How to solve the Combat Logging Problem

[Kaocraft]

edit: reworded 1st paragraph for hopefully better clarity

If two players are in an engagement where shots have been fired, and one of the players suddenly disconnects for any reason, the player still signed into the game is granted a "pick up where we left off" option in his contacts panel. This is a one-time use instant teleport which he may activate anytime both parties are signed into the game, which takes him to that other player's current location and instance. After the teleport has been used, the token expires and the player is free to do whatever, but after logging off he will be returned to his original location the next time he signs into the game.

If of course the target happens to have yet another "accidental disconnect" or has to "gracefully log off" due to personal business during the re-engagement, then an additional "pick up where we left off" token will be granted to the party left behind during the disconnect.

This cycle can be repeated as many times as needed until both players have successfully completed their interaction, no matter how many times those pesky routers, crying babies, boiling teakettles, and sketchy Frontier servers get in the way.

Plus, there is no need to worry about who is or isn't "Combat Logging" vs "Menu Logging" vs "having Internet problems," because this method doesn't punish anyone it simply allows good actors to act in good faith, while limiting the benefits to bad actors of acting in bad faith.

 

[Alex Brentnall]

Hmmm, I see potential for abuse with that idea though. Maybe possible to tie up the loopholes but the two biggest I can spot off the bat are:

1) Pick fights, combat log and swap to solo. Change ship to a sidewinder, enter open and not have the ship issue.
2) After logging enter open, combat log instantly, wait 1 minute, re-enter open, combat log. Rinse repeat. Player with teleport is constantly in a state of being teleported to the engagement and back to where they were until they give up.


Unless of course this transcends Open/Solo/PG - In which case I strongly strongly object purely on the basis that the game shouldn't lie to players. Additionally I suspect that'll turn the combat logging crowd from using logging to things like IP banning certain network traffic making the whole situation several times worse than it is at current by simply glitching and breaking other peoples games.



Personally I'm in favour of an automated bot - Measures how often you disconnect in combat vs disconnecting randomly. After a threshold in a certain time is crossed you get a days ban from Open. If it's crossed again it's a week ban, again, a month. Run continually until combat loggers are forced into Solo/PG to play.
Simple and those with genuinely inconsistent networks are not punished as the system will be able to calculate the ratio of disconnects and not take action against genuine cases or one-off incidents. Just have to ensure that it works with the data the servers get from each player.

I'd also advocate a similar system for Non-PvP PGs where a flag can be applied by PG owners to ban PvP and then the bot can auto-ban/block any infiltrators, do it enough times to not be a coincidence/accident and the player will loose all "no-pvp" flagged PGs.

 

[Vandaahl]

Reaaly? People would be able to grief griefers till kingdom come.

 

[Kaocraft]

1) Pick fights, combat log and swap to solo. Change ship to a sidewinder, enter open and not have the ship issue.
2) After logging enter open, combat log instantly, wait 1 minute, re-enter open, combat log. Rinse repeat. Player with teleport is constantly in a state of being teleported to the engagement and back to where they were until they give up.

1) You can do this now so I don't see how it matters. Also the victim of your disconnect doesn't have to teleport to you right away. They have a single-use token which they may activate at their own discretion anytime both of parties are online at the same time. So if someone switches into a sidewinder they might be stuck flying around in a sidewinder waiting for the other party to teleport to them, which may or may not happen. Which is a punishment for bad actors, but wouldn't affect anyone genuinely trying to play fairly. But, I'll add one more thing to the system: the owner of the token can always see whether or not the other party is signed in, but the other party does not have this information (unless they're in-game friends obviously)

2) Player with teleport token is not teleported back to where they started until the next time they log in. So if player A is teleported to Player location, and Player B logs off, Player A can still hang out in the instance for a while if they want to see if Player B comes back. If player A signs out of the game, then they will be returned to their starting location the next time they sign in. And let me reiterate that the person with the teleport token may activate it at their own convenience, they can not get trapped in a loop of any kind. And if they "give up" in frustration, they'll still have the teleport token available to use in a few days, weeks, or whenever they want.

 

[Kaocraft]

Reaaly? People would be able to grief griefers till kingdom come.

Why wouldn't you want to grief griefers? Or do you mean something else?

 

[metatheurgist]

OK. Imagine this scenario. I pick a fight with a friend in his 0LY combat tank, he logs off and I pick up the insta-port option. I do this with friend 2, 3, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 .....

For laughs I go find a griefer, or player faction trying to do something, CG, group of guys on an exploration trip in their paper ships hundreds of LY away. Then I cash I non all my insta-ports and laugh maniacally while my friends flood the instance in their 0LY range combat tanks and either attack everything in sight or collapse the server.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

Ultimate combat logging fix

If you ungracefully exit the game while in danger, (task kill, CTD, power cut, etc), you can only returning your previous mode for 1 hour.
Menu logging in not effected.

Done!
No silly gimmicks, no exploits, no punishing accidental disconnects.
You just return to where you left off, which legitimate CMDRs do anyway .
Anyone trying to sneak in to another mode to escape is only allowed to rejoin their previous mode, or not play until the timer runs out.
And no, you can't log back in to your previous mode, then menu quit, and join solo. The 1 hour timer runs from the moment you disconnected, for one hour.

 

[Kenpachi85]

Ultimate combat logging fix

If you ungracefully exit the game while in danger, (task kill, CTD, power cut, etc), you can only returning your previous mode for 1 hour.
Menu logging in not effected.

Done!
No silly gimmicks, no exploits, no punishing accidental disconnects.
You just return to where you left off, which legitimate CMDRs do anyway .
Anyone trying to sneak in to another mode to escape is only allowed to rejoin their previous mode, or not play until the timer runs out.
And no, you can't log back in to your previous mode, then menu quit, and join solo. The 1 hour timer runs from the moment you disconnected, for one hour.

+1 to this great idea

 

[Brrokk]

If two players are in an engagement where shots have been fired, and one of the players suddenly disconnects for any reason, the player still signed into the game is granted a "pick up where we left off" option in his contacts panel. ...

This can't be done in P2P. Do you mean the player has disconnected from FD server or from the other player or both? Effects will be different in those three cases. The other player can't be granted anything in his contacts panel if his client doesn't know the event has happened.

 

[Brrokk]

Ultimate combat logging fix

If you ungracefully exit the game while in danger, (task kill, CTD, power cut, etc), you can only returning your previous mode for 1 hour.
Menu logging in not effected.

Done!
No silly gimmicks, no exploits, no punishing accidental disconnects.
You just return to where you left off, which legitimate CMDRs do anyway .
Anyone trying to sneak in to another mode to escape is only allowed to rejoin their previous mode, or not play until the timer runs out.
And no, you can't log back in to your previous mode, then menu quit, and join solo. The 1 hour timer runs from the moment you disconnected, for one hour.

Consider that in P2P it's not the FD server that knows you're in danger, it's only your client which knows that and applies the menu log countdown. If you kill the client, the FD server doesn't know you escaped danger.

I'm not unsympathetic to the search for a solution to this, but I don't think the ideas I've seen so far can be implemented.

 

[Kaocraft]

This can't be done in P2P. Do you mean the player has disconnected from FD server or from the other player or both? Effects will be different in those three cases. The other player can't be granted anything in his contacts panel if his client doesn't know the event has happened.

I guess I don't understand what you're saying. If two people are engaged in a firefight, both of their clients "know" that shots have been fired and who has fired those shots. If one of those players disconnects from FD server or the other player or both, the remaining player's client will still have a record of that transaction and will still be connected to FD server, and would be able to determine that the event has happened. I mean, I can look in my contacts panel right now, and it will show a list of CMDRs I have interacted with in the past, including ones that are not currently signed into the game, including ones that have killed me, etc; so *somehow* the client can keep track of these things.

Have I misunderstood your question?

 

[Kaocraft]

Consider that in P2P it's not the FD server that knows you're in danger, it's only your client which knows that and applies the menu log countdown. If you kill the client, the FD server doesn't know you escaped danger.

I'm not unsympathetic to the search for a solution to this, but I don't think the ideas I've seen so far can be implemented.

If you kill the client, your OWN client still knows you escaped danger, and can (1) inform the FD server the next time you start the game, and (2) impose the 1-hour mode restriction.

 

[Cmdr Roma]

Why not just grant the player who doesn't combat log the credits for the kill and just move on? Why this need to go after the person to "Finish him" . I'm a PvE player, never had any interest in PvP but respect the fact that some love PvP. But everyone should have the right to play the game how they would like. There should be a "one time only" option for a player to opt out of PvP. Can't be changed once chosen without starting a new Commander but it renders you ammune to other player attacks and renders you harmless to other players. That way people like me would happily be able to play in Open.

if a player attacks me and I've opted out of PvP he or she gets a message but also the credit for the kill so they don't lose out. Just a thought but it would solve the griefing issue in a heartbeat. Also I think Engineers was a big blow to PvP, it's not a fair playing field now. Someone who, like me, has virtually ignored Engineers but, unlike me, loves PvP can be instantly killed by a Commander with loads of upgrades.

 

[Kaocraft]

OK. Imagine this scenario. I pick a fight with a friend in his 0LY combat tank, he logs off and I pick up the insta-port option. I do this with friend 2, 3, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 .....

For laughs I go find a griefer, or player faction trying to do something, CG, group of guys on an exploration trip in their paper ships hundreds of LY away. Then I cash I non all my insta-ports and laugh maniacally while my friends flood the instance in their 0LY range combat tanks and either attack everything in sight or collapse the server.

You've got it backwards. The insta-port would transport YOU to the location of your "friend," it doesn't transport your friend/CLogger to you. You wouldn't be able to cash in multiples at once because you can only be in one place at a time. If you used your teleport to friend 2, and then immediately to friend 3, you would leave the instance of friend 2 and be brought to friend 3.

Now I guess you could get a similar result and do the reverse of this and combat log on a bunch of your friends so that they all have a token to get to YOU, and then coordinate something where they all use their own tokens at the same time. I think there's plenty of possible tweaks to the initial premise that could prevent this from being a problem, though.

 

[Kaocraft]

Why not just grant the player who doesn't combat log the credits for the kill and just move on? Why this need to go after the person to "Finish him" . I'm a PvE player, never had any interest in PvP but respect the fact that some love PvP. But everyone should have the right to play the game how they would like. There should be a "one time only" option for a player to opt out of PvP. Can't be changed once chosen without starting a new Commander but it renders you ammune to other player attacks and renders you harmless to other players. That way people like me would happily be able to play in Open.

if a player attacks me and I've opted out of PvP he or she gets a message but also the credit for the kill so they don't lose out. Just a thought but it would solve the griefing issue in a heartbeat. Also I think Engineers was a big blow to PvP, it's not a fair playing field now. Someone who, like me, has virtually ignored Engineers but, unlike me, loves PvP can be instantly killed by a Commander with loads of upgrades.

That's fine but we're not discussing why or why not pvp or starting yet another thread to demand Open PvE or condemn people for shooting each other with their spaceships, or whatever.

This is a proposal specifically to address the problem of people getting into space battles and then bailing on them partway through by disconnecting from the game. The credits are only one aspect of the experience and not at all the most important part. Most people are not playing primarily for points they are pretending to be spaceship pilots and combat logging (even "graceful" menu logging) pulls the rug out from under that experience.

 

[Brrokk]

If you kill the client, your OWN client still knows you escaped danger, and can (1) inform the FD server the next time you start the game, and (2) impose the 1-hour mode restriction.

No, here's the nub of the problem. Your own client is no longer running and thus knows nothing. It didn't have a chance to tell the FD server what you did. The next time you run it, it doesn't know what happened last time.

You could conceivably write a status continually to disc, but I think that would be prone to corruption and also tinkering by motivated players. It would be easy to just restore a previous status by file copying.

 

[Florenus]

Why do you guys think there's a problem that needs to be solved?

 

[Kaocraft]

No, here's the nub of the problem. Your own client is no longer running and thus knows nothing. It didn't have a chance to tell the FD server what you did. The next time you run it, it doesn't know what happened last time.

You could conceivably write a status continually to disc, but I think that would be prone to corruption and also tinkering by motivated players. It would be easy to just restore a previous status by file copying.

If I force-quit my client with my hull at 33%, when I sign back on my hull will be at 33% and I'll be in the same location as I was when I task-killed the game. The game doesn't wait for you to manually "save your progress", it records most significant events as they happen. That's why there's a player journal which you can load into EDDiscovery to see most game events like interdictions, cargo acquired, fuel scooped, damage taken, etc. And there are apps which read from the player journal as it updates in real time. The client knows enough about what happened last time to be able to tell whether you closed the game normally or not.

 

[Brrokk]

If I force-quit my client with my hull at 33%, when I sign back on my hull will be at 33% and I'll be in the same location as I was when I task-killed the game. The game doesn't wait for you to manually "save your progress", it records most significant events as they happen. That's why there's a player journal which you can load into EDDiscovery to see most game events like interdictions, cargo acquired, fuel scooped, damage taken, etc. And there are apps which read from the player journal as it updates in real time. The client knows enough about what happened last time to be able to tell whether you closed the game normally or not.

Well, it's not possible to know for sure, but I would be very surprised if that's how it works. When I log in, I would expect my client to ask the FD server what my hull health is.

Have you ever had the experience of entering a system and flying a distance to the station, then getting a disconnection when you try to drop from supercruise? When you reconnect you find you have to fly across the system again, because the FD server doesn't know you already did it and has your hyperspace jump into the system as its last information. Your client doesn't know you did it either because it only knows what the FD server now tells it.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

To expand on my idea, the game knows you're in danger as soon as you're in danger.
Simply save this state as soon as it happens, as a sort of tag on your save, with your current mode logged.
The tag is cleared if you legitimately leave danger (die, high/low wake, menu log, etc).

If you force quit, disconnect, CTD ect, the tag isn't removed (because it can't be).
When you next load the game, it reads there's a tag, and locks the mode for 1 hour.