If I'm understanding you correctly, you're suggesting that the person who remains online is granted authority to place a flag on the disconnected party which would be stored server-side and applied to them next time they sign on? Do you think there is a reasonable expectation that this could be designed such that it worked correctly most of the time and was not easy for bad actors to abuse?
How to solve the Combat Logging Problem
- Thread starter Kaocraft
- Start date
So how are you going to close the loop hole, where I forces you to combat log?
I trick the game into believing you combat log, and I get a free hunt you token to use at my own convenience...
This loophole can't be fixed as long as the game is P2P... and a player holds the instance....
Why is this problematic? because if can get you into an instance, where you you feel "superior", like you are in better ship compared to my ship, like I am in a Cobra and you are FDL. I interdicts you, and we exchange a few shots, and if I holds the instance, I can now use some trickery and kick you out fo the instance, but the game will believe you combat logged. Now I fly back to the station, change ship for my FDL killer, and then when you log back in, I can now insta-teleport my killer to you ....
Griefer heaven...
I trick the game into believing you combat log, and I get a free hunt you token to use at my own convenience...
This loophole can't be fixed as long as the game is P2P... and a player holds the instance....
Why is this problematic? because if can get you into an instance, where you you feel "superior", like you are in better ship compared to my ship, like I am in a Cobra and you are FDL. I interdicts you, and we exchange a few shots, and if I holds the instance, I can now use some trickery and kick you out fo the instance, but the game will believe you combat logged. Now I fly back to the station, change ship for my FDL killer, and then when you log back in, I can now insta-teleport my killer to you ....
Griefer heaven...
solution...logging in battle leaves your ship behind un-piloted and begins a 5 minute self destruct sequence. the pilot who abandoned their ship cannot log back into the game until the ship is destroyed and cannot pilot a logged ship in any game mode for 2 hours. they must also cover the cost of a rebuy or lose the logged ship before logging back into the game.
you can only get rid of combat logging by getting rid of the reason why it is effective. those who log out during combat only do it to save their ship. remove that option and the problem goes away.
for players who get disconnected during combat they are only allowed 3 consecutive occurrences after which the logging solution applies. disconnected meaning any other means of game termination during combat other than explicitly logging out. fdev needs to hold firm that it is not responsible for accidental disconnections and for the player to consider the risk when playing the game on an unreliable network.
you can only get rid of combat logging by getting rid of the reason why it is effective. those who log out during combat only do it to save their ship. remove that option and the problem goes away.
for players who get disconnected during combat they are only allowed 3 consecutive occurrences after which the logging solution applies. disconnected meaning any other means of game termination during combat other than explicitly logging out. fdev needs to hold firm that it is not responsible for accidental disconnections and for the player to consider the risk when playing the game on an unreliable network.
maybe not impossible, you could copy the state of the ship into an npc for example and then upload the final state of the NPC to the logged player preventing the logged player from entering the game until the fate of the NPC replacement is resolved. madden did something similar several years ago. when a player lost connection for any reason during a game their session and their fate was taking over by a computer replacement and the game continued. when the game completed the stats and result of the game were uploaded to the offending player.
you can also forego the 'sticking around' part and just instantly self destruct the ship of the logged player dropping all of the players cargo. whoever was the last to successfully land a shot in the instance receives the kill. the rest of the suggestion can still be implemented.
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So, griefer heaven again. as I it is possible to trick the game into belivieng you combat logged, and thus free easy kills....
And then we have those players who have really flaky internet connections.
And your comparison with madden lacks one fundamental part, that is a PvP scenario where BOTH players actively chooses to participate. Elite Dangerous is not that. There is ALOT of game content that do not need to involve PvP at all.
PvP is not in any way mandatory in this game. And we have already seen the slippery slope where players that want to engage any other player for whatever reason already complains that those players that do exit to menu with countdown timer, that they are "cheaters", but this is a approved gameplay by FDev.
Do not forget, people that want competitive PvP seek out like minded players and here combat logging should not be a problem at all, the problem arises when people who want to prey on easy "targets" find themselves in problem and now combat logs to avoid a "loss", and it is this sort of player base that also complains that their unwillingly victims chooses to not be their "content" and combat log to avoid this preying nature. These players sour the game for other players that for legitimate reasons want to engage players, that have learned the hard way that getting interdicted by another player is bad, and thus take whatever measure to avoid the fight.
if you fail to understand these basics variants and all of their derivations, you are going to keep suggesting/promotion flawed ideas.
Not the person, their client application, as part of an automated process. Given that the logging instance will trigger a validation on the client side, which would invalidate any judgement on failure, hacking won’t be an easy task. More importantly, as the referee would be seeking to reward the effort of the remaining player and secure their kill, there’s not much point in going to the effort to modify a process that’s working to their favour, and just for the odd occasion where someone they’ve engaged drops out.
The NPC would be run by the attacker's game client, and ain't nobody gonna trust another's game client to run an NPC representing another player.
In other words, since NPC's are created and operated by a game client, whose game client do you trust?
Any suggestion for dealing with combat logging has to cope with the situation where players A and B are instanced together, then they lose the connection with each other but can both still contact FD.
This could happen because of router shenanigans or internet flakiness.
Which would be copied? I suspect your suggestion would make copies of both of them in the other's client. Then what would happen to the "real" ones still in their own copies of the instance?
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K. How do you do that? Is it easy? Is is something a lot of people are going to do? Is it something Frontier couldn't monitor and ban you for doing?
I'm mostly with you. I still prefer my solution because it doesn't require the software to make any differentiation between combat logging, menu logging, computer crashes, server issues, and accidental disconnects, but I agree with you that people are being ridiculous when they pretend that it's some kind of insurmountable unachievable goal for Frontier to automatically detect and punish combat logging. I am especially amused by the special pleading about people who could somehow spoof the client into making it look like their opponent has combat logged. If that's what it comes to, I would consider it progress: most garden-variety griefers aren't going to do that. If you have to hack the game to cheat that's orders of magnitude better than allowing cheating by pressing ctrl-alt-del.
This is known by everyone who has had anythng to do with networking. Because the other player connects directly to you once the P2P connection is established you use a sniffer to determine the IP address of the other player, then you either use your PC or another PC, maybe even on another connection to flood the other players connection by sending repeated packets to their address, DOS them (Denial of Service). To the entire world it just looked like the other player just vanished. There's no way to determine where the attack came from unless FDEV installs packet monitoring software on your PC to detect if you are doing it from your PC, and that opens and entire can of worms because it basically means they are capturing your internet traffic that can include personal details, passwords etc, so that's not going to happen. But even then if they did you can do it from any PC anywhere if you know how. So basically it will look like a combat log.
Is it a thing a lot of people are going to do? Of course, note the prevalence of doxing in many games, people do it because they are....ok not allowed to use those words here but that's the sort of people we are dealing with. They will do it, you can't stop them, so implementing mechanics that encourage it is just madness.
Hacking? Lol, when people ascribe the title hacking to such a simple process it trivialises actual hacking. Twenty seconds is all it takes. There's no hacking, there's no spoofing. Tell me your IP address and I will DOS you right now....no don't do that, that's a silly thing to do and I wouldn't do it anyway, but it's as easy as that. People will do it!
Let us put bounties on them ourselves. I wouldn't mind throwing a 20 million credit bounty on someone being a . And activate their wing-beacon so I can hunt them down myself in my combat ship
So this opens it up for abuse, credit transfers etc, etc.
I want to give you 20 million.
So I have a "friend" kill me in a cheap ship, I after I get killed, I add the 20 million bounty, now you can kill my friend, and collect the 20 million bounty.
Then we have the issue with instancing. What is preventing me from going solo/private group after killing you? does not matter how many "beacons" I have active in this case, you cannot instance with me anyway.
Not to talk about all the shenanigans I can on my end to mess with how we two can be in the same instance.
Then we have the I can block you option, that will prevent us from being instanced together etc. etc.
So on so many levels, this will simply not work in practice. After reading ALOT of these sorts of suggestions, and knowing a big how the game client works, and basic knowledge on networking etc, it is clear that most of these suggestion are NEVER going to work as intended. So there is never going to be justice for this. Just accept and think about how this would be if we changed the rules for what happens if you get killed by another player. Remove rebuy costs,. etc, restore lost cargo, NPC, exploration data, etc, etc. You would still get kiled, but it would hurt alot less... so less reasons for going after the pitch fork and yell, burn them!
See, this is the fundamental problem with trying to think up solutions to combat-logging; anything that might actually work is capable of being weaponised.
In this case, a bunch of gankers can show up at, say, a CG, an engineer, Eravate or Shinrata, force-disconnect everybody in the instance and then, Yay! They've got a bunch of people who're stuck in Open for the next hour.
Maybe instead of trying to punish people who combat log we should be trying to change the mechanics so that people didn't feel the need to combat log. The current approach to combat logging appears to be "punish, punish, punish", sort of like the "war on drugs" it simply isn't going to work like that. Of course changing the mechanics so people didn't feel the need to combat log may result in Pv...sorry gankers not having as many easy targets, but that's good right, the PvP'ers can fight each other and the gankers can do....well something useful for galactic society.
TBH, I suspect that the vast majority of people who CL would continue to do it regardless of how trivial any consequence was.
But we'll never find that put as long as the only method we use is punish, and since punish doesn't seem to be working it's time to change our approach.