Me, I can understand prayer who "log" if they met the same idiots I just met in Maia sitting out side the station waiting fore you to have your back to them and halfway in the station and than firing of there pack hounds those guys need to get band. I can understand that pirate's asking fore a ransom is OK. But those idiots didn't. If everyone else is getting there game ruined by those guys, send me a massage or reply here and let's turn this around so they quit the game and let the guy how loves it play!
Combat Logging: How do other games deal with it? And a possible fix for Elite.
- Thread starter WinterCharm
- Start date
Let me repeat your claim:
I don't believe you. You care nothing at all about accidental punishment, because then you propose this:
Ah and your examples:
Well there is an elephant in the room, one that is so often overlooked or consciously ignored:
In most games, there is no personal punishment for death in PvP at all.
Usually you just respawn after a short timer. Death is a strategical disadvantage for yourself or your team. But it won't take away money or items in your possession. Guess why the old school of MMOs where you could get PKed and then your actual possessions looted mostly died out? Because it sucked hard, and most people want fun in their games and not a Lord Of The Flies Simulator.
But in ED, death often means great personal loss, all of which equates back to hours upon hours (sometimes weeks or months) of playing being erased on the whim of some ganker.
I make the following counter-proposal:
- When you die in PvP, rebuy is free.
- Damage incurred in PvP is also free to repair.
- You keep bounties, combat bonds and exploration data when killed in PvP. Missions do not fail and mission-specific cargo (marked as "haulage") is not destroyed. (Please not that Powerplay cargo is destroyed. By signing up to PP you consent to players from other powers attacking you at all times.)
Do this and you will see PvP combat logging incidents plummet to near nothing, while the numbers of people playing in open will skyrocket, meaning more people to engage in PvP. A win-win-win situation. The only people who lose are the griefers who want to kill other players just to cause them the anguish of the aforementioned losses.
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Suggestion for combat logs. If you disconnect while in combat, when you log back into the game you should be placed into an instance with attacking NPCs of the same ships that were there when you left with the same combat ratings/load outs. The combat will continue, even if PvP is replaced with PvE. While this may not prove as difficult as your original predicament against real players, you will still need to deal with the problem.
An interesting idea - but players determined enough to log against other players will have no problems re-logging to avoid NPC's in their instance. And if NPC's are tied to selected players so that they always spawn whenever they log on - it doesn't take much to ensure you have a PG of tanked-up mates ready to annihilate NPC opposition and farm kills.
It's not perfect, but at least there is a consequence for the logger and not a completely free get out of jail card. Unfortunately this doesn't do anything to stop the griefer attempt to start with either, so again.. not the perfection solution.
Alternative idea; How about bringing back the old ways (1984 Elite), you can't save or exit the game unless docked in a station. If you disconnect for any reason and you are not in a station, your ship blows up. At the same time, get rid of insurance entirely. If you are destroyed you just start back wherever you last docked as you were at that time. You've lost any progress you made after that, but no other cost. What about explorers though? Hmmmm.... Ship hibernation mode I guess, drop from SC to normal space and engage something that takes a while to virtually 'dock' in deep space. It wouldn't work in combat at all, so it couldn't be abused that way.
Another interesting idea. All that would take to abuse is a group of lulzbunnies in free N00bwinders to crash their own instance and simultaneously bankrupt and lulzbann everyone else who was in it.
I don't entirely understand what you mean, but No... bankruptcy would be gone, you would never lose anything other than the progress since your last dock/save. So if people somehow crash instances or do other undesirable things, yes this would be annoying, but I wouldn't necessarily lose hours or days of work like it is now with a high insurance rebuy. This would be a fundamental change to the way it works now.
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And if lulzbunnies crashing instances mean you can never dock to save? Surely you can see how this plays out.
So somehow these 'lulzbunnies' are going to stake out every station and stop anyone from docking and saving, all the time, everywhere? I'm sure there will be some attempts, but like I said... You only lose your progress since your last dock (or hibernation) so it's not the end of the world. How might we find a way to stop the lulzbunnies? Stronger station security perhaps, no loitering policy.... What do you think?
Murder with no real significant consequences does more damage to the social fabric of the community than combat logging.
Introducing penalties for logging that reach beyond the internal game environment into "banning" without equally pervasive penalties for murder is naive and short-sighted.
Piracy is legitimate.... but griefing clearly demands an equally heavy hand.
Introducing penalties for logging that reach beyond the internal game environment into "banning" without equally pervasive penalties for murder is naive and short-sighted.
Piracy is legitimate.... but griefing clearly demands an equally heavy hand.
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Your penalties certainly should apply in cases of real piracy and bounty hunting. Those things are in the spirit of the game. But how do you decouple people playing Elite and people playing Players?(griefers and people just trying to annoy others on the other side of the screen?)
With maybe the exception of Runescape. Those games you listed are designed around competitive PvP. They are games with rounds and respawns and timers and win conditions based on scores. The only thing that is comparable in Elite is Arena. OPEN doesn't equate to competitive PvP. Sure you can use the sandbox as a playground with interested parties setting up their own rules of engagement and competition like the Cobra vs Viper battle and Buckball Racese. If someone is not trading fire with you, then they are not engaging in combat with you. I guess everyone can define the "Combat" part however they want and we can go in circles.
Why would they bother? They will simply do as they do now - find where other people gather, run the islanding roulette, and unleash lulz when clueless CMDR's either try to dock or join the instance.
Ok, so if that's happening now (although I've never seen it), then changing the way gamesave/insurance works doesn't actually make this worse. The intent of the suggtion is to remove the high cost of dying that we incur now (large insurance rebuy) so that it is no longer such a problem to be destroyed from non-consensual PvP. This doesn't eliminate the problem, but it makes it less costly for the victim.
Personally, I lost 30m last week in a CG to two insurance rebuys from SDC action. The first time, I wasn't paying attention and they caught me by surprise... (Don't watch Netflix when entering a CG system). Like an idiot, I went back again, thinking I could avoid them.... Almost, but they lured me into a trap! (fun story for another post) Good for them... it cost me a couple Sothis runs, but it was good fun and I knowingly put myself in danger. Now this kind of fun doesn't happen all the time because a lot of people avoid Open entirely because they don't want to l lose millions. If we decrease the cost of dying there would be a lot more players willing to take risks and enjoy the immersive gameplay that results.
But if you decrease the cost of dying - there is no purpose in the activities of lulzbunnies.
FD gave them CQC/Arena - which is supposed to be an intense pew-pew fest.
They laughed at it and said "Do not want!" - mostly because, in their own words, "nobody loses anything!"
Similarly they rejected it as it was not "emergent gameplay" - as everyone playing it fully expected full pew-pew up to 11.
FD gave them CQC/Arena - which is supposed to be an intense pew-pew fest.
They laughed at it and said "Do not want!" - mostly because, in their own words, "nobody loses anything!"
Similarly they rejected it as it was not "emergent gameplay" - as everyone playing it fully expected full pew-pew up to 11.
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yes! Exactly... "if you decrease the cost of dying - there is no purpose in the activities of lulzbunnies." So let's reduce the cost of dying.
If you remove any and all "costs" of dying in a game like Elite - then what is the purpose in becoming Elite?
"Yay I hit rebuy 1000 times and made Elite in 20 minutes!"
Of course - there is no "purpose" in becoming Elite - it's just a game to be played for one's enjoyment. At the end of the day, my gameplay enjoyment and lulzbunnies gameplay enjoyment are equally valid. It's up to everyone else to decide how they want to enjoy their gametime.
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If each of those examples occurred, and were serious enough to throttle your internet bandwidth enough to force a game disconnect, then in any popular multiplayer game you'd be punished.Your kids purchase a new game on the console, your girl/boyfriend wands to download the new season of series X? Maybe windows got a new NIC driver and installs it automatically
All sorts of things can happen.
- Want to prevent those issues from occurring? Configure QoS properly on your router. Other games would punish you harshly, at least ED has two modes you can play where you won't get punished.
- "But I had an emergency, so I had to taskkill!" - sorry, if it's an emergency then an imaginary ship with imaginary cargo/data doesn't matter. Other games would punish you harshly, at least ED has two modes you can play where you won't get punished.
- "My computer/connection is unstable!" - play in Group or Solo, where it won't matter. Other games would punish you harshly, at least ED has two modes you can play where you won't get punished.
- "I'm getting DDOS'd by a CMDR!" - report it to your ISP as its a criminal offence, and buy a not-cheap/nasty router with some DDOS protection. Other games would punish you harshly, at least ED has two modes you can play where you won't get punished.
- "I'm getting griefed so I have to cheat!" - complain to FDev to implement proper Crime & Punishment. Full pips to shields, two to engines, and high wake; use Group play to move away from the griefers, and switch back to Open. There's no excuse for cheating.
Proper Crime & Punishment mechanics should also be implemented, but that's a topic for a different thread.
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Do you really expect every Elite player to have a Ciskokidcert or a Ciskosissy? Some of them would quite happily say they knew what a router was for if you gave them a 2X4 and asked them to route it. QoS is a shopping channel. They depend on strangers calling them up from Microsoft Virus Support to clean their dextop using syskey.
It's a game. It's entertainment. Normal people play it. Normal people have normal families and normal internet connections - and they go down all the bloody time.
Thankyou for taking all of my points to their extremes. None of which are relevant - example for any multiplayer game:
- "Oh, I was disconnected from the game, what happened? Now I'm dead/out/lost/etc, great. Do the servers have a problem?"
- "Sorry Dad I was downloading a film."
- "Darn it. It was our fault."
See above, for every multiplayer game out there - you disconnect for any reason, you're out of the game. For further examples of harsher-penalties that are applied, search for games with perma-death mechanics, which surprisingly are played by "normal people" too.
And a reminder: we're talking about Open Play only here. Worried about losing your ship and time-penalties to a "random disconnect when in combat with another CMDR in Open Play"? Play in Group or Solo. Mobius PvE is a very successful group for different reasons, but always welcomes new CMDRs.
"I want to play in Open play, fight other CMDRs, but don't want to be penalised if I (randomly) disconnect while in combat with another CMDR" - the response here from the game should be "TOUGH".
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My lulzbucket overfloweth 
And would you really like someone to go through a couple of dozen ways of making you disconnect while in combat with another CMDR? With a TOUGH response?
I know the mods wont. That doesn't make it any less trivial.
And would you really like someone to go through a couple of dozen ways of making you disconnect while in combat with another CMDR? With a TOUGH response?
I know the mods wont. That doesn't make it any less trivial.