But you have a choice! Form a private group with only non-combat loggers in it. Eject anyone who combat logs.
This is the *exact same argument* Möbius users have had since inception. What's wrong with it?
-BW
An investigation into Frontier's actions on Combat Logging
- Thread starter ryan_m
- Start date
But you have a choice! Form a private group with only non-combat loggers in it. Eject anyone who combat logs.
This is the *exact same argument* Möbius users have had since inception. What's wrong with it?
-BW
No one is making anything up, those who did the investigation have simply confirmed what many suspected.. Combat logging is a persistant problem that Frontier has failed to address and rather than tackle it they have fobbed us all off.. There are countless occasions where people have exploited the game and no action was taken.
Its rather odd to have to point the obvious out but cheating and exploiting should not be tolerated since it undermines the experience for everyone.
We actually have a concept of legal blackmail: the strike.
I think SDC should go on strike until we all realise what we're missing and join their campaign for law enforcement. N'est pas?
-BW
Javert
Volunteer Moderator
I've looked through the rest of this thread from overnight, and frankly I haven't seen anything to change my view (personal view nothing to do with moderation or FD).
I don't see a smoking gun here.
The OP was very carefully constructed using as it's basis a very old post from just after the game was first released, and a few other links. Glad to see that people are learning lessons from the communication techniques of recent political orators.
In none of these links does FD explicitly say that they have watched a particular video that the OP is so upset about them not watching. The links provided by the OP, even an email from support, doesn't specifically even say they have reviewed the individual evidence relating to that ticket. The screenshot doesn't contain a specific ticket number and it's not clear that the reply is referring to one particular incident or just a generic statement.
You should be very suspicious of evidence presented in this cherry picked type of way - had the OP released the entire dossier of all actions, with date and time stamps and clear links and ticket numbers visible for each reply, with a clear smoking gun of a lie, it might be more believable (please don't post that here but if you have it you can provide it directly to FD by PM).
I see the signs here of cherry picked items pulled from various different sources to back up a predefined position. I may be proved wrong later, but based on this evidence so far, that is my suspicion.
"We take action even against first time offenders" (from a messages linked in the OP) is very likely a generic statement about all offences and a stock reply given from support. It is not meant to indicate they are going to take action against the specific report concerned and doesn't even specifically mention Combat Logging - may well be out of context.
Now the original post from FD dated January 2015 states that they consider combat logging as an exploit and people shouldn't do it. It says "at some point, we will start taking action against commanders using this exploit". It does not say they will do that on or before September 2016 or whenever these reports were made. It also makes it pretty clear that this is going to be a difficult issue to deal with as it's technically impossible to prove that any one disconnect was done on purpose.
Keep in mind that this post was made by a dev who almost always puts "No Promises, no guarantees" against most of his posts.
So, accusing FD of being liars is not a valid accusation here. Even if you could prove that one FD support person said something that wasn't true (which you haven't by the way), that still wouldn't prove that the whole company has a specific policy which is a lie.
More recent statements by FD about combat logging have been more circumspect - they have continued to say it's an exploit, but they've also implied that it's difficult to detect reliably. I can't see any evidence linked by the OP where FD specifically said "We regularly ban combat loggers" or words to that effect.
I should also point out that SDC by their own admission are a group who tries to break the game, push the rules to extreme, and cause trouble "in order to highlight problems with the game". Such group cannot be taken as an independent body, and all reports of griefing or other rule breaking from members of this group are probably taken with a pinch of salt by FD support. Therefore the test may have failed before it even started when FD simply put tickets from SDC members on the back burner.
Frankly, I suspect SDC were disappointed that they didn't find a real smoking gun in this "investigation", so they have just spun the results into a supposed case for what they hoped they would find in the first place.
Just to close, I am commenting here on the accusation of FD being liars which I find unacceptable. It is possible that FD are currently taking no banning action against any reported combat loggers (even multiple prolific offenders), and if so, that's certainly not an ideal situation. However, if faced with a decision to take people off other game development tasks in order to spend all their time looking into combat logging reports, personally I'd rather they carry on with game development.
I don't see a smoking gun here.
The OP was very carefully constructed using as it's basis a very old post from just after the game was first released, and a few other links. Glad to see that people are learning lessons from the communication techniques of recent political orators.
In none of these links does FD explicitly say that they have watched a particular video that the OP is so upset about them not watching. The links provided by the OP, even an email from support, doesn't specifically even say they have reviewed the individual evidence relating to that ticket. The screenshot doesn't contain a specific ticket number and it's not clear that the reply is referring to one particular incident or just a generic statement.
You should be very suspicious of evidence presented in this cherry picked type of way - had the OP released the entire dossier of all actions, with date and time stamps and clear links and ticket numbers visible for each reply, with a clear smoking gun of a lie, it might be more believable (please don't post that here but if you have it you can provide it directly to FD by PM).
I see the signs here of cherry picked items pulled from various different sources to back up a predefined position. I may be proved wrong later, but based on this evidence so far, that is my suspicion.
"We take action even against first time offenders" (from a messages linked in the OP) is very likely a generic statement about all offences and a stock reply given from support. It is not meant to indicate they are going to take action against the specific report concerned and doesn't even specifically mention Combat Logging - may well be out of context.
Now the original post from FD dated January 2015 states that they consider combat logging as an exploit and people shouldn't do it. It says "at some point, we will start taking action against commanders using this exploit". It does not say they will do that on or before September 2016 or whenever these reports were made. It also makes it pretty clear that this is going to be a difficult issue to deal with as it's technically impossible to prove that any one disconnect was done on purpose.
Keep in mind that this post was made by a dev who almost always puts "No Promises, no guarantees" against most of his posts.
So, accusing FD of being liars is not a valid accusation here. Even if you could prove that one FD support person said something that wasn't true (which you haven't by the way), that still wouldn't prove that the whole company has a specific policy which is a lie.
More recent statements by FD about combat logging have been more circumspect - they have continued to say it's an exploit, but they've also implied that it's difficult to detect reliably. I can't see any evidence linked by the OP where FD specifically said "We regularly ban combat loggers" or words to that effect.
I should also point out that SDC by their own admission are a group who tries to break the game, push the rules to extreme, and cause trouble "in order to highlight problems with the game". Such group cannot be taken as an independent body, and all reports of griefing or other rule breaking from members of this group are probably taken with a pinch of salt by FD support. Therefore the test may have failed before it even started when FD simply put tickets from SDC members on the back burner.
Frankly, I suspect SDC were disappointed that they didn't find a real smoking gun in this "investigation", so they have just spun the results into a supposed case for what they hoped they would find in the first place.
Just to close, I am commenting here on the accusation of FD being liars which I find unacceptable. It is possible that FD are currently taking no banning action against any reported combat loggers (even multiple prolific offenders), and if so, that's certainly not an ideal situation. However, if faced with a decision to take people off other game development tasks in order to spend all their time looking into combat logging reports, personally I'd rather they carry on with game development.
The thing is it doesn't matter what's the cause of the connection loss. Other players should not suffer the conection problems of other people.
Also, there's no need to ban them.
Simply leave their ship there doing nothing so the other player/s can still destroy it. People would quickly stop combat logging.
Many online games do this.
It can be done in P2P:
1 - Combat logger disconnects.
2 - His ship stays there doing absolutely nothing for some time in the P2P instance shared between other player/s clients.
3 - If the ship is destroyed, that is sent to Frontier's "transaction server" by the clients still in the instance.
4 - The next time the combat logger logs in, as always, his client connects to the transaction server to get the status of his ship, placement, etc,...
5 - He is greeted by a nice "rebuy" screen.
(it's really more complicated than this and have more syncing issues and would need more checks... but it can be done)
As I said elsewhere, I prefer the occasional player loss by a faulty connection, to widespread (and allowed) cheating.
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Fair rebuttal on the targets comment and I suspect the issue of rule infringements is largely ignored (my impression just from reading the forum).
My guess for this is that, as pointed out it is difficult to prove it was a deliberate disconnect and not a connection issue as lots of people complain about regular disconnects and it is clear that disconnects are much more likely with other players are around.
Watching disconnect trends is a reasonable suggestion, but when I had a spate of connection errors, it was massively more prevalent when in combat, when other players were around (Not PvP, it was a CZ in Mobius) so it would show I kept dropping connection while in combat. If I got banned for this I'd be pretty angry, possibly to the point of saying sod-it I'm off so they would permanently loose a player/cash source.
On balance, I believe ignoring the issue and retaining the players that have no appetite for fighting, but like to actually meet other players in an MMO so don't want to go Solo outweighs loosing those customers that love shooting players in significantly one-sided fights.
If the majority of PvP was between like minded players then I doubt there would be as much CL'ing although there will be some as you always get sore losers, even if they initiated the engagement. As it often seems to be people complaining talk about that mean T7 CL'ing on their FDL I completely sympathise with the T7 pilot.
I do think its wrong and don't do it so I don't ever go to Open any more but neither do I see it as a major issue given the serious lop-sidedness of the consequences in the non-consensual engagements.
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If FDEV were not looking at the videos they should have told everyone not to send them in... letting people waste their time because they're worried about the backlash or marketing impact is in itself dishonest.
Doesn't SDC claim to have a secret line of communication with the devs and that Sandro personally consults with them regularly? Every time one of them makes a thread they invariably mention this.
"Non-consensual PvP" - REALLY? You sign the consent form by playing in Open, 
I'd hazard a guess that the majority of those who are so vocally against PvP haven't played many video games since the original Elite, or at least have never any multi-player or MMO games.
Anyway, if FD dedicated any time/resources to looking into the Combat Logging problem it would take away from their ability to produce more Cobra skins and mean they have less to time to hit all the fun things with the nerf-bat... and we can't be having that! /s
I'd hazard a guess that the majority of those who are so vocally against PvP haven't played many video games since the original Elite, or at least have never any multi-player or MMO games.
Anyway, if FD dedicated any time/resources to looking into the Combat Logging problem it would take away from their ability to produce more Cobra skins and mean they have less to time to hit all the fun things with the nerf-bat... and we can't be having that! /s
Well it wouldn't have a bias if there is that many of them and they all posted here!
Yeah and SDC never waste anyones time, how many more times are these clowns going to be allowed to run roughshot over the developers...........man is the circus back in town.
The fact is we have been told that they take action over combat logging. I have been told this directly. Yet this clearly isn't happening given the ubiquitous nature of it. Its not without some small sense of irony that people are free to say they do it and promote doing it on these very forums.
Its really not up to you to refute or deny these allegations. I'm sure Frontier can defend themselves and its revealing that you attempt to marginalise the issue by attacking the poster; very dubious.
It short, your post is apologist white knighting despite the obvious.
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verminstar
Banned
I suppose I could say this could never affect me as I play solo only, hence no reason or motivation to log...unless Im just being lame but I dont...whether anyone believes that or not, I really dont care...no way of proving it either way anyway.
That being said, it does affect everyone...why you ask? Because if they lying or dragging their feet over what should be an important issue, then one has to ask themselves what else are they lying about? The stone wall silence doesnt help because the silence itself could be seen as a rabbit caught ij the headlights, and they freeze not knowing how to respond...a silent admission of guilt.
Of course, they could also be rolling around on the floor laughing their asp off while readint this over their morning cuppa, but without some form of public reaction, players will draw their own conclusions...and considering the state the game is in right now?
Attempting to ignore this or keep it behind closed doors will not be taken as a sign of openness and honesty with the community...considering frontier are built on good reputation with many, this really doesnt look good. Staying silent could end up doing more harm in the long run...and not harshly punishing the perps will send out the message that logging is perfectly acceptable, as is running 3rd party scripts and cheat programs. Why should players care when the devs obviously dont?
That being said, it does affect everyone...why you ask? Because if they lying or dragging their feet over what should be an important issue, then one has to ask themselves what else are they lying about? The stone wall silence doesnt help because the silence itself could be seen as a rabbit caught ij the headlights, and they freeze not knowing how to respond...a silent admission of guilt.
Of course, they could also be rolling around on the floor laughing their asp off while readint this over their morning cuppa, but without some form of public reaction, players will draw their own conclusions...and considering the state the game is in right now?
Attempting to ignore this or keep it behind closed doors will not be taken as a sign of openness and honesty with the community...considering frontier are built on good reputation with many, this really doesnt look good. Staying silent could end up doing more harm in the long run...and not harshly punishing the perps will send out the message that logging is perfectly acceptable, as is running 3rd party scripts and cheat programs. Why should players care when the devs obviously dont?
"Non-consensual PvP" - REALLY? You sign the consent form by playing in Open,
I'd hazard a guess that the majority of those who are so vocally against PvP haven't played many video games since the original Elite, or at least have never any multi-player or MMO games.
Anyway, if FD dedicated any time/resources to looking into the Combat Logging problem it would take away from their ability to produce more Cobra skins and mean they have less to time to hit all the fun things with the nerf-bat... and we can't be having that! /s
Please show me the form I signed.
If I play COD or similar where the sole function of the game is to fight the environment or other players then I'd agree with you.
As I'm playing a game where you can be social and do lots of things that do not involve fighting with load-outs that are not suited to fighting I cannot agree with you.
E.g. If I play ETS2 online to do some social trucking, you occasionally get a player that just drives around in a powerful cab ramming other players. By your definition, the fact that it is possible to ram another lorry means we all signed a declaration that this is what we wanted when joining an online haulage company. No, it really isn't true.
I have been playing the game a long time and just recently registered and started using the forum.
Those polls here are not representative of all the player base.
I prefer Reddit, which is a much better system for a community.
Still, not all the players are in Reddit.
From what I've gathered on other forums, FDev punishes cheat programs very severely, to the point that running a certain program at the same time as Elite will result in an account ban within the day. The days of invulnerable "PvP"ers sitting at stations with turrets shooting at everything that moves is now long over.
3rd party scripts on the other hand seem to be more tolerated considering auto-key and those insipid "Yar, I be a pirate and here's my life's story" multiparagraph messages that some "pirates" send out while they attack.
Considering they didn't punish anyone who exploited the anarchy no fire zone bug which resulted in thousands of destroyed ships and actively disrupted CGs that FDev themselves was running at the time, I think combat logging is way too low on the list for them to care.
Most players probably don't visit this forum, reddit or anything else so no it's not truly representative, but it can be an indication.
The same poll on Reddit at the same time to see what the spread is would be interesting. Do you have a link to one? Not combative, I'd genuinely like to know if the bias is significantly the other way with comparable numbers of votes at a similar point in the games development.
Generally polls are only relevant when they reinforce your own opinion (Guilty as charged).
It's funny though when someone produces a poll that goes heavily against them, then claim its not relevant due to forum bias etc.