones.
There's nothing in the eula, TOS or minimum specs about broadband stability or speed, the requirement is simply broadband.
I don't clog and I fully support account bans for all identified cheats, but the thing with clogging is to match a rural UK connection the clogger would need to be doing it almost constantly. If they could reliably identify it they would probably already be punishing it, in the gentle touchy feely way they punish other forms of cheating in ED (other than hacking which they are rightly harsh on).
I can't see FDEV's response to clogging ever satisfying the people it upsets.
Then they can explode for no apparent reason from time to time when they fail to recognize a threat or take precautions against it.
A player using weighted dice isn't role-playing.
Collect more detailed telemetry/logs and set some criteria so suspect behavior can be automatically flagged for review.
Record disconnections and compare those instances against network status, system resource utilization, other CMDRs in the instance (if any), recent peer-to-peer connections, ship location, detailed ship status, etc, and look for correlations. If someone is disconnecting at random, that should be fairly apparent and shouldn't trigger any punitive action, though some suggestions to increase system or network stability might be in order. If there is strong correlation for disconnections in combat, when flying certain types of ships, when in apparently inextricable circumstances (telemetry says 463m/s at -77 degree angle, in an unshielded Asp, over a 6G world, at an altitude of 350m), when instanced with certain ship types, or when paired with certain peers, and there are no corresponding contraindications that would indicate technical issues, wilful disconnection is likely and a warning should be sent out. If the pattern persists punishment should escalate. If there are reports against said player, more detailed manual review of telemetry may be in order, followed by more severe punishment (asset loss at the low end), if they seem to be guilty, beyond reasonable doubt, of wilfully disconnecting to preserve assets or aggravate other players.
I suspect Frontier already does a fair portion of, and has a pretty good idea when deliberate disconnections occur, when they bother to look.
Regardless, in those clear-cut cases featuring repeat offenders, irrespective of where the evidence comes from, those players shouldn't be allowed to play the game anymore.
I would also move confirmation for the log out timer to the beginning of the countdown (to remove the excuse that 15 seconds is too long a wait to be able to do something urgent; the game can just run int the background and close itself when the timer completes), extend the timer to at least 60 seconds, and apply a much longer timer to limit one's ability to mode switch immediately after a logout where one's ship was in danger.
Additionally, if possible, one's instance state should be saved upon quitting and at frequent intervals otherwise, so PvE threats would be restored upon logging in again. Logging out/disconnecting should never be the go to way to avoid in-game trouble, irrespective of mode, and should never help one in this regard. This same sort of persistence would also help mitigate other exploits (certain data terminals being repeatedly scannable rather than being on their ~2 week timer, for example), without needing to wait for a specific fix.
The idea that 'combat logging' is only a PvP issue is really unfortunate. It's most glaring in PvP, but as long as our CMDRs share the same underlying setting, can freely bring assets across modes, and can influence the BGS from any mode, what they have and how they got it (or kept it) is relevant to the game as a whole.
I'm not at all keen on punishing people for unintentional disconnections (though those with unusually unstable systems/connections should probably be flagged/limited some other way as Asp Explorer has mentioned), even via means such a 'karma', and no reasonable system is going to catch every willful disconnector every time. Recognizing patterns is indeed the key, and achieving a good level of certainty will likely remain a labor intensive endevour.
This is precisely why, when actual punishments are merited, that they have to be severe. To be a viable deterrent, the odds of getting punished must be very high and the gains still below the costs, or the penalty must be high enough that even a modest chance of being caught is too much to risk.
There certainly is more likelihood of a disconnect in combat rather than when alone, just because there's more moving parts to go wrong and more continuous use of the network coding. You could have a ten-second network drop when alone in space and possibly not even notice ... mid-fight, you'd certainly notice and probably get kicked.
However, such likelihoods would affect winners and losers of the fight alike - where are the stories about "I was dead for sure and then my opponent disappeared"
In CQC we can easily tell the difference between combat loggers and people who just had a network glitch, because the people with the network glitch quite often disappear one kill from winning the match... also, the game provides carrot-and-stick incentives not to log, so it is rarer than genuine disconnects there. ... Actually, that's maybe what the main game needs: both stick and carrot.
If you disconnect in danger for any reason, add your ship's rebuy to a score; if you die, add your ship's rebuy to a different score. You could use that to punish people with disconnect >> death, as if nothing else they should probably be sticking to Solo where their highly unstable network won't be annoying everyone else -- but the more major part is to reward people with death >> disconnect: give them (revokable!) access to exclusive system permits, paint jobs, 10% boost to mission earnings or bounty payouts, maybe even Engineers, etc. (Yeah, you could "play" this by repeatedly self-destructing Cutters when on your own to give you "combat logging rights" ... but you pay the ship loss cost either way so it's no big deal)
Yes, absolutely. This would also benefit non-loggers who had genuine network issues: there's the occasional thread from someone who spent hours searching for a USS to complete a mission, and then their connection dropped and they're going to have to spend more hours finding it again.
You could even semi-restore PvP threats this way: if the player isn't still in the instance when you log back in, replace them with an NPC-piloted copy of their ship and combat rank. It wouldn't usually be anywhere near as dangerous, but it might be able to finish the job sometimes. (Player-replacement AIs could even have the self-nerfs such as "no subsystem targeting" turned off)
This is a good point.
Persistence, or lack thereof, is a key issue underlying many others.
So how long until we see part 3 of this so called "investigation"?
Give the man a cigar.
Save the "Morbad is in combat" or "Morbad is not in combat" state along with with the current location (which we know the game does save every so often): Then just check on start-up.
if disconnect.state="Morbad is in combat" then rebuy()
If count (disconnect.state="Morbad is in combat") > count (disconnect.state="Morbad is not in combat") then dirtylogger(teleport to beaglepoint)
It doesn't need to be a network problem. In fact, it's better is it's not.
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If I was flying my corvette on either a bad connection day, or after any of FDEV's patches (which always break connectivity) that could cost me a hundred million credits an hour even though I never clog.
That's a risk we all take.
I've requested my thread in the main discussion forum to be unlocked and highlighted that.