No, they don't know you blocked them.Hi All
Interesting topic...One question just out of interest, if you block a player, does that person know you've blocked them?
Jack
Could griefers be turned into a feature?
- Thread starter Wily Rites
- Start date
To my mind, more important than the protocol is its semantics, and as such this solution can only be implemented in the game code.
If you describe a language of all the ways in which combat can take place, as gross acts, you can then give semantic meaning to acts, and more importantly to strings or sentences of acts.
All players writing a log whilst playing the game, so record this language as they play the game; These logs can be scanned for certain behavioural patterns, and then consequences applied to concerned players. I think that 'space madness' could be a great condition to apply to someone who is repeatedly killing other human occupants of civilised systems, the symptoms fit the behaviour rather well, and it would work wonders in smoothing out this 'suspension of disbelief' breaking bug.
Setting the protocol would be really delicate though, to my mind it really would need to be a very subtle effect that comes in gradually. Some folks may have a passing phase of insanity, which is really not worth bothering about, but those who persist in it, well that is where the issues lay. No one wants to play in a universe with overtly strict rules, but catching diseases for insane behaviour, is really more an extension of nature than a human rule.
You can not do this in any other way than in the code, is my main conclusion. The behaviour is too far out side of reality to be managed with human protocols of interaction, as such this requires the 'divine intervention' of the great coder from beyond; I can't help but wonder whether raxxla be a portal straight into their IDE or text editor?
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That said, encouraging and engaging in a protocol for dualing, could be interesting too. Of course any computer written protocol would have to have clauses for any human protocol set to work with it.
The game could measure something like both ships combat output, if it's one sided like a anny hitting a Sidey then the attacker is tagged as a griefers this tag is galaxy wide and shows on the galaxy map so they can be located. The idea is it makes PvP more inclusive as they must want to attack players now they would then be able to get more and more together to maybe have a griefer Olympics 
they can check by writing you a message; if the message does not go through, it means they are blacklisted
Obviously in that case the Sidey is most likely at fault, but you couldn't assume that to always be true without opening up exploits.
That's the fundamental problem, yes.
The solution has to be automated in the game code, so can only judge on events and outcomes. But this sort of behaviour is fundamentally a matter of intent, which isn't measurable in-game. If you're flying a T-7 and someone in a FAS comes along and blows you up at random, that's a set of events and outcomes, yes. But if I'm flying a T-7 and someone in a FAS comes along and blows me up because I'm using that T-7 to undermine their preferred faction, that's the exact same set of in-game events and outcomes but they're absolutely justified in doing so.
Maybe the correct answer is that the game has already detected with its automated protocols and semantics that you are the real reaver (you're just space-mad that you aren't, obviously), and is sending other players to punish you for it?
That is a very dark triad type response
/me wily eyes Ian Doncaster suspiciously and deploys hard points ...
More seriously though, this sort of thing is going to become so trivial to resolve with AI in the future, so long as they are not coded by psychopaths, we'll be in gaming heaven!
More seriously though, this sort of thing is going to become so trivial to resolve with AI in the future, so long as they are not coded by psychopaths, we'll be in gaming heaven!
Yes but the level of AI envisioned by the hype artists of the moment and those of us not in the industry is probably to far in the future to affect this version of Elite.
Maybe a next generation Elite with all new and therefore less entangled code.
I think that if you set up a basic interaction protocol, semantics and grammar. Non of which are in the domain of AI, that then once that were done well, it would be very simple to train an AI on what is acceptable and what is not, no LLM in sight, this is with the more simple machine learning models. This would have to run server side though, as if the data is kept locally, it would open up a can of worms for cheating.
The end result would be that you have another piece of code on the server, moderating the game, rather than a human, in effect you would be plugging in another system more so than altering the current one.
But only after the protocol, semantics and grammar have been defined and added to the current system, which is in essence only a form of logging; This is no mean feat though, the protocol.
Let's take another one, quite an old video this one, from back when mining was more popular and this site in particular was a good spot to solicit... donations.
Now let's look at the details that make this a complicated situation to automatically determine who, if anyone, is the aggressor here.
Now let's look at the details that make this a complicated situation to automatically determine who, if anyone, is the aggressor here.
- The system is uninhabited, and thus lawless.
- I didn't open with an interdiction as you'd find in most pvp encounters, I found them in the rings.
- I manifest scanned them, then demanded cargo via the chat box.
- They stalled for time until their third wingmate arrived, then opened fire first.
- I responded by immediately obliterating their smallest, weakest wing member.
- They were a wing of a cutter, anaconda, and python versus my type-7 transporter.
- Conversely, I was clearly far more engineered by any one of them.
Are you sure that chap in the Cutter wasn't your mate?
I wouldn't need weapons to take out a T7
To quote Blackadder
O7
System security forces are obviously not capable of protecting much of anything.
It is only through the Benevolent Frontier Gods that provide 100% indestructible protective coatings is mass destruction prevented. If it wasn't for these magical impenetrable coatings that cover space stations, fleet carrier, surface settlements, and presumably the larger cities..... humanity would be wiped out in a week!
Lots of people thought that about the Spanish Inquisition. They see a T7 and expect it to pop, just like the NPC ones do. They don't expect it to facetank them and blow them up. Hence the name.Are you sure that chap in the Cutter wasn't your mate?
I wouldn't need weapons to take out a T7
To quote Blackadder
O7
That is clearly a no brainer, it is a lawless uninhabited system, there could not be a simpler case of, 'this is fair game for anything goes'. I don't understand why you think this would be a complicated metric?
My grip is, folks squatting felicity farseer and the likes to nab humans in the early stages of their game; Hanging out in prime systems because the game sends noob's to them.
If engineering was small tweaks instead of G5 crazy, most, if not all sec would be far more potent.
Engineering should have been made so that its decentralized and not act like a funnel. That, or low level or starter engineers could be done anywhere remotley and that only higher grades had to be done face to face.
Open is for everybody, which includes all random people from all over the world. That's the sad truth of MMOs.
It's simply impossible to control how they will play, except by introducing a lot of code restrictions that will artificially manage the game and limit player freedom, which in turn is not that great for the game.
Private Group like Moebius f.ex is for people who enjoy PvE with other players over unwanted interactions with people who don't share your approach to the game. The upside is that when you will get bored, you can jump into Open and find those Reavers and get your adrenaline rush. All under your control.
Oh for sure, it's definitely fair game in my eyes (hence why I was over there jacking people's stuff at gunpoint) but you'd be surprised how many players called me a griefer. That vid's by far my most downvoted video - thankfully, it's also the most upvoted so it balances out. The reddit thread was particularly controversial, with people popping in to call me all sorts of names for being an evil PvPer imposing myself upon noncombat players against their will, others telling them that piracy is the acceptable form of pvp and it's ganking that's bad, and naturally the people who do pvp responding with variations of "lol".
You get a lot of very strong opinions on PvP in this community from people who never do it. It's at the point where the OP of "I got ganked" threads aren't even the main entertainment any more - aside from the whole "these threads are the reason" angle, the gankers probably don't even need to gank any more if they want to get the popcorn out, they could just post a sockpuppet thread pretending to be some poor newbie who just got sent to the shadow realm and watch all the frothing and venting and "this is why I never play in open" posts commence.
It's very entertaining.
Yeah. That was the good thing about the PF district - the starter stations were inaccessible and the area around it for people leaving the zone was far too large a surface area to cover, people couldn't camp out for the new players because there wasn't one single location to camp, and the nature of being booted out of the zone and told to go explore gave them a nudge to get gone and stay gone instead of just... returning to Chamberlain's repeatedly.
Personally if I wasn't going to go the PF district route I'd just go with multiple starter stations to scatter them around a bit. Hell, take a leaf out of the Elder Scrolls series and start the game with your cmdr being released from a detention centre. Did they actually do the thing they were being held for? Were they just being held for questioning? Who knows, evidently the charges didn't stick. Whatever, you're a free pilot. Go away and don't come back.