Interdiction Dodgers

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Ok this has happened several times today, and to be honest its beyond annoying, its actually ruining my game and making me think of going elsewhere.

So I'm still doggedly playing as bounty hunter, and due to the lack of legit targets (i've not yet met a single human wanted player since starting this game) i've been forced to start interdicting 'clean' ships, I pull em out of supercruise and scan them with the KWS just to see if they have any bounties.

Now, i'm not yet quite ready to turn to piracy, so as long as they are clean I let them go.

But.... what is really getting on my wick is the number of ships that are exploiting the disconnect-to-get-out-of-trouble bug.. I think about 4 out of 5 ships that I try to interdict simply vanish from the scanner, i'm guessing that they simply pull the plug rather than risk an engagement.

TBH I wish these chicken poo commanders would just move over to solo mode, after all why bother to play online if they are going to chicken out of any contact ? They are just wasting my time and ruining the game....

FD REALLY need to sort this out it going to ruin the multiplayer game for many, otherwise


why not try something like this.

Once an interdiction tether is established you cannot pause or quit.
If you disconnect then the AI takes over your ship and you cannot rejoin the game until the engagement is over.
If the AI looses the engagement then tough, you loose a ship and its your own fault for chickening out.

If the AI wins, then its tough on the person that interdicted you.

This Game is Called Elite Dangerous, why have they made it so soft ?

So basicly because you cannot be bothered to find real player pirates and you dont like bounty hunting npc pirates, other players have to change their play style to suit your needs. If its not a nice bounty hunter like yourself interdicting them, are you going to cover the costs of them submitting to a griefer if they happen to lose their 79m credit Lakon 9 or whatever . You could just go to the warzones or park outside stations and scan players as they enter /exit stations therefore not intervening in their game play so much. You could also text chat to them whilst in SC before you interdict them.

I got a good idea - why dont you find a nice system and call it your base and then post the name of that system on the forums and invite PvP'ers to come and play... being an honest friendly type I'm sure you will honour any battles lost by supplying the winners with some free booty when you respawn...
 
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So freighters could have the remote chance of hitting an target.. hmmm.. is that not.. unfair?

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That would mean killers with easy 15+million bounties on there heads.
Will not happen.

I would love to have this kind of bounties on my head. But I admit, I would love than as well to be able to scoop up your full 5 million cargo up in a reasonable time. After all I have bounties to pay or better destroyed ships to pay for, because for 15 million credits there will be a decent amount of hunters on my aft :D

Bounty hunting plateaus to a measly profit per hour. Trading rises and rises with each ship that has larger holds, until it is absolutely the top earner per hour. I make 6-8 million per hour. I dare a bounty hunter to come close.

Can I haz this 15 million credit bounty pirates please? I dare you to say that bounty hunting would than not scale with traders. It would scale perfectly fine with traders blown up in open :D
 
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Hello Commander tagos!

I just want to confirm something. You say that it's impossible to escape interdiction - could you clarify? Interdiction is more or less skill-based, with both pilots having a very similar chance. There are differences between ships, but they tend to counter each other out in different ways. If something is occurring that's messing this up, it's likely a bug that can be looked at.

And to carry on with this theme: if you could escape an interdiction you would have, at a minimum, forty seconds of grace period whilst your aggressor is waiting in normal space for their FSD to cool down (not to mention that they will have suffered some damage that you would have avoided). Would that not be enough of an advantage?

Hello CMDR Sammarco

There are indeed bugs with interdictions. It happened to me twice since 1.05 that I got interdicted in a Cobra (by another Cobra NPC) and in the minigame, even though I managed to align the big circle over the small circle with relative ease and they both turned blue, the red bar quickly increased and the blue bar decreased until I got dropped out of SC. However, this happened only twice.

There is another bug were the interdiction minigame lasts less than 2 seconds and you're thrown out of SC. Hasn't happened to me recently, maybe it was fixed since release.

PS: I would encourage the devs to make NPCs more intelligent and powerful. Because right now it's really stupid to take this risk in open mode. That means anybody flying a big expensive trading ship would just play in solo for trading and go back to a Viper/Cobra for open mode, which would mean open mode would have less and less traders.
 
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Realistic would be an 15 million bounty, and that means, I make 2 accounts, kill traders and then my own char with the second.
Money machine.
An cobra with dumbfire missles turns about every T9 who is not geared for serious war into swiss cheese.

That super easy avoidable. Bounty payout is limited insurance costs of the destroyed ship. Make them pay for each and every credit of their bounty. That way the system can not be exploited to make credits. If you want to be especially mean about it, than the bounty payout is even just 50% of the insurance costs to make bounty trading not even remotely attractive, but imo that just creates a too great desire to pay bounties directly off.
 
Ability to disconnect and avoid combat is implemented by FD and is a part of the game. They make the game as they want and won't listen to whining. If you don't like it, you can always play solo.
(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
 
The thing is most traders have taken to flying unarmed and shieldless to increase cargo capacity.... Then they cry 'Griefer' and pull the plug when they get stopped by a pirate.

But my profits! My immersion!

ALl cargo expanders and nothing else! Profit profit profit

It's a joke really. It just shows how un-dangerous the AI are when they run no shields and just grind grind grind for the next ship. When they get the python and find that killing AI is the exact same as their viper they'l be like '' too i bet.
 
Hello Commanders!

A few points to hopefully let you guys know what our feelings are currently on a few of the issues raised in this thread:

* Ghost interdiction
: interdiction ending with no other vessels present - this sounds very much like a bug, so please ticket. In general, if an interdiction completes (either because of submission or the interdictor winning) then both ships should be pushed into the same space. I can't really think of any circumstance where this should not be the case.

* Submission escape: we are looking into two potential solutions to the ability for ships to submit then charge their frame shift five seconds later.

First though, a rationale as to why we have submission: we want authority ships to be able to drop players out of super cruise, in order that they can scan them. If authority ships can't do this, then smuggling loses some of its excitement. On the other hand, we don't want authority interdictions to damage the ships involved if the Commander is willing to submit to scanning. We also don't want to leave players with a significant cooldown afterwards.

Solution one is to allow the interdictor device to have some sort of FSD delaying attack in normal space, that is temporarily disabled when the device is used for a successful interdiction. So submitting Commanders would be at risk of this attack, whilst Commanders that fought the interdiction would not (but instead would have to contend with their frame shift cool down).

An added benefit would be that the interdictor could be used outside of interdiction.

Solution two would be to remove submission and instead update the AI to be able to demand Commanders to drop of their own accord so that the authority ships could drop out onto them and scan.

Both solutions are non-trivial, both have pros and cons. No ETA, but we are working towards fixing this exploit.

There's also one other interesting point to note. If you submit to interdiction simply to escape back to super cruise there is nothing preventing your assailant from repeatedly dragging you back down. If you fight and successfully evade interdiction, your aggressor is dropped into normal space with a forty second frame shift cool down...

I like solution two better. I always feel like interdiction is a very violent way to pulling someone off supercruise and it should not be used lightly. If space cops have probable causes to pull me over, then I'd appreciate they give me the chance to pull over first instead of yanking me off suddenly. I also want these space checking to not be too often, maybe 1 or 2 times max in an hour of gaming session. Maybe more if I am a known pirate/smuggler or have past history of pirating/smuggling. Their firepower/speed should also be more powerful than your daily pilot. For now, if I want to, I can blast any cop who pull me over sky high and pay my bounty after, but it should be a serious serious offense killing officers.
 
The thing is most traders have taken to flying unarmed and shieldless to increase cargo capacity.... Then they cry 'Griefer' and pull the plug when they get stopped by a pirate.

I would call such pilots "fools" rather than sensible traders :) If they are flying those defenseless barges in any game mode they really need a target paintjob available to them possibly with the addition of a "shoot me" decal.
 
A thought about murders/pirates, if someone have accumulate large enough bounty due to killing or pirating other player pilots, should they have more punishment? Such as revoking their ranks in empire or federation (do they allow murders in their rank?) Refusal of docking in major faction stations? (I notice even hostiles are allowed to dock, is there some kind of international law/rights about docking?) Quicker/more often/more powerful space cop pull over or drop in? (Like GTA in space, if you have enough stars, the whole city will come after you)
 
A thought about murders/pirates, if someone have accumulate large enough bounty due to killing or pirating other player pilots, should they have more punishment? Such as revoking their ranks in empire or federation (do they allow murders in their rank?) Refusal of docking in major faction stations? (I notice even hostiles are allowed to dock, is there some kind of international law/rights about docking?) Quicker/more often/more powerful space cop pull over or drop in? (Like GTA in space, if you have enough stars, the whole city will come after you)

There are no murderers in Elite. There are people who love destroying your property, but they cannot murder anyone.
 
When you run Lakon Type-9 without shields, get interdicted and submit you usually can escape with 1-2% damage from AI ship firing at you. With default thrusters there is no way to evade interdiction.

How do you envision this to change when you redesign the interdiction?

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I'd say upgrade thrusters and put a shield on.....
 
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Since ye olde devs are paying attention to this thread, I'm going to jump in with some anecdotes and warnings.

I highly recommend that Frontier not get too "tunnel vision" when it comes to protecting the "noncombat" playstyles from "PvP"ers. Storytime.

Over in EVE, we had a similar controversy, only it was between mining ships, and people who blew them up. The mining game in Eve pretty much encourages going and doing something else, which makes those ships quite vulnerable to attack. Naturally, other players took advantage of this, and went to blow them up. The miners complained, and from then on a multi-year "buff miners/nerf gankers" cycle began. Now, I won't go into the details of that, but suffice to say, killing unattended mining ships basically became a worthless endeavor. The intent of doing this was to protect the miners from PVP people. It failed in a dramatic way. After a point, the people targeting miners said "Screw this, we aren't playing Eve Online anymore. We're playing Blow Up Miners Online." Instead of curtailing the slaughter, each nerf move by CCP was seen as a challenge to overcome. No more ship insurance for ganking, fine, the gankers set up their own third party reimbursement system. Give mining ships more armor and shields, the gank teams devised ways to bring in more people to add more firepower. So on and so on, and now, the miners in Eve are being slaughtered by the buckets by well-organized groups of people who couldn't care less about whatever game mechanics are thrown at them to stop them.

We're starting down the same path here, only instead of "Miner vs Ganker", it's "Trader vs Pirate". Be careful, Frontier, as you really don't want to go down those same steps as Eve. Once someone says "I don't care about bounties/wanted status/fines I'll never pay them I'm just gonna blast traders", you'll never be able to reign that person in, except with some drastic changes to PvP, or bans. Neither of those is a good option.


The focus should not be to "protect" traders, as non-combat pilots. The point behind playing a non-combat role in a game like this is that you ARE the hunted. You should be rewarding smart ways to escape the PvP "predators", not just bulking up the prey to the point that it can't be killed. When it comes to trader vs. pirate "combat", it's honestly too late once the pirate has the trader has been dragged out of supercruise. The "combat" should start well before that point, as a battle of brains between hunted and hunter, and Frontier should be encouraging that.
 
Yesterday, some unkind fellow in the forums, posted exactly where I was at, and the next hour the traffic report increased by about 800, I'll never know if any of that increase was because people were looking for justin bieber. Which oddly enough, with a traffic report of about 4k at that time, is where I got attacked the least in my trading ship, with the most visible people.

You dont know what to tell me, how about the answer to what I asked about risk?
You told me I was calculating risk incorrectly, but I don't see yet where you've said how I can correct my mistakes.
My risk assessment should have nothing to do with actual loss comparison, and only with percieved potential human sightings, or what?

If you fly around in unpopulated systems then there is virtually no risk to trading. I said earlier I'd spend 50hours trading, and that's not really true. That's about my total time. Closer to 25hours trading, but in that amount of time I haven't been interdicted yet. My friend has easily spent over 100hrs of non-stop trading and his story is the same as mine. I can only say the same thing so many times. I don't know what you're doing to attract so much attention to yourself.

Running cargo is only risky if you don't know what you are doing. I'll give you one of my old trade routes. Brani (Gold) and Maridal (One of the technologies, can't remember). 1800creds per ton, round trip. I ran that route for 20 of the 25 hours I've spent trading and not once did I see a single human player. You go run that route and then post a screen shot or a video of you being interdicted by a player and I'll immediately take back everything I've said.
 
I would call such pilots "fools" rather than sensible traders :) If they are flying those defenseless barges in any game mode they really need a target paintjob available to them possibly with the addition of a "shoot me" decal.

They are not defenseless. They can push the button and disappear. With such an ability, installing weapons and shields is a bit silly.
 
Yesterday, some unkind fellow in the forums, posted exactly where I was at, and the next hour the traffic report increased by about 800, I'll never know if any of that increase was because people were looking for justin bieber. Which oddly enough, with a traffic report of about 4k at that time, is where I got attacked the least in my trading ship, with the most visible people.

You dont know what to tell me, how about the answer to what I asked about risk?
You told me I was calculating risk incorrectly, but I don't see yet where you've said how I can correct my mistakes.
My risk assessment should have nothing to do with actual loss comparison, and only with percieved potential human sightings, or what?
Did you factor in commander's name in your risk assesment? ;) I hate to bring the bad news, but i read some other post mentioning your commanders name on a "kill on sight" list or something like that. Be careful out there CMDR.
 
Sandro Sammarco said:
* Submission escape: we are looking into two potential solutions to the ability for ships to submit then charge their frame shift five seconds later.

First though, a rationale as to why we have submission: we want authority ships to be able to drop players out of super cruise, in order that they can scan them. If authority ships can't do this, then smuggling loses some of its excitement. On the other hand, we don't want authority interdictions to damage the ships involved if the Commander is willing to submit to scanning. We also don't want to leave players with a significant cooldown afterwards.

I think one solution would be to allow the interdictor to choose beforehand whether they allow peaceful submission or not (such as by having it as a toggleable setting in the side panel). The biggest problem I see here would be communicating the feature so that people know about it and understand its significance, but I don't think that's insurmountable.
 
perhaps they think you are a griefer who will just open fire and destroy their ship and cargo without even speaking to them or making demands. Just happened to me, tried to evade, had to submit and was met with a wall of lead, no demands and no warning, destroyed the ship and a full load of rares.

i will be exploiting the disco bug in future.

Be nice if we could issues bounties on commanders ourselves.


I'm another who would love to see those killed in game by either griefers or just pirates able to issue bounties, it might be a way to drag a few more players away from solo if they know there is a way to discourage players from griefing etc.
 
I personally think that a part of the puzzle that's still missing to some degree is the super cruise game play aspect, which, after all, is the determining factor of whether interdiction can occur in the first place.

This is interesting, would you be able to elaborate at all on what this missing part of the puzzle entails? Thanks in advance if you can.

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We want to see more stuff that has players working together in some meaningful fashion, with meaningful game world responses, as much as the next Commander. Various options are in the "big list of cool stuff".

By this you mean the DDA I take it?
 
* Murder is not serious enough: This is an interesting one that has a couple of different strands to unpick. Firstly, we are looking to add in a future update a change that will cause any bounty claimed to become a special, non-expiring fine for the perpetrator. The idea is that when you commit a crime you are expected to pay at some point. Currently some game play flow options remove the bounty completing when you are killed, which is not what we want.

Random thoughts:

  • Implement the piracy role as per the DDF threads on the subject.
  • Make the bounty for murder proportional to the rating of the victim (100K for an Elite killing a Harmless; down to 20K for an equally matched pilot)
  • Force criminals to pay off their bounties on death.
  • Allow players to inject money into their insurance plan (non refundable) to top up the 200K loan amount limit.

The last one has 3 benefits - forces criminals to save money for the time when they are caught and don't simply go bust; allows peaceful pilots to ensure if they are killed they have enough money to buy back their ship. It also acts like a gold sink (to a degree - once you have enough wealth the game, to a large extent, is trivialised anyway)




ETA: Please, for the love of bringing in real adrenaline fuelled drama, implement Ironman, even a simplistic model to begin with (flag / extra matchmaking rule / flag flip on death) :eek:
 
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Sandro Sammarco

Lead Designer
Frontier
Hello Commanders!


I'd just like to add this morsel to the debate, again to explain where we're coming from.

I'm not overly interested in the whole "who wins the encounter" discussion, especially when the encounters can be very lopsided. I'm interested in how game play is served for both parties:

So a combat-heavy ship interdicts a trader. What's interesting to me here is: how are the players' game play needs being served? My first thought is: is the frequency and mechanics of the interdiction process working? If it is, then great, I know that the trader is facing a threat that I believe traders need to create interesting and exciting journeys.

I know that if I asked a bunch of traders about their thoughts on this particular interdiction they would all likely cry out in despair - the odds are stacked against them. But I have faith that the potential of this encounter makes their overall game play experience better (of course, this assumes that the frequency and game play is correct, something which might need a number of tweaks).

I look at the combat ship. Regardless of what their intent is, at this point in the game play they have a material advantage. But I want to make sure that the length and options of the encounter mean that both parties have at least *some* tricks to employ (hence I want to make sure that the trader could have fitted modules that make life more difficult if used well, and that the combat ship has the means to potentially prevent instant escape and actually attack). If you fly a stripped down trader with no shields or means to defend yourself, I contend that you are taking a calculated risk and can't complain too much when you get interdicted.

All in all, the end result of this encounter is mostly likely that the trader suffers some amount of material loss (the extreme being that they are destroyed) and that the combat ship more than likely has a bounty. Depending on player skill and materials involved the result can swing one way or another, but this is most likely outcome.

At this point, the trader needs to recoup their losses (being traders, they'll likely trade to do this). I believe we currently have some issues linked to the severity of their potential loss, but I suspect we may be able to find ways of softening the extreme cases a little better (tweaks to the credit line, for example is something we're looking at, or some changes to overall ship costs). Importantly, to me it makes no sense for the trader to perceive that they somehow "lost" this encounter - because the deck was stacked against them from the start.

The only sensible way for traders to assess how well they did is to consider how much they lost. And in a nutshell, this is where we have to make sure that traders can *if they wish* alter their ships to mitigate the loss caused by loss. Tough shields, armour, point defence, weapons - these all make a difference. For sure it's no guarantee that the trader can defeat the combat ship, but - if we get the numbers to the right place - it may well mean the difference between some hull/module damage and complete ship loss, depending on the equipment and *how well* it's used.

And I have to say that this is a core concept for the trader's basic journey. It really has nothing to do with them "beating" or "losing" to ships that are designed specifically for combat. It's about the dangers and efficiencies of haulage.

For the combat ship Commander, who presumably wants to fight - they now have a bounty which allows anyone to attack them in the area. Both player and AI ships can take advantage of this, and, again, almost certainly through some ongoing balancing, they should get more fights, which is kind of what they want, I would hope. The idea we want to create here is that living by the sword means risk of dying by the sword, potentially quite often.

Now, for the combat ship pilot who targets weaker ships then pays off the bounty instantly, I don't believe the answer is in making trader ships invincible, or impossible to find or catch. I'd suggest we will get better results in increasing the likelihood of dangerous combat encounters for them, such as tweaking the frequency of more powerful authority ships, especially around stars and starports, increasing the bounty they accrue based on the imbalance between ships, making bounties they accrue sit around as debt once they've been claimed - basically making their infamy count against them wherever we can do so and in so doing increase the chance for combat.

Again, this isn't to make them "lose", it's to provide an entertaining experience for them to work through. The only time player versus player becomes a clear cut case of win/lose is when too evenly fitted ships decide to slap each other about (which they can do, I have no issues with that).

I'd say that possibly we should look into AI to make sure that the more experienced Commanders can feel challenged, without destroying newer players. I think that there is perhaps room to look at rewards in addition to credits, to minimise the perception/reality that trading is the path of least resistance to progression. I think we can look at improving AI goals and activities in super cruise (for example having AI more interested in players based on how the player acts, maybe AI that can use wakes). We will also have lots of interesting situations to monitor when player wings and other features come on-line.

This game is certainly an ongoing endeavour and we're committed! All I'm saying here is that, due to the nature of the game, Commanders are going to inevitably find themselves in situations that aren't necessarily balanced or fair.

What I want to be able to do is make sure that Commanders who employ skill and knowledge (which can include knowing how to outfit your ship) maximize their success in those encounters.

Of course, to caveat, no guarantee or ETA on stuffs that are discussed here, it's simply me trying to explain our current line of thinking (and therefore is in no way immune to change!) Hopefully though, there's some food for thought (and of course, just because you disagree does not instantly make you "wrong" or us "right").

I hope this proves at least an interesting read :)
 
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