Griefers make open impossible, and how easy the solution is.

Ship has hardpoints which any player can point at any ship and press fire. So if we can shoot NPCs this is normal thing that game allows to shooting other player. Sometimes I'm suprised that someone are suprised that someone done this. It's quite wierd for me that somone could think about disable this ability. PvP is absolutely normal thing in video games. Griefing, seal clubing, yes it's below the belt, but it can't be a suprise 🤷‍♂️
I don't mind PvP, but proper C&P system should be implemented. Yeah, it's video game, but when the video game is simulating something, Devs should give it some logic. High security system should be quite safe and anarchy systems should be... anarchy. Criminals should be hunted and all bases in "civilized space" should'nt alow to dock right after kill of few players.
 
the magic number seem to be 140. I just ignore commanders that attack me with no reason and by the time I get to 140, life became much easier. I still run into other commanders and some of them still trying to attack me was no reason but its much less. About one every other week or so, I have about 170 ignored now but as you can see this problem is a manageable problem.
 
I don't think it is unrealistic to suggest that in all higher player population systems that there are players waiting to interdict other players with high frequency. Many of these systems have high incentives for player visitation, engineers, SD, CGs, or gold rush points.

These threads have been posted probably weekly (or with greater frequency) since pvp has been possible in this game. FDEV responded with ineffectual C&P, and ignored 20 years of PVE PVP partitioning in mmos.

I sincerely hope that FDEV gets over these cheap bandaides (bad C&P, blocking, modes) and actually uses effective partition mechanics in the next iteration of ED, for an open experience consistent with other mmos.
 
So it has been a while since visiting the forums; still amazing how much can be said about the blinding flash of the obvious - I do, however, sincerely appreciate most of the humor and common sense comments - confirms the conclusions I came to.

I like open, the universe (real and unreal) is a dangerous place and the only rules that count are the ones that can be enforced, and that takes power and strength to overcome the will of those who want to resist - another form of right by might.

I avoided open for 2 years, then joined power play and found a global group of players that are just great to work with. I learned as a trader how to avoid interdictions, and when I could not, how to get away. Real pilots are way better than NPC, but just like I learned how to beat NPCs, I'm learning how to beat real pilots. That is the beauty of this game; and the beauty of open. Chased by a real pilot in a FDL deadly the other day, who taught me I'm getting better as a pilot; first interdiction I fought and was forced to wait out FSD cool down and got taken down to 19% hull before escaping, and then I submitted to the second interdiction (real pilots are persistent) and escaped with 4% hull and was forced to use the ole jump into solo and direct message him a severely worded taunt just to give him some additional frustration - "nice try, better luck next time" which elicited an adolescent response trying to bait me back into a sure defeat. Lets face it, an engineered DBS vs engineered FDL, even if pilots are equally skilled, is not an even match, and I'm nowhere near as good a pilot as an experienced ganc pilot; that and I was mission focused and he was not going to interrupt me obtaining my objective for the day.

So OP, you are losing a valuable experience, chance to learn skills to become a better pilot, by not flying in open. But then this game is full of opportunity to learn at your own pace and go your own way, and that's probably the best part of it. So good luck, fly fast and be as dangerous as you can be, until you meet someone better, then learn how to be a better pilot. o7 Cmdr.
 
snip experienced ganc pilot; *snip
Unrelated to the topic at hand mostly, but the crew of Ganc are hardly what I'd call experienced. Anyways, OP, murderhobo is a valid form of gameplay for elite dangerous. Don't like it? Tough, go to solo, private group, or quit entirely. Makes no difference to me, ultimately. Alternatively, you could take the time and dedicate yourself to getting a better equipped ship and better piloting skills and realize that this game hands you every opportunity to escape and survive that you could want even against a wing of 4 murder hobos.

Unfortunately, given your post here asking for the dev's to make it less difficult for you I suspect that's an unlikely possibility. Hope you enjoy the next game you play more.
 
OP .... seriously NO.

Awful idea , your point system would even punish PvP players who fight in arranged matches. Outright banning people for playing the game, as many have mentioned maybe domt log into open if you cant take what may happen to you.

Quick question though, do you log into CG's and hotspots every time you have went to open mode? Or how does a ganker find you while exploring? Are you exploring in deciat or shinrarta?... your either the unluckiest pilot in the galaxy or the hyperbole is strong in your post.
 
While crime and punishment could certainly use some improvement, the real number one step to reducing the impact of griefers is to balance the damn game. Get defensive modules out of anything that's not a military slot, make sure all ships have at least a few military slots to work with, and rebalance engineering to be about side grades and specialisation rather than giant direct upgrades. Suddenly, even those cargo haulers will be about to mount a full tank, and put up a reasonable fight against attackers. PvE ships can be just as combat ready as PvP ships, which will have far less indestructible-levels of health. Any ship a griefer interdicts could very well be piloted by a superior pilot, and kick their butt.

No more stupidly easy pickings of a PvP ship pulling over a PvE out trade ship, and having a massive health advantage. Selecting the easy wins will be much harder, and getting ganged up on by even cooperating traders would be legitimately (elite) dangerous.
 

Deleted member 115407

D
...Been playing Elite Dangerous the launch of PS4.
The only time I have been griefed as in Pallaeni when flying my Type9 in a heavily instances DW2 departure point.

Haha - that was the most fun in this game that I've ever had.

Lighten up, OP. I haven't been around for a long time, but if you head over to the PvP forum and just ask for help I'm sure there are a ton of folks who will be happy to advise you on how to survive.

edit
....it's not even that difficult. Once you get the hang of it, it takes like 15 seconds to not get 'sploded and be on your merry way.
 
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I don't think it is unrealistic to suggest that in all higher player population systems that there are players waiting to interdict other players with high frequency. Many of these systems have high incentives for player visitation, engineers, SD, CGs, or gold rush points.

These threads have been posted probably weekly (or with greater frequency) since pvp has been possible in this game. FDEV responded with ineffectual C&P, and ignored 20 years of PVE PVP partitioning in mmos.

I sincerely hope that FDEV gets over these cheap bandaides (bad C&P, blocking, modes) and actually uses effective partition mechanics in the next iteration of ED, for an open experience consistent with other mmos.
The modes are fine as they are (tho better tools for managing as well as forcing rules would be nice or perhaps multiple open modes with different rules to expand on what we have) . Blocking I agree is not ideal as it effects more than just you and the person you block and I would love a better C&P but that could improve all parts of the game not just PvP imo.
I always hark back to what DB said right at the start, that whilst technically ED is an MMO he did not look at it as one and that it would NOT follow the same tropes as what most players consider in an MMO.
Problem is with arena shooters like warthunder selling themselves as MMOs it is clearly a profitable term so FD would have been nuts not to use it.
 
I've been playing for about 6 months and I've been gweefed exactly once.. Oh my.

I've been to Deciat, Sol, Khun, all sorts of places and I rarely run in to another human, let alone someone who wants to upset my paintwork. I usually run a sort of combo-build that is part explorer, part defence. But I ran an almost all cargo job for the recent Golconda CG, found myself running in to other humans. They were running cargo like me, or running CAP for us cargo rats. Didn't even run in to any human pirates, just NPC's.

Now, I understand that being in Australia means that timezones come in to play, but I have insomnia and play at all times of the day. I suspect I'm just playing some other game..
 
While crime and punishment could certainly use some improvement, the real number one step to reducing the impact of griefers is to balance the damn game. Get defensive modules out of anything that's not a military slot, make sure all ships have at least a few military slots to work with, and rebalance engineering to be about side grades and specialisation rather than giant direct upgrades. Suddenly, even those cargo haulers will be about to mount a full tank, and put up a reasonable fight against attackers. PvE ships can be just as combat ready as PvP ships, which will have far less indestructible-levels of health. Any ship a griefer interdicts could very well be piloted by a superior pilot, and kick their butt.

No more stupidly easy pickings of a PvP ship pulling over a PvE out trade ship, and having a massive health advantage. Selecting the easy wins will be much harder, and getting ganged up on by even cooperating traders would be legitimately (elite) dangerous.

Making combat ship hulls weaker won't help trader ships survive. No matter how the module slots are called (military or not) they can already use as many defensive modules as they like - it's just that they choose not to. Escaping from ganks is already pretty easy, it's not that (nor 1v1 duels) what the game should be balanced around.
 
I usually play solo, but every now and then I'll go online to find some CMDRs, and have some interaction. Every single time I did however, I have been interdicted and killed within 10 minutes of launching out of the station. You spawn, you try to fly somewhere and someone interdicts you and kills you without any thought or explanation. That's my complete experience with open. I'm fine with piracy and bounty hunting and all. But these people that just attack for no reason at all makes it that me, and a lot of people like me, don't want to play in open at all. Today I just wanted to screw around with some CMDRs at the community event. Never mind, cause they're waiting to kill you.

I have never, in a year of playing Elite, been in open and not been randomly killed by a griefer. Imagine that. Every time I played in open, a griefer has killed me (and no I have no open bounties). And the saddest thing is, I'm not even exaggerating. Open is completely useless. It has no upsides at all. Doesn't matter what you do, you risk everything on your run by playing in open. Whether you're exploring, mining, trading, bounty hunting or even pirating. All your hard work is ruined by some half-baked gently caresstard in a Challenger.

But instead of complaining, here's my solution: A scoring system. A simple one from the top of my mind: X / kills in the last X hours of play = S. If S < 3, the player is a griefer. IE 6 / 15 = 0.4 (meaning 15 innocent kills in the last 6 hours the player was online), which means this player is a real piece of poopoo griefer. This simple system can be upgraded to use the players full pvp history.

Punishment for players when the score drops below the threshold for the first couple of times:
  • Not be allowed to dock at any station (no repairs, resupplies, engineering, respawns, missions, etc).
  • Immediately be attacked by security forces in any inhabited system. And I'm talking constantly. As soons as the drops in the system the security forces should start interdicting. By doing this constantly, the annoyance of the griefer will be pushed to new levels and he'll stay away from inhabited systems.
  • Be made a large target for bounties. Players can go to a station, go to contacts and get contracts for griefers. With the reward around 1 million per player killed, hunting griefers becomes a liable option for people to make money. Besides, the community will ridding itself of the toxicity. The contracts update to let the hunter know where the griefer is (what system and where in the system). When the hunter attacks, the griefer has 2 options, Flee or fight. If they die, they have to wait for their score to rise before they can spawn in again (cause no griefers at stations). If they fight and win, they just killed another player with no bounty. So their score goes down even more, while more hunters will be on their way. Fleeing grievers will be on the run until their score rises enough. The worse their crimes, the longer they're on the run.

Harsh, but as we say in my country, a cookie of your own dough. You ruin the game for others, the game is ruined for you to.

Punishment for players who go below the threshold more than x times:

Flatout ban these players from playing in open for a week and put a strike on their account. If the player receives 3 strikes the account is banned, GG you played yourself.

I think this is fair because it has clear warnings, you can stop and better yourself at any point. If you get banned it's cause you simply don't do anything other that ruining the game for others. This system however leaves space for killing each other for RP reasons, I mean, you wanna be able to blast some imps on sight. I'm not against PVP, but I am against consistent pointless griefing. As many people are. And it's time Frontier did something about this, cause people have been complaining for years (I've followed the games development for a long time). Elite NEEDS a system. No one stands any real consequence of losing anything if they misbehave in game. The fine for killing a player for no reason is around 150.000 credits. If I saw 150.000 credits floating in space I wouldn't even bother to try and scoop it up. It's nothing, to anyone. Imagine if we had this system in place for murder in real life? You killed a random person now pay a 15 cents fine. It is laughable. There is a reason why you don't need to worry about being gunned down for no reason when going somewhere (except maybe if you live in the US); you murder, you go to jail for a long time. And no-one (sane) is willing to risk that for a stranger. But in Elite there are practically no consequences which is why it's out of control.

Real consequences = less griefing.

Simple as that. And quite frankly, Frontier has tried doing nothing for 5 years now and it clearly hasn't worked all that well. I'd give up space legs, fleet carriers and atmospheric landings for just some peace and interaction with other CMDRs. I've played this game for a year, and have been alone for the entire time. Despite all the hype, all the enthusiasm of people of how great the community is, I have only ever encountered the business end of railguns and plasma accelerators.

Open is impossible, inhospitable, toxic and frustrating , and quite frankly, it's beyond me why Frontier is not doing anything about it. The player pressing alt-f4 when he encounters a griefer is liable for a ban but the griefer is not. It's poor game design and it's poor community management. Frontier should be called out for it. Every other gamestudio actively fights toxicity, Frontier should as well.

LOL
 
More than four years, playing in all modes and never been killed by a player. I don't think anyone has even made a serious attempt.
Open is a peaceful place for me. 🤷‍♂️
 
Making combat ship hulls weaker won't help trader ships survive. No matter how the module slots are called (military or not) they can already use as many defensive modules as they like - it's just that they choose not to. Escaping from ganks is already pretty easy, it's not that (nor 1v1 duels) what the game should be balanced around.
I think the point is if a ship has a military slot there is no downside to making it defensive, where as if it is a generic slot then trade min maxers will use it to haul more cargo......... You could argue that that is the risk min maxers take............ and its a valid point, however min max combat ships which a "griefer" will use doesnt make any such compromises, hell some players even drop their FSD (and then whine that jump ranges of specialist combat ships are too low)
So i think giving some trade ships forced defensive slots (be it for armour or SCBs) is perhaps not such a bad shout...... It will also reduce at least in part any "advantage" a player playing in solo or PG has.

I am not really bothered either way, but i do see logic in the idea. Ultimately Engineers took a problem and then dialed it all the way to 11.
 
Making combat ship hulls weaker won't help trader ships survive. No matter how the module slots are called (military or not) they can already use as many defensive modules as they like - it's just that they choose not to. Escaping from ganks is already pretty easy, it's not that (nor 1v1 duels) what the game should be balanced around.
It's a matter of making PvP min-max, stuffed-every-slot-with-defense builds more fragile, while at the same time making I-actually-have-modules-required-to-interact-with-the-game-world builds more durable. Making them meet somewhere in the middle. The key is eliminating the false choice of health or anything-else in optimal slots. Someone just interested in killing other players doesn't really need any other internals besides stressed defense modules. Someone interested in trading, or interacting with the game world in almost any way is REQUIRED to bring certain non-defense modules. With the (ridiculous) way defense modules stack, giving up even a single one of your slots to anything else can have a substantial negative impact on your durability.

Needing to choose between defense and utility looks good on paper, but in practice just really doesn't work out. Hell, even in a single-player context it's questionable. How do you balance the NPCs? Balance them with the assumption the player will want to use any of the myriad utility / functionality modules in the game, and they're a joke to anyone that fully defense stacks their ship. Balance them with the max defense build in mind, and players are effectively forced to ignore all of the other interesting modules in the game if they want to even have the option of reasonable combat.

Making it so that defensive noodles can only go in slots specifically for defensive modules makes the game far easier (i.e. possible) to balance both in PvE and PvP, and makes interesting organic PvP interactions, well, possible. There are still plenty of choices to be made about which/ what balance of defensive modules to bring what utility you want, what weapon arrangement you prefer. Whether or not you want your effective health to be even in the same order of magnitude as any would-be attackers or if you want to have the modules needed to play the rest of the have does not need to be, nor should have to be, a choice the player must make.
 
balance the damn game. Get defensive modules out of anything that's not a military slot, make sure all ships have at least a few military slots to work with, and rebalance engineering to be about side grades and specialisation rather than giant direct upgrades. Suddenly, even those cargo haulers will be about to mount a full tank, and put up a reasonable fight against attackers.

traders can actually be capable tanks provided you engineer your eyes out and sacrifice some cargo space. offensively not so much but survival, yeah.

it is however true that this power creep, locked behind a grind wall which 97.2% do in solo, while not the actual root of the problem just made it considerably worse.

anyway ...
europa-valeryvasilevskiy-antarctic_22.jpg
 
Making combat ship hulls weaker won't help trader ships survive. No matter how the module slots are called (military or not) they can already use as many defensive modules as they like - it's just that they choose not to. Escaping from ganks is already pretty easy, it's not that (nor 1v1 duels) what the game should be balanced around.
When it comes down to it, the PvE combat balancing is the far more important part anyway, since most combat is PvE.

Things like RES and CZs are balanced around the player being just generally better than the NPCs (by a smaller margin in CZs, sure) so a dedicated combat ship needs to be fairly tough to take on the multiple opponents found there.

Conversely "passive" combat opportunities like pirates and assassins attacking traders / mission runners are much weaker and don't require a full combat build to take on - my general purpose Krait Phantom gives up just one optional to defenses (a 6C biweave) plus some utilities and weapons in slots which can't hold cargo - and can destroy any NPC pirate without difficulty. (And run away from any player)

The range of responses to the NPCs goes from "there's nothing to really challenge an experienced player with a high-end ship" to "it's so unfair they have weapons and shields" so there's probably not a massive amount of rebalancing to be done, except perhaps adding some even higher-threat NPC encounters.
 
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