Elite Dangerous Blocking System: A Call for Change

rootsrat

Volunteer Moderator
Not bad, but I would add more points to this:
  • Give us interdiction prevention module. I'm not talking fully block it, but if you equip it, it could lessen the distance FSDI is working at and it would lower the rate it drags your ship when you're being interdicted, making it easier to win the minigame. Various sizes with varied effects strength.
  • When a ship is interdicted, pull the attacker to the victim's position physically in space (the opposite happens currently). This would mean that once you get interdicted, but manage to survive the encounter and get back into Super Cruise, you're not punished by being farther away from your destination then you were when interdicted and thus making it so much easier for countless chain-interdictions to happen.
  • Uncap the PVP bounties. They are still capped at 1 or 2 million Cr and this was introduced to prevent exploiting it by amassing big bounty and letting your mate destroy you for Credits. With the current earning rates this cap is completely pointless.
  • Increase police response time, especially in Medium and High Sec systems. The response time for highly notorious Commanders should be almost instantaneous. (Surely the cops are aware of such people violating their system space!)
  • Make ATR great again by making them more ruthless and unforgivable at pursuing notorious Commanders across the galaxy.
One more thing, actually..
  • Remove the absolutely silly effect of the attacker being able to disable my FSD through shields. Beyond ridiculous, just mental.
 
On the contrary i actually do play the game i want in Solo and PG, no issues with SD there, sad but it is what it is.
Why is that sad, though? I mean, you can always mode hop. Open when you have nothing to lose, Solo or PG when you do. That's what I do. I don't care. I'm not always in Open. That's just a place you go when you didn't use your rent money to purchase the chips you're gambling with. If you die, no reason to block, but you absolutely can if you want to. Not because any of it is ideal, but because these are the systems we have.
 
This is why I don't think C&P will ever be an effective solution - because people will scream "ganker" at even the most blatant, obvious, cut-and-dry "bro you signed up for team deathmatch, you don't get to complain when the other team.. death... matched.. you."
The accepted baseline seems to be "kill another player == griefer".. the fact interactions with NPCs such as "Massacre Civilians" and black-market trade, or inducing states like Bust/Famine/Outbreak equally get considered griefing by some, well, it's not hard to see that in-general the playerbase has no idea how to effectively apply C&P.
 
I have the most important thing in life to lose .............. Time.
I mean, you say that, but you've wasted enough of it on me that I'm pretty sure you can afford to have a d-rated Asp Scout go boom outside a station you'll respawn in for a few loose spacedollars, all because CMDR Thunderpants wanted to see the new green weapon effects he bought.

Besides, if you're all about time, ED is an odd choice. You have to grind just to grind the grind grind 'round these parts. I would describe this game was a sort of sanitarium for space wizards. All progress is an illusion, because there is no endgame. Just the courtyard and the padded cells.
 
The accepted baseline seems to be "kill another player == griefer".. the fact interactions with NPCs such as "Massacre Civilians" and black-market trade, or inducing states like Bust/Famine/Outbreak equally get considered griefing by some, well, it's not hard to see that in-general the playerbase has no idea how to effectively apply C&P.
The reason PvE crime and punishment is in such a sorry state is because every discussion about how to fix it, including the focused feedback thread back in the day, got utterly overwhelmed by people screaming about PvP, and it lead to people getting locked out of stations with multi-million "hot module cleaning fees" because they bumped an NPC in the mailslot in solo mode.

Same with the powerplay thread - a ton of great ideas, and the thread got utterly destroyed because it got completely swamped by open-only arguments.

I've got to thank @rootsrat for keeping this topic away from modes too. As it is, blocks are the best tool we have for people who simply don't want to play with another particular person. Changing the entire game's C&P system to centre on an interaction that you can prevent from happening with the press of a button can only have negative consequences on the entire rest of the game.
 
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I mean, you say that, but you've wasted enough of it on me that I'm pretty sure you can afford to have a d-rated Asp Scout go boom outside a station you'll respawn in for a few loose spacedollars, all because CMDR Thunderpants wanted to see the new green weapon effects he bought.

Besides, if you're all about time, ED is an odd choice. You have to grind just to grind the grind grind 'round these parts. I would describe this game was a sort of sanitarium for space wizards. All progress is an illusion, because there is no endgame. Just the courtyard and the padded cells.
Yes. Sometimes I am asking myself what am I even doing here 😁
It's still a game. I am glad for every day that I am allowed to live.
 
ah, the old "I found a friend for life through ganking" tale
I guess so. I also met my friend Bob in Tarkov after he shot the scav I was with. I became friends with a dude named Xeremos in DAoC after he beat me up in a frontier 1v1. These things do turn out well, provided that when they happen you don't throw a tantrum and go off to sulk in a corner.
 
Not bad, but I would add more points to this:
  • Give us interdiction prevention module. I'm not talking fully block it, but if you equip it, it could lessen the distance FSDI is working at and it would lower the rate it drags your ship when you're being interdicted, making it easier to win the minigame. Various sizes with varied effects strength.
  • When a ship is interdicted, pull the attacker to the victim's position physically in space (the opposite happens currently). This would mean that once you get interdicted, but manage to survive the encounter and get back into Super Cruise, you're not punished by being farther away from your destination then you were when interdicted and thus making it so much easier for countless chain-interdictions to happen.
  • Uncap the PVP bounties. They are still capped at 1 or 2 million Cr and this was introduced to prevent exploiting it by amassing big bounty and letting your mate destroy you for Credits. With the current earning rates this cap is completely pointless.
  • Increase police response time, especially in Medium and High Sec systems. The response time for highly notorious Commanders should be almost instantaneous. (Surely the cops are aware of such people violating their system space!)
  • Make ATR great again by making them more ruthless and unforgivable at pursuing notorious Commanders across the galaxy.

C&P and interdiction balance has little to nothing to do with this. No level of C&P would address the issues some people leverage block functionality for. Similarly, no degree of bias toward the defender, short of just removing the possibility of interdiction, would make being interdicted tolerable to everyone.

Not at all. I was simply clarifying that from lore point of view Pilots Federation does not reward being nasty towards your own kind in any way.

Own kind? The Pilots Federation clearly takes almost anyone, which makes any sort of comradery a rather shakey presumption. My CMDR would have left years ago, but renouncing Pilots Federation membership is harder than getting a US telecom to cancel one's cable service.

I've also argued that when there are multiple sources of lore, the actual gameplay implemented in a game trumps all, with regard to that game.

Its not just that (cue Demon playing 'Have we been here before'), the times when i play Open with some friends i enjoy it, but its often ruined by a few muppets, griefers, pad blockers.
At this moment in time Block is the only option, sure i play Solo a lot but why should i be pushed into PG with my mates because of some idiots?

You can replace "a few muppets, griefers, pad blockers" with "users of the block feature" and have a statement that would be an accurate description for my experience.

So, I ask the same question with regard to those using the block feature in a way that excludes me from encountering those who have no objection to encountering my CMDR, or vice versa. Why should my acquaintances have to head off to a private group to be able to mutually encounter each other? Why should I have my Open-play experience degraded because you saw fit to block a third party?

This is a blatant double standard held by everyone in support of block as it currently functions; they all feel that they are entitled to harm the experiences of anyone or everyone they may encounter to prevent a small handful from shaping their experience in a way they find unappealing.

Ultimately it comes down to how much context defying control one believes one should be able to impose upon other players. I'm of the opinion that this should be 'zero', both for the sake of fair play and for the internal consistency of the game. Of course, many others, not the least of whom are Frontier themselves, disagree.

Players are encouraged, but not required...if they were required to conform, then this conversation, and many others like it, would be moot...

I don't believe we're encouraged or incentivized to adopt any given 'role'. There are examples given and ranks that are tracked, but never are they presented as some sort of narrow or exclusive path, and the rewards are token ones.

I've been killed by gankers, pirates, thargoids, and cops. In a ship and on foot. Another one isn't a reward. Besides which, there's very little to possibly learn from being an enforced helpless victim.

I can't recall ever feeling like a helpless victim, not even during the falling skimmer bug where I lost a ship (corvette) and high-rank NPC crew member (before they were immortal) when a golaith spawned on top of it 3km above a surface outpost. I did feel justified in getting reimbursed as a bug was a major contributor to the loss, but even in that case a bit more caution could have prevented it. No other player can remove my CMDR's agency with ships, interdictons, guns, ect...only via non-contextual means (e.g. undocumented or unmitgatable bugs, cheating, or blocking) is this possible.

Hence if blocking is removed, open gets emptier.

But subjectively better, because those unwilling to tolerate legitimate behavior would only be able to exclude themselves, not anyone who had the misfortune of instancing with them.

How many times have these brave gankers attacked my Vette in SD? Zero

I don't doubt that you've experienced what you've experienced, but your experience may not be representative.

I'm pretty sure I'm piloting a vette in this small selection of encounters where my CMDR is accosted by 'gankers':

Out of all the ships my CMDR has flown (which is all of them, though some a lot more than others), he's been attacked while in a Corvette more than any other, and has only been shot down in scenarios that could be described as a gank while in a combat-fit Corvette.

Not surprising really, as the vette encourages me to have my CMDR stand his ground. His trade vessels are immune to ganking because he will always choose flight over fight when using such a vessel and due to the overwhelming bias toward the defender in this game. The only time my CMDR has ever lost a ship to hostile action when not looking for a fight was a single time I got complacent and clipped a suicidegankwinder with my combat Corvette on the way into the station and couldn't quite get far enough away in time.

Haven't used the Corvette much in populated areas since 3.5 or so, as a Corvette without an SLF feels kinda silly to me, and I cannot, in good conscience, risk exposing other players to the obtrusive network and performance problems that I know are likely to occur when deploying them. I have no idea if this is responsible for my encounters with gankers falling to essentially zero or not, but even when I pass through populated systems and encounter other CMDRs as of late, no one has attempted to engage my CMDR in combat, no matter what he was in.

Anyway, the subjective quality of gankers is neither here nor there. Their existence will always be intolerable to some players and a complete non-issue to others.

If you go to a high traffic system, aguably the high-traffic system, in an open-world game with unrestricted PvP, which consistently tops the inara security reports along with deciat and whatever the week's CG is, then... yeah, you kinda are.

I'm not saying that's a good thing, but we should play the game we have rather than the game we want.

I can take my CMDR to SD any time I care to, in Open, with a well configured network and an empty block list, and not have any problems, no matter what ship I have him fly.

I can't fight anything, as my preferred controls are collecting dust on a shelf, but I don't need working control bindings, or anything that could be mistaken for skill, to escape every single time my CMDR is attacked...which is almost never, anywhere, because almost everyone who could possibly be a threat knows it's pointless to try.

Again though, it really wouldn't matter. No degree of hopelessness in a contextual situation would justify giving players control over other players via non-contextual means in any multiplayer game, as far as I am concerned. Likewise, I'm sure block advocates would still be block advocates no matter how they viewed the relative balance of the game, or rather I suspect they'd view any balance that didn't result in them always achieving the effect desired as incorrect.

One more thing, actually..
  • Remove the absolutely silly effect of the attacker being able to disable my FSD through shields. Beyond ridiculous, just mental.

Remove shields.

ah, the old "I found a friend for life through ganking" tale .

I did meet a large portion of people I know in this game when they had their CMDR attack mine. And if anyone doubts this (they don't) I have documented an example or two.

Can you tell me what engineering can I do to avoid having my FSD disabled through shields? I don't believe there is such thing.

Don't even need Engineering. A PDT, combined with the realization that a PDT is not a passive defense, is sufficient defense. That said, good thrusters always help.
 

rootsrat

Volunteer Moderator
C&P and interdiction balance has little to nothing to do with this. No level of C&P would address the issues some people leverage block functionality for. Similarly, no degree of bias toward the defender, short of just removing the possibility of interdiction, would make being interdicted tolerable to everyone.
Some people, yes. From both sides, actually. But not all.

I tend to block griefers, but not gankers. I.e. if someone blatantly stream-snipes me, or blocks the landing pad, or uses the good old "smash eagle into a big ship, so they get a bounty" trick. I respect good PVP encounter. I still think that if the victims had a bigger chance of survive with some additional modules to counteract the OP stuff, and if the criminals could not get away with almost anything, we'd have a much healthier "emergent gameplay" environment.

You can't eliminate the trolls, ever. That's a given. But you can create a more balanced playing field IMO.

Don't even need Engineering. A PDT, combined with the realization that a PDT is not a passive defense, is sufficient defense. That said, good thrusters always help.
Wait, PDT can shoot down the Yuri Bomb?
 
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