You're right. The vitriol against ganking has always been fundamentally ideological.
Ganking and Game Design
- Thread starter RELSPI
- Start date
You're right. The vitriol against ganking has always been fundamentally ideological.
Even if I ignore that it generally takes longer to lock and deliver a torpedo salvo than it does for the FSD cooldown, there seems to be a hyperbolic presumption of hopelessness in this example that I do not find to be reflective of actual gameplay.
There is no threat that cannot be significantly mitigated with relatively minor loadout adjustments and some situational awareness. While you cannot guarantee safety, that risk is one of the incentives of Open.
If that risk is unacceptable, there are other modes to choose from. Personally, fending off the occasional attempt to take my CMDRs cargo, or destroy one of his non-combat focused vessels, is a far greater reward for those less than explicitly combat relateds tasks than any number of credits (or the like) could be in a game with a defective placeholder economy.
While this is true, in the world of Elite Dangerous it takes on a religious fervor.
In a game where content is locked behind PvP doors or where you cannot experience the entire game unless you participate in something you don't enjoy then I can understand the complaints. To wit: I bought a game to be a space trucker but I cannot do it thanks to gankers. <--- That is an ideological difference that is somewhat reasonable in a game where players do not have a choice.
However, in Elite Dangerous you see the religiously anti-PK zealot who doesn't want anyone playing PK style anywhere in the universe. Given the availability of any and all features in solo and group play there is no reason to object to how other people play unless you're a zealot who cannot be happy unless you force everyone to play your way. There doesn't seem to be many of this variety here.
I can move cargo despite gankers and the occasional gank attempt is, for me, as often an interesting diversion as it is an annoyance.
What I cannot do is feel the economic pressures (and rewards) that should be the bread and butter of 'trucking'. Everything is optional; deadlines, where they even exist, are so lax as to be irrelevant; cargo can't spoil or break (unless it's corrosive...what happened to toxic waste again, too confusing for morons and illiterates?); virtually all NPC actors behave entirely predictably, expenses are irrelevant, commodities are worthless, etc and so forth. Elite: Dangerous is ostensibly a space trade game, yet there are games more than thirty years older with better economic/trade/supply chain models.
The only aspect of 'trucking' you can really do is drive from point A to point B and back. There is no significant need for budgeting of time or money, not even a chance for mechanical troubles...unless someone goes out of their way to shoot you and gets really lucky.
While I do understand that relentless, consequence free, ganking can make for an unsatisfying trader experience, I have vastly bigger issues with the underlying mechanisms of trade. It started off as an obvious placeholder and somehow was made even more stripped down and pointless.
Yeah, that comment has to be evaluated in context.
That aside, I've yet to see any game with much of a meaningful economy.
And this is a problem when it comes to people that do want to join the big PvE groups, even if they fully intend to keep their noses clean - new players, the people who would benefit the most from playing in these groups, have to go out of their way to find out about them, or get told about them on the forums/reddit when they end up making a thread about how horrible open is for them thanks to all the engineered murderboats hanging out in the starter systems. And when they look closer they find out about all sorts of flamewars and god knows what else centred around these groups, then find that in order to be let into these groups they have to go and join some out-of-game forum or whatever, then they'll see some reddit posts where the group is brought up and someone will mention being banned from it on shaky grounds for something as simple as friendly fire, and... to be frank, it can be a little offputting, especially when you read the wall of text telling you just how comprehensively you'll get banned if you do any of the things on this exhaustive list they've written up. And when you see the anti-PvP crowd calling people literal psychopaths and comparing getting blown up in a video game to actual , that... doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
Hell, one of the first CGs I did, I was flying in Mobius. I'd brought my turretboat cutter. I wound up winging up with a fresh-faced new guy in his brand new eagle, and someone in an FDL, hit up the res-site, and pretty much spent my time following the eagle around giving him covering fire. After a while, another CMDR jumped in in a gunship, we mostly left him alone after he ignored our wing request, but after a while for some reason he fired on the eagle. Friendly fire or not, I have no idea. Either way, his pip turned red and my turrets turned on him. His fighter was dust in seconds. He was sent running before I had the presence of mind to switch them to target only. Our wing made a hasty withdrawal from the res, and the first thing to come over wing chat? "Man, are we going to get banned from the group for this?"
After all, we all had a nice big red "YOU KILLED" in our history panel for his trashed fighter. Cue looking up how to get our journals and prepare for a he-said-she-said on the forums in case this guy decided to report us for returning fire on him - because whether we'd actually get banned or not, the stuff we'd heard on the forums and the way the big ol' red-and-black rules page about zero tolerance didn't exactly fill us with confidence that it'd take much more than a "you were killed by CMDR Screemonster" to get us ejected.
So what are you to do if you just want an open-style co-op game and don't want to go through some random group of third-party gatekeepers?
To be fair, that's all on FDev for not either giving the PGs proper management tools (incl. PVP/PVP flags etc) nor for making a PVE mode. They just dumped responsibility on the PG owners with little or no support.
Goose4291
Banned
Fully agree. It'd be the same individuals who call PvPers RL Terrorists, kitten rapists and punchers of disabled children, who now bemoan the lack of proper piracy and how they miss pirates.
Forgetting they called all pirates RL Terrorists, kitten rapists and punchers of disabled children during the golden age of Elite piracy.
While there is some truth to this the anti-pk crowd is given quite a bit of ammo in games where significant progression makes veteran players untouchable to the new players they are victimizing. It is just plain flat out poor design and has been recognized as such for years.
There is a reason why in professional boxing things like weight class exist.
Two equal opponents banging on each other causes some people to complain, but most would complain if Andy Ruiz Jr. was going after a crippled kid in a wheel chair.
These distinctions loose some of their impact in this title because of solo/group play.
I'm pretty sure the kitten thing is true.
The Euro Truck Simulator series runs rings around this game in that respect. Needing to balance fuel, amount of time able to drive, the cost of running your rig (and later rigs if you expand your company), budgeting for potential tickets, the extra time needed to navigate a particularly difficult place to park. It all adds up in a way this game works at every turn to push out of the way.
Put another way, Elite: Dangerous feels like it started out going a direction it then decided it didn't want to but has yet to actually decide where it wants to go. It certainly isn't anywhere near as interested in being the "Make your own way, simulating the ups and downs of living out of your spaceship" as it might've been 4 years ago.
Veterans have always been nigh untouchable to new players. The equipment barrier is new and significant, but even when it was largely absent, the gulf in combat capability between a PvP veteran and a new player, or even an experienced PvEer, was immense.
The only thing that's really changed is that the skill bar for being effectively untouchable has been lowed considerably because defense has inflated an order of magnitude faster than offense.
The laws of physics aren't keeping Andy Ruiz Jr. from killing a crippled kid in a wheelchair and outside of CQC Elite: Dangerous isn't trying to simulate a sporting event. The game provides for rough equality of opportunity and beyond that the pieces should fall as they may.
So something I'm gathering here is that PvP is further viewed as unfair because relative to PvE it's such a difficulty spike. This means that (as the thread demonstrates) a player unused to PvP perceives the easiness of NPCs as the norm, naturally leading to most everything else seeming unbalanced and broken. In other words, Solo and Open are not gameplay-symmetric, which (ignoring factors like social engagement) means you really have a game with two 'difficulty settings', with the dev team assuming that balance passes for one affect the other just as much.
Add to this the other side of PvP experienced players who usually consider PvE too easy and you have the central rift of most discussions about ganking. Which boils down to the frustration about the percieved rules and the actual rules of gameplay, it's a textbook example of anger structures (not the lawful/criminal nonsense). While I would love to see a more differenciated difficulty curve I don't see that happening with the late emphasis on new players. At least a better documentation and explanation of this would help massively.
Just for the record - I don’t think it’s unfair because it’s too hard. PvP is supposed to be hard - it’s real people who may have different skill levels, experience in the game, etc. That’s what makes it fun - when you’re in the mood for it.
What I think is a shame is that you cannot experience Open (ie other folks in the game) without (the potential for) PvP being forced upon you. The only choice you have is to play in Solo which, whilst that’s what I do most of the time, feels like “less” of the game experience.
Of course there are private groups where you can wing up with mates - assuming you have any mates who play the game ... sob
- and it’s great that ED provides that option.So, it’s not the difficulty of PvP that I have an issue with it’s the one sided nature of the choice to participate if you want to experience a (player) populated galaxy.
if the NPCs in this game were anywhere near as tanky as player ships are with engineering then every PvE fight would be a frustrating experience. Rinzler's guide to trading in open even says to get rid of your weapons since nothing short of a full PvP fit will ever damage another PvP fit.
It's starting to get that way now with some mission NPCs if you're not coming in loaded for bear. I took my python out to run missions for the first time in ages, got a mission update saying that an assassin was after me - the trip to the station was a long chain of being interdicted, submitting, turning around, shooting him a bit, when his hull got to 50% he'd high-wake, then I'd continue only for him to immediately interdict me at full health again. In short, improving the AI so they don't stick around and let you kill them when they're losing, coupled with improving their outfitting so a bunch of lasers slapped on a trade fit isn't enough to actually finish them off before they wake out, is turning them into a bulletspongey slog. But that's every fight against another player. Unless you come at them with an overwhelming alpha-strike you might as well not bother.
Just for a bit of lazy math fun, a stock Sidewinder has 108 absolute HP. One favoring well-rounded defenses and a boatload of Heavy Duty HRP's w/ Deep Plating (Reactive armor w/ HD and Deep Plating as well for funsies), less a C2 for a Bi-Weave and a C1 with Thermal Resistance+Angled Plating, has 1373 absolute HP with 2370 Explosive / 2449 Kinetic / 2490 Thermal effective hitpoints. That's a hair shy of 13x its base hitpoints. You go shoot damn near any Sidey-bot/PvE AI ship and they will virtually never be anything like that tough. 90% of your TTK will be down to missing the thing 'cause it's tiny rather than any sort of durability. You fly unengineered ships against those unengineered/garbage build bots and the game feels like something out of Star Wars, zipping around and getting on a bot's tail long enough to smoke them then peel off after another fighter. Against something engineered you're looking at needing a solid minute's worth of firepower on target to kill it in most instances, or much, much longer.
PvP combat ships (talking, specifically heavily engineered with very competent loadouts, not a G1 Clean Drive here, a sturdy weapon there, etc.) are pretty easily 8-10x as tough as anything you're likely to run across outside of the highest-tier Conflict Zone ships (the elite squadrons in particular) when it comes to any given model of ship, throw around 40%-60% more firepower, and with competent players are generally tremendously more aggressive than the AI while being better at both keeping their weapons on target when they need to be while keeping yours off target. The stuff you see in most HazRez (and especially lower) or pirate signals or just random interdiction that you're like to run across just doesn't rock that kind of survivability and firepower.
I mean, hell, half the time the AI ships will be trying to do the old "lets have a bunch of different weapons for different purposes" approach to loadouts. You'll bump in a Gunship with just about every hardpoint having a different weapon with every type of aiming mechanic represented. I mean, okay, they're poor and just scraping together what they can, fine. Lore or immersion or some $@#%, but they are far removed from what you can reasonably expect from the middle-to-top end of ship capabilities.
I have cut up newbie ships in the Challenger that folded in around 20 seconds of sustained fire, flying just an all-gimbals multicannon potato boat. 20 seconds. They've been everything from Sidewinders to Vultures to Type 7's to one incredibly over confident FdL and a couple of Anacondas that thought they were invincible because they heard it was the hotness (well, they combat logged, but still). Mind, this ain't a humblebrag, I'm not looking for a fair fight and doing so with intent (malice varies from day to day). Even competent ships with competent pilots I can be pretty reasonably sure aren't going to kill/mission kill me before I can highwake even with accounting for them swinging Grom bombs. 'Course an engineered Challenger is safe as houses... and so is damn near every other ship in the game when built and reinforced, and to an extent no similarly equipped but unengineered ship could ever be, as the example about illustrates.
Even a stripped down Type 7 POS that spends a modicum of its internal and utility capacity on the tools to survive an interdiction is in only the tiniest danger of going pop in a 1-vs-1. Same for the Type 6. Same for basically every space truck in the game. However, against the AI you don't even need to do that as they're so bad, offensively speaking, and their interdictions so easy to escape, that you can fly around in what amounts to a bunch of cargo racks duct taped together with engines tied on with twine and not need to worry about popping because the threat isn't there. There was a time when setbacks for getting something like a 'Conda or Python shot out from under you were devastating. Nowadays, the advent of easy cash making like Robigo tourism and Void Opal mining renders such setbacks quite a bit less terrible for many folks.
Aw hell, it's almost 2 AM and I've rambled enough. The point is, that yeah, the bots rarely have the tools a competent or experienced player will, and the gap between having those tools and not so vast you could hide Raxxla in there and no one would ever find it. The PvE is not built to follow the same expectations PvP does and vice versa.
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We seem to talk past each other.
I only brought up Andy to demonstrate that somewhat equal PvP only gets mild blowback when compared to obviously one sided fights which gain almost universal condemnation. The belief that one sided fights are silly is a nearly universally held belief and they aren't respected across the board. That doesn't make them wrong (it is a game, after all) but people who are opposed to grossly uneven fights in ED aren't dysfunctional, they're normal.
If you doubt that put "In this game veterans can stomp your new character and you'll have no chance of survival" on the box.
That all said, it is ultimately the responsibility of the buyer to carefully read the packaging before making a purchase - so I'm not trying to change ED and people should enjoy it for what it is.
Interesting observations.
The issue, I guess, is that in a game or a sport, as Elite is, you want entertainment and so fights should be more or less even. However, you can't have both that AND realism. In war, one does not wait for the enemy to bring in reinforcements before attacking, but rather prefers to take every advantage to minimise ones own casualties and time of engagement.