An investigation into Frontier's actions on Combat Logging

Hyperbolic much?

So since 100% of games have had some cheating: 100% are ruined? Neat.

When said cheating goes unaddressed? Yes. Nobody cares about single player cheating. Multiplayer cheating, if nothing is done about it, ruins that game, every time.

Don't pretend as if you don't know what was meant.
 
When said cheating goes unaddressed? Yes. Nobody cares about single player cheating. Multiplayer cheating, if nothing is done about it, ruins that game, every time.

Don't pretend as if you don't know what was meant.

Not exactly. ED is multiplayer, yes, but it's not competitive multiplayer. There is nothing gained besides epeen in most pvp scenarios and NOTHING gained IN GAME from ganking; not rank or credits. If you were discussing cheating in Starcraft, for example, that becomes a huge problem that has to be immediately addressed, because there's a ranked system in the multiplayer. It's simple there as a drop fro whatever reason is a loss and that's the end of it, but it has a real and tangible in game competitive purpose. What ruins multiplayer games across the board is an unbalanced system left to stagnate or badly managed. This scenario is not remotely applicable to ED. The argument of cheating ruins multiplayer games is laughable in the context of logging in Elite Dangerous. Perhaps CQC? That's the pvp ranked sport within Elite. Also, it may be an exploit, but stop calling it a cheat. What were you cheated out of exactly? What ranking did it effect? What mission did it deter you from completing?
Ridiculous, dishonest hyperbole. SDC and those likeminded have done more damage to elite than any logger ever has, and FDs lack of addressing gankers, C&P or effective ballance in the game has done more damage than both combined.
 
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Not exactly. ED is multiplayer, yes, but it's not competitive multiplayer. There is nothing gained besides epeen in most pvp scenarios and NOTHING gained IN GAME from ganking; not rank or credits. If you were discussing cheating in Starcraft, for example, that becomes a huge problem that has to be immediately addressed, because there's a ranked system in the multiplayer. It's simple there as a drop fro whatever reason is a loss and that's the end of it, but it has a real and tangible in game competitive purpose. What ruins multiplayer games across the board is an unbalanced system left to stagnate or badly managed. This scenario is not remotely applicable to ED. The argument of cheating ruins multiplayer games is laughable in the context of logging in Elite Dangerous. Perhaps CQC? That's the pvp ranked sport within Elite. Also, it may be an exploit, but stop calling it a cheat. What were you cheated out of exactly? What ranking did it effect? What mission did it deter you from completing?
Ridiculous, dishonest hyperbole. SDC and those likeminded have done more damage to elite than any logger ever has, and FDs lack of addressing gankers, C&P or effective ballance in the game has done more damage than both combined.

tl;dr: I don't think it's a big enough deal, so FD shouldn't fix it.

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No. TLDR, it is a simptom of a larger problem and if addressed on its own will only exacerbate the issue.


In other words, addressing it in a vacuum is not only a waste of time, it is harmful to the overal game.

Fair enough, I wish you just would have said that to begin with :D

Sadly, many people do not make this differentiation between addressing it (and C&P at the same time) and not addressing it at all. Look at the other thread where it's roughly 50/50 in favor of not punishing CLers at all.
 
Not exactly. ED is multiplayer, yes, but it's not competitive multiplayer. There is nothing gained besides epeen in most pvp scenarios and NOTHING gained IN GAME from ganking; not rank or credits. If you were discussing cheating in Starcraft, for example, that becomes a huge problem that has to be immediately addressed, because there's a ranked system in the multiplayer. It's simple there as a drop fro whatever reason is a loss and that's the end of it, but it has a real and tangible in game competitive purpose. What ruins multiplayer games across the board is an unbalanced system left to stagnate or badly managed. This scenario is not remotely applicable to ED. The argument of cheating ruins multiplayer games is laughable in the context of logging in Elite Dangerous. Perhaps CQC? That's the pvp ranked sport within Elite. Also, it may be an exploit, but stop calling it a cheat. What were you cheated out of exactly? What ranking did it effect? What mission did it deter you from completing?
Ridiculous, dishonest hyperbole. SDC and those likeminded have done more damage to elite than any logger ever has, and FDs lack of addressing gankers, C&P or effective ballance in the game has done more damage than both combined.


Nothing else really needs to be said on this subject........unless it's a mic-drop? :D
 
My pleasure, believe me. When I play on steam servers, there's a reason I check the "VAC Secured" option, it's the same reason I won't be investing any more time or money into ED and will discourage anybody else from wasting their precious time and money on it also.

This community is a disgrace to gaming.

<rolls around the floor in uproarious laughter and mirth>
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I'll tell you who's a disgrace to gaming mate - the countless hackers, gankers and griefers, with their misguided sense of superiority and complete lack of any honour, fairplay or sportsmanship in the numerous online PvP games I've played ever since the days of the original Quake on dialup. Every game has had them, and every game has suffered as a result. Can't say I've come across a game yet ruined by a few people getting disconnects though (deliberate or otherwise). A few people combat logging on these very same types of players? While I don't condone it, it's far from a disgrace, as is this community.
 
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Cheating, in any form, ruins games .. period.

Acting like a [expletive] in game also ruins it for others but isn't the focus of this thread.
It's not that simple. Some of the most fun I've ever had with multiplayer games involved getting a group of friends to play a few games with heavy use of cheats to extricate all grind and give everyone an equal footing. Heck, many games are released with cheat codes, or even a full debug console, officially available.

Cheating doesn't ruin games, not by itself. In fact, cheating can be used to greatly improve the experience. What ruins games is using cheats to, borrowing your phrasing, "act line a [expletive]."
 
Killing clean commanders with no consequence is a disgrace to gaming.

Arguably that is FD at fault though. (Note i loath the actions of SDC and am convinced they are harming the game). They say FD support their play style.. maybe they do now but it is not the speil DB gave when his hat was out to old elite players. The 1 credit i will give SDC they do not hide their actions, if onky police had it so easy with villains openly crowing about it. The fact FD are letting them go and only really offically calling CLing an exploit and not all the rest in my book make them at least as big a villain as SDC if not more. All the exploits SDC do they argue are endorsed and the only exploit which is bad is CLing.... and from a certain view i see their point because it IS the one FD have been most vocal about.

Its a bit like a rude missbehaving child. The child only take a small part of the blame, imo its the parents who carry the can
 
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Big player-collectable bounties would just help them exploit the system for more money.

Yes... It needs to be a rapidly escalating fine directly to the CMDR themselves.

ie: After several illegal murders of other Pilots Federation members, the imediate fine would be hundreds of millions. Continue? You'd soon be getting billion+ CR fines...


In truth if the game was designed properly there should be no reason for any illegal CMDR destruction. A large part of the problem is the fact even two years on, the game does little/nothing to offer any orchestrated PvP combat, yet alone anything of any worth/meaning! Powerplay should be obvious go to place for this, but alas no.
 
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Nobody's restricting anybody to anything though, besides, I've five manned on Eco rounds so it's certainly no death sentence. In ED every commander is free to fit their ship to the best spec they can afford. If people choose to fit woefully underpowered defensive systems to their trade ships in an effort to haul as much cargo as possible then they can't expect to last very long in the event of shenanigans.

Of course many of said. Commanders have gotten their wealth by cheating and are smashing players who do not cheat... whi h is why it is not so black and white as it looks on the surface imo. I know i couls make 100mil in an hr but it involves various exploits (one of which is logging) i wonder if any of these killers have done it?

The thing with most vs games is even experienced players are roughly balanced either by level locks or by most equipment being sidegrades . ED has none of that its a bit like if a character was allowed to play darthvader 100% of the time with all force powers and was allowed to play against grunts where if the grunt was shot they lose hrs and hrs of progress. That is not good MP gameplay
 
My 5c, FD probably just do not have manpower to process all reports.
To admit it = bad press.
In general, they are aware about issue, but solution is not available:

a) they have higher priority tasks like 2.3 and 2.2x update (bugfixes)...FD does not time to fix old content..
b) Elite by design is more PvE then PvP game - ship total inbalance (add eng mods here, too) = short lifespan of trade and starter ships...
c) too much time to implement proper solution - not worth for "inferior" PvP mode...
 
Fair enough, I wish you just would have said that to begin with :D

Sadly, many people do not make this differentiation between addressing it (and C&P at the same time) and not addressing it at all. Look at the other thread where it's roughly 50/50 in favor of not punishing CLers at all.

That poll is very simplistic though - as with this thread's OP and tone. I've repeatedly replied to the SDC/Pro responses and pointed out that addressing their problem in isolation is a no go and I don't think they've responded one single time. Each side sees the issue from their side and while I've seen the PvEers say "we understand what you're getting at but..." I've seen little but ridicule in return from the other side - so kudos to you if you acknowledge there is a link. We'd do better exploring that and finding a solution we can all (except the gankers) be happy with so we can give Zac something useful to take to the design team
 
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a) this game isn't competitive
b) it's mostly an MMO SP with MP added on (i.e. you can play perfectly fine in Solo, and Open / Private just adds more people)

My guess is Frontier, rightfully, doesn't care about the issues at the moment. Most of the people whining about this are the ones doing risk-free attacks vs ships built for PvE.

Finally, the way the game is currently implemented makes actually doing something about this a HUGE hassle from a technical standpoint.

Theoretical example:
I have 2 monitors, I could be running a detailed firewall config on a second screen whilst playing ED. I'm flying a weak PvE oriented ship, but not without weapons. Someone attacks me - I turn off the relevant connections on my second screen, and suddenly the enemy commander is floating in space not doing anything (connection lost) while I'm still connected to ED server. I can start blowing the enemy CMDR up. In the same time that CMDR sees my ship floating aimlessly, and also blows me up (on their screen). WHO, in the end, is the one who gets blown up?

In other words, the P2P nature of the game makes this a heck of a problem to solve through technical means. A better solution would be to have players not need to combat log at all... of course, this means implementing solutions the griefers are very unlikely to find pleasant.
 
But yeah, they don't suffer the same issues as ED. Not because of any potential way to keep players in the game or punish them for leaving, but because most games with VAC are designed in such a way that a loss doesn't matter in the least, as there is no setback from losing, and often there are even rewards for taking part in a match even if the player loses. Combat logging is mostly eliminated, then, not because of technical features, but because players simply have no reason to combat log.
True. I wonder what the combat logging rate is in CQC?
 
Tl;dr: Frontier didn't even look at the video evidence.
Getting back to the original post, and this particular grievance, I wouldn't expect FD to start by looking at the video evidence. To do so in the majority of cases would be an immense waste of time. I would only expect them to visit these videos if they were considering action against a player.

The 'investigation' I would expect them to carry out would be to look at the number of reports they receive about each alleged offender, and their own server-collected metrics.

Perhaps the research carried out by the OP was doomed to fail because the people conducting the experiment did not look like serial loggers from these sources.
 
My habit of checking on the forums once a day seems to be leaving me behind on discussion...beware, long collection of replies ahead!

I'm happy to admit I'm biased against cheaters in multiplayer games.

Who isn't? That's my point: by declaring any combat-logging as outright cheating, you're precluding any kind of discussion on the matter. It's not such a clear-cut issue. The circumstances and context matter.

Combat Logging is endemic in the ED community

Really? *Endemic*? In the ED community that doesn't even play Open to begin with, thanks to the same reasons that inspire folks to combat log?

CMDRs have gotten used to doing it for crying out loud.

And how much of that is thanks to how often they're attacked by silent, unwanted, overengineers agressors when instead they'd just like another CMDR to say "Hi!" once in a while?

If someone loses server-connection... <snip>

I feel that's all rather unecessary. I think it would be better to focus on 'replacing' the disconnected pilot with an AI, presumably with a difficulty tuned to the combat rank of the disconnected player, 'cloning' their ship's orientation/health/module health/loadout/all possible variables/etc. all in order to give the other player a persistent target they can continue to engage, rather than it just suddenly winking out of existence and wasting the last 15 minutes or so.

At that point, there would be no reason for anybody to complain about "cheats" or wrongdoing. (I can't recall if I or anyone has put in a specific suggestion thread about it, and I'm feeling a bit lazy & preoccupied just this minute, so feel free to post the idea if you like it; I might do it myself sometime soon.)

Regarding ED Reddit's policy on Combat Logging: "encouragement of cheats and/or exploits are not allowed"

> sothis runs
:p

Again, this is entirely hinged upon the sweeping declaration of any combat logging as "cheating", and I'll point back to what I said about how that preempts discussion about the issue.

Hahaha! SDC aren't seen as honourable, how on Earth did you get that impression? The Reddit community sees them as rabble-rousers too, with exchanges between SDC and other CMDRs often being moderated for breaching the rules - all posts and comments are mod'd as consistently as possible.

Not quite what I said, but it is quite true you get on top the rabble-rousing when it gets out of hand. I just happen to see it before it does get moderated, I suppose, I do check reddit about as often as these forums.

We won't be changing our open-to-all policy...<snip>

I'm not questioning that policy. I'm making it clear that you, personally, do not seem impartial on this issue and so far, in my eyes, seem to be standing up for SDC's angle on this combat-logging issue. Which is perfectly fine, really, just as fine as me thinking that's a silly view to take given the full context of who SDC is, what they've done before, the various complexities of the combat logging issue as a whole, and the fallacies I've pointed out with the reddit post that spawned the discussion we're having right now.

The marketing for that game was very successful: the pre-orders alone probably made them $50m. Not bad results for such a shoddy game.

And how much of that have they now lost thanks to refunds and absolutely dashing the faith and hope of the general gaming community at large? That's a rather big deal, and I imagine a quite expensive one.

The overhype and consequent downfall of NMS doesn't justify intentionally giving Frontier bad publicity & then making it out to be a good thing.

True that - because Adles Armada & SDC chose for the latter to do the investigation with their love for creating drama and being the centre of attention. Both groups organise and co-moderate the EliteCombatLoggers Reddit btw, and have been concerned with an apparent lack of CL-punishment action from FDev for quite some time.

I rather doubt Adles Armada had much to do with the situation. The idea of SDC going to ask AA for "permission" or "approval" before doing anything is downright laughable. If they did just that,

Do I think the OP was over-dramatised and in some places inflammatory? Yes. Am I happy with its outcome for rallying the community into discussing the put-on-the-backburner issues of CL and C&P? Definitely. Do I think there's a nice bonus of publicity out of it? Yes, that too. Will SDC be quiet for a while? Probably not :(

Back burner? Hardly. This issue doesn't seem to ever die, no matter how many times it gets talked to death - usually with hardly one iota of constructive ideas being put forth (or repeating ones that have already been shot down, like the often-suggested "higher bounties", which only led to exploitation in the past and is why we don't have it today). More often it seems to be a hotbed of namecalling, fingerwagging, and salt-mining...which to me seems like a far more plausible motive for SDC, given their past and outlook on the game and community at large. Again, reading between the lines, they most certainly were not thinking of giving Frontier a helpful ublicity boost or rallying the community to have a useful discussion.

Can't rep+ you enough.

> SDC member upvoting Reddit mod defending SDC megathread

What was that about psychological vote manipulation again...? :p

Circlejerking is what it is, I just feel it's worth pointing out that "Can't rep you enough" would mean a lot more coming from someone who's, well, not SDC.

i play in open for the interactions and pvp therefore when you cheat by ''combat logging'' you ruin my fun.

I lol'd. Isn't ruining player's fun the whole main ethos of you & SDC? You yourself have in this thread stated you play the game to blow other CMDRs up and that's it - in other words, a careless murderer with no real goals or motives.

Sorry pal, in my book that means you don't get to complain about "ruining fun"....

I don't understand why you are trying to start drama or stir the pot

I could ask the same of you guys...?

We are not mad nor angry

Oh, please. You are either in denial or the most tsundere CMDR on the game. "I-it's not like we're mad or anything, b-baka...."

I'm 100% willing to accept the consequences to my actions

Combat logging, in your case, is a consquence of your actions. If you instead said "I'm willing to accept any consequence of my actions except causing players to combat log", that would be a truer statement I could acknowledge.

In your defence (and admitting my own error) you are one of the better posters from SDC

And that's saying something about SDC, now isn't it?

Big player-collectable bounties would just help them exploit the system for more money.

Aye, as I just mentioned, something many players seem to keep-forgetting/ignoring/don't-know-about is how bounties used to be huge in Elite, and it got exploited, so it got nerfed into the ground.

Basically, we need a different kind of solution.

No it isn't but keep spreading that if you like. Far more offputting are the gank squads that have no interest in the game as a whole, but rather what they can get away with to grief others. If we were talking about genuine gameplay, with in game reasons for the conflicts then it would be a different matter. We're not. We're dealing with a pack of griefers who like shooting fish in a barrel and are having a fit because there are people who won't put up with it.

To pivot a bit here: it's not 100% griefers vs combat-logging victims; as GTUK has mentioned, AA and other groups who actively take down griefers have a beef with griefers also combat logging, too.

I think *that* issue would best be solved by gradually restricting people's access to "Open" based on how often they are taking actions seen as "griefing". Naturally, that's a bit of a hazy line to draw, but I reckon there must be some things that a server can track that unquestionably indicate griefing.

This community is a disgrace to gaming.

So you and I are also disgraces, being members of this community, eh?

You've played this game since BT and beyond, but totally are telling your friends to stay away, are you?

A truer statement would be: "I see everyone who disagrees with me on this as a disgrace." though, of course, a likely response would be "That's a pretty disgraceful thing to say."
 
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It's not that simple. Some of the most fun I've ever had with multiplayer games involved getting a group of friends to play a few games with heavy use of cheats to extricate all grind and give everyone an equal footing. Heck, many games are released with cheat codes, or even a full debug console, officially available.

Cheating doesn't ruin games, not by itself. In fact, cheating can be used to greatly improve the experience. What ruins games is using cheats to, borrowing your phrasing, "act line a [expletive]."

this...

hell i dont even play skyrim or fallout without the old TGM console command.....

games are like a book or movie...a escape from ones own life...to be something we are not.......to be in my own bubble/world.

aint my fault they keep making games online all the bloomin time....

pc gaming for me is all about trainers,scripts....and everything for free....

if i wanted vanilla gaming id go back to the consoles.


also some of us been doing this stuff since the zx spectrum..........couldnt care less about crappy multiplayer...i play games for my enjoyment.

im a old school gamer....before the online pew pew kids ruined it.
 
If you spend a lot of hours doing trades and bounty hunting you'll make credits. If you were running actual credit hacks, wouldn't you consider it hacking? Because that's what you are doing if you do trades and bounty hunting.

- - - Updated - - -


So you are absolutely AOK that players have 100% methods to avoid dying when interdicted.

But if, heaven forbid, they use the wrong one of those methods: they should have their game taken away because... um... you don't like it?

You're wrong in the head

- - - Updated - - -

I'd like to see you take on a wing of heavily engineered gankers. Not gonna happen no matter your loadout.

I wouldn't, I would attempt escape. If I lost my ship then I lose my ship. That's just part of selecting open play.

- - - Updated - - -

<rolls around the floor in uproarious laughter and mirth>
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I'll tell you who's a disgrace to gaming mate - the countless hackers, gankers and griefers, with their misguided sense of superiority and complete lack of any honour, fairplay or sportsmanship in the numerous online PvP games I've played ever since the days of the original Quake on dialup. Every game has had them, and every game has suffered as a result. Can't say I've come across a game yet ruined by a few people getting disconnects though (deliberate or otherwise). A few people combat logging on these very same types of players? While I don't condone it, it's far from a disgrace, as is this community.

I guess some of us just set a higher standard of behaviour for ourselves.
 
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