Interdiction Dodgers

[CMDR_Justin_Bieber]

Then you are not calculating your risk correctly. If I can fly for 50 hours without seeing a single player, then the risk of me losing my cargo to a griefer is not very high.

Also, depending on the ship you are running, a couple of days worth of trading is easily a couple of months worth of flying around in any other profession. You can easily make 1mil credits an hour in a type-7. You can maybe make 300k an hour camping resource extraction zones, and that's the next fastest way to make money besides trading.

Trading is by no definition of the word "risky" if you simply fly out to the boondocks and set up a trade route there. I've only changed trade routes 3 times and that was because I got bored flying to the same places over and over. I wanted a change of scenery.

My experience shows me, I get killed more often trading, even when seeing considerably less humans than when doing combat. Are you saying that for me trading is less risky than combat, even though in trading my losses are more often, and greater, and it only depends on how many humans I encounter? Does this mean that the past has no business in my calculation of my own risk, and only the future potential for meeting humans?

I get attacked about 1% of the time from humans in my combat ship, I get attacked about 50% of the time in my trading ship, is this something I should consider in my risk assessment?
Also, I include attempting to get behind me in super cruise also an attack, should I disregard that?

Should my risk include the consideration of return on investment, or money at all? I go out in my viper and do one bounty for 10k, and my viper is almost 100k to replace, thats 10% ROI, I go out in my trading ship, and make 500k in one run, and risk about 15 million to replace everything, thats about 4% ROI.

 

[Vincent Starson]

I do not want people who combat log in open at all, so this seems like a good thing to me. People who combat log make the game experience worse, so I'd prefer if I didn't have to deal with them at all. Move to solo all you like.

You shouldn't want those who combat log to leave open, you should want them to stop combat logging while still playing open.

This is good for the community if players stop combat logging (if losing a ship doesn't mean losing days of time), and stay in open (for pirates to honorably steal from).

 

[Oddity]

I do both trading (mainly) and some pirating, so I presume I understand both PoVs.

• From a trader's perspective player interdictions are the biggest, if not the only scare. Even a well equipped cargo vessel can be pretty easily torched by a semi-decent player (hello dumb fire missiles). Turrets have a low hit rate and a cheap hard counter at the moment. I can invest thrice the attacking ship's net value in defenses alone without achieving much of a deterrence. (Suggestion: let point def shoot down non-guided missiles as well)
-> So the balance of battle is far, far on the pirate's side. So are the balances of fun, of risk and reward. Until that changes I don't expect much player trade in the open mode.

• I'd gladly drop some cargo to a player pirate if I knew he'll be placated after. The game lacks the tools to negotiate (and possibly support) such a deal in the few seconds between interdiction and FSD disposition.

• Law enforcement NPC interdiction need a telegraph, in a frequented system it isn't always obvious who is interdicting. No need to resist an allied authority ship with legal cargo.

• From a pirate's view I'd like to dead stop an interdictee long enough to scan and convince him to drop a satisfying part of the cargo. Out of gun range, so things don't escalate inadvertently. Ideally cargo scan would be executable before deciding to interdict at all. The limited time window however forces quick action. That too often ends with an expanding gas cloud, which was not the purpose.

Primarily I want player cargo vessels in the open mode at all. Assuming traders seek monetary gain in first line and not PvP they have no incentive to leave solo mode. We need a material incentive or at least compensation for the losses by player attackers.
Player-player piracy simply requires open mode trade. Without that there's nothing to escort or bounty hunt or whatnot either. So we're all interested in getting trade to OM. Seriously. Keep the lowest end of the food chain alive.

 

[Rennard]

@Sandro:
I've merged a few of your responses here to keep my reply all in one place. I've tried to keep it all in context.
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Hello Commanders!

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


* Combat Logging: unfortunately there isn't a panacea we can apply to make it go away. We're investigating various options to mitigate the issue. I can't really add anything more at this point in time, other than to say that we're aware of the issue and we're looking at what we can do to both "escapee" and "victor" to improve the situation.

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Whilst you work on a permanent solution to this issue, I think it needs to be switched around. It is far more likely that a disconnect in battle is deliberate so having the disconnected ship persist only punishes a few genuine disconnects whilst fixing the main problem being reported here.
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As PVP combat for me is a low percentage of my game play, chances are if I do disconnect genuinely it won't affect any other players anyway. From what I can see in the forums this is the case for a lot of CMDR's and I would wager that the vast majority would take this option rather than the current issue even if it meant the same applied to them.
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One possible permanent suggestion from me is having the disconnected CMDR's ship persistent with a [DISCONNECTED] flag against their name and make them invulnerable for a set duration at which point they become vulnerable.
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This has two aspects. 1) Anyone thinking disconnecting gets them out of the fight will know better; 2) A CMDR attacking someone that disconnects knows that it was either deliberate, in which case they just wait and get their easy kill or it was unintentional in which case the player will reconnect shortly and maybe get a 10sec invulnerable status whilst they settle back in and the fight can resume.
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Hello Commander Robert Maynard!
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First, as a reminder to everyone - there's no iron guarantee or ETA on any of the stuff we discuss here, unless we absolutely state as much. Now, caveat duly issued:
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As it happens, we've recently been discussing a "Reboot and Jury Rig" option that would allow you to bring dead systems back online with some minimal health (say a couple of percent) by "eating" an equivalent (or probably double amount) from other systems. This would allow you to come back from being crippled, but not save you from A) destruction at the hands of someone who really wanted you dead and B) further issues and malfunctions (but we think this could be a pretty cool aspect, actually).
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Have you considered modifying the Shield Bank Cell game mechanic for in the field repairs? It seems to me you have a pretty useful mechanic there for 1 shot repairs to specific systems. Maybe just prompt for the system that needs the fix?
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A couple more points:
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There's an interesting sentiment that keeps cropping up: if you make it harder to escape from aggressors, then I'll be forced back into solo. I'd like to ask, is this a player-only issue, or would it include NPCs. Because the idea we've always had for trading is that being attacked is the core game play risk.

In fact, I'd posit that one of the reasons (not the only one, obviously) trading is so much more profitable is because there's little risk of losing your ship or taking much damage, or losing cargo (feel free to disabuse me of this notion if you have evidence to the contrary!)

Now I certainly don't want to see traders getting slaughtered like lambs in an eternal spring, but I want to make it clear that being attacked/placed in significant danger has always been part of our plans for the trader role.

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I personally feel near zero risk when trading. I am more of a liability to myself than anyone or any AI ship causing me harm
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Player ships are definitely more troublesome should they choose to be but simply trading someone less popular gets around this as well. I haven't felt the need to "go solo" when trading but I sometimes play in a private group with a few friends just so that we 'instance' together properly, this however wouldn't be the case if it wasn't necessary.

 

[Starnr]

beware interdiction can come with a price, try me sometime

 

[SE-Apocalypse]

Hello Commanders!

* 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.

It's also worth noting that a bounty is not simply a fine to pay (otherwise it would be called a fine). It is also a green light for you to be attacked. In fact, this is undoubtedly the more serious part of the punishment. I think we still have some way to go to tweak background events to pick up on Commander bounties more (as in, when you fly around with a bounty the game takes it into account when deciding what to generate in the game world near you).

We already have a system that keeps bounties alive when you are killed but they are not claimed (dormant bounties). I just think it would be too punishing to have bounties that kept on being active after respawning. Sure this would not be an issue for the tiny minority of super wealthy Commanders, but our data suggests that losing a ship is a non-trivial event for the majority of pilots - and having a more or less permanent target on your back would likely just stop people committing crimes. That's my current take, anyway.

We are considering bounty adjustments based on some difference metric between Commanders (for example, Elite Commanders getting slapped with a bigger bounty when attacking lower rated pilots, or perhaps based on ship strength).

You are the lead designer, you should have done the math. Killing another player comes with a bounty worth less than a second of high-end trading. Let me say it again, you make in a single second of trading more credits than you have to pay for an unauthorized kill. How can you even think that having a bounty or not is a meaningful greenlight outside of roleplay reasons? Even if you are just mining in a sidewinder we are talking about not much more than minutes of work to pay off a bounty for destroying clean player ships.

I am aware that you can not have large bounties unless you reduce the bounty payout to insurance costs, else the system gets exploited heavily. Still what is wrong with having bounties that reflect the servitude of the crime? Destroyed a type-9? Here have a 5 million bounty that will be reduced by each insurance pay that you make. That is even more fair than having dormant bounties that you can not see in your UI and will bite you in the ass someday because you forgot that you should not dock at station X because faction Y is still angry at you and which send you than in the worst case straight back to your sidewinder. Instead you know exactly what you deal with, you have a decent idea how bad the bounty for destroying a ship is and you have a good reason as pirate not to destroy targets. As well the bounties are getting easy enough into the range that player bounty hunters can have a decent income from other players. Imo that is a clear case of Occam's razor when I compare it to your design. Just because eve-online needed 10 years to 'come up with it' (ignoring players demanding it) does not mean you have to wait that long.

Besides that, check your metrics if they include inactive pilots, or pilots like me, who simply do not generate credits, because they have literally no use for them. I fly vipers and eagles, exclusively, what would I ever need credits for, so what would be the point for me to start trading and make lots of credits with boring tasks that I do not enjoy to make credits that I do not need?
And while you are at it: Check your metrics about pirates income, because that would be the only good reason to limit bounties for killing ships. Pirate income is one of the lowest in the game, so they might indeed have a problem with large bounties. This would need indeed some love first.

 

[OillyRag]

Hello Commanders!

* 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.

Out of the two options that seem to on the cards I'd definitely prefer solution 2.

It adds depth to the gameplay, imagine that a security vessel demands you drop out of supercruise and you refuse, you could then be given a fine (made wanted if you will) and made to go through the interdiction mini game. If you win, good for you, you got away with a small fine. But if you lose your then pulled out of supercruise and your ship is scanned and potentially shot up by the security vessel's.

get rid of submit boost jump it's a lame exploit that does the game as a whole no good.

 

[DarkWalker]

There's an interesting sentiment that keeps cropping up: if you make it harder to escape from aggressors, then I'll be forced back into solo. I'd like to ask, is this a player-only issue, or would it include NPCs. Because the idea we've always had for trading is that being attacked is the core game play risk.

In fact, I'd posit that one of the reasons (not the only one, obviously) trading is so much more profitable is because there's little risk of losing your ship or taking much damage, or losing cargo (feel free to disabuse me of this notion if you have evidence to the contrary!)

Now I certainly don't want to see traders getting slaughtered like lambs in an eternal spring, but I want to make it clear that being attacked/placed in significant danger has always been part of our plans for the trader role.

I can't speak for everyone, but for me an attack by a NPC and an attack by a player are fundamentally different even if everything else — difficulty, chance of escape, frequency, etc — is the same. And whereas I tend to consider an unannounced attack by a NPC to be interesting and enjoyable, I always consider an unannounced attack by a player to be merely frustrating and detrimental to my enjoyment of the game.

 

[Undisputed]

Yeah no, not going to work.

Why the hell would an Empire station care that a fed trader got bumped off XXX LY away? Why would a pirate or independent station give a rats anus about some no name trader who 'sploded no where near them?

No jurisdiction.

Just because you are "innocent" does not mean bad things will not happen to you. And just because someone is an "innocent" does not mean players should be penalised for killing them. Its all fair game, whether you like it or not. Its OPEN play. Dont want to get splatted by another player? PLAY SOLO.

lol, some links are missing here, how much playing time do you need to get ship able to shoot down trader? And how much do you need to make for such trader ship? Just insurance for good t7 is enough for a fleet of pirates, dont mention cargo value and ship itself.

simply saying 2 hours from clear save is enough to have more then well shaped viper. Maybe 150 hours for t7 and cargo.

any kill of clean player in non anarchy should be penalised, milion in bounty and a week wanted to force pirat to hide. Then it will become really dangerous.. To be a pirate

and check meaning of word FAIR,lol

 

[NeoTron]

There's an interesting sentiment that keeps cropping up: if you make it harder to escape from aggressors, then I'll be forced back into solo. I'd like to ask, is this a player-only issue, or would it include NPCs. Because the idea we've always had for trading is that being attacked is the core game play risk.

In fact, I'd posit that one of the reasons (not the only one, obviously) trading is so much more profitable is because there's little risk of losing your ship or taking much damage, or losing cargo (feel free to disabuse me of this notion if you have evidence to the contrary!)

Now I certainly don't want to see traders getting slaughtered like lambs in an eternal spring, but I want to make it clear that being attacked/placed in significant danger has always been part of our plans for the trader role.

I was just lamenting last night on how trading is entirely safe today. I never get interdicted (in a Python now, but this was true or mostly true in about any ship) and there really isn't any sense of danger involved. I've mostly traded in ships entirely without weapons with minimum shields to get higher jumping ability and I still didn't get intererdicted.

Looking back at the original Elite, you'd think twice before trading into an anarchy system. In ED, I only pay attention to the system status when looking for slaves...

 

[Robert Maynard]

Hello Commander Robert Maynard!

First, as a reminder to everyone - there's no iron guarantee or ETA on any of the stuff we discuss here, unless we absolutely state as much. Now, caveat duly issued:

As it happens, we've recently been discussing a "Reboot and Jury Rig" option that would allow you to bring dead systems back online with some minimal health (say a couple of percent) by "eating" an equivalent (or probably double amount) from other systems. This would allow you to come back from being crippled, but not save you from A) destruction at the hands of someone who really wanted you dead and B) further issues and malfunctions (but we think this could be a pretty cool aspect, actually).

Many thanks for that (subject to caveats) - changing the current position such that unless destroyed, ships have at least a chance of getting to a station would be a great improvement, in my opinion.

 

[Matnik]

I believe they're adding functionality that means your ship stays in game, on autopilot for 15 seconds if your connection drops.

It'd also be great if there was a certain amount of time you had to wait to log in again if this occurs. Realistically, it's be 30 seconds. I vote for a week

 

[DaveB]

This has been an interesting read but I don't see any mention of any traders in slow, cumbersome and basically defenseless vessels reporting how they chose to stick around and *fight* their way out of an interdiction encounter or how a trader in such ships actively initiates interdictions. From what I can tell, interdictions are initiated by people in *fighter* type ships which by definition are designed to be offensive and highly manoeuvrable. Furthermore, I doubt interdictors go out of their way to target other well equipped/offensive ships unless they're looking to prove how BA they are or how 'leet they are. So - what am i rambling on about? Simple: If piracy and hunting down traders to steal their cargo is a legitimate pursuit in the game, and I think it should be, then I also believe that the victims should be able to adequately defend themselves (which really is not the case at present)

With a couple of beam lasers on my old type 6 I managed to boil a few pirates (mostly NPCs but there was one player in an Eagle that got a nasty surprise), although the "flying sauna" got a little toasty in the process. Spamming them with missiles tended to work too. My upper limit of what I was prepared to give a pirate without a scrap was where the cost of the cargo I dropped passed the cost to refill empty missile racks.

Traders can fight back, assuming they are flying something with more than the single hardpoint on a hauler. Sometimes submitting to the interdiction only to roll on into the fight surprises pirates.

 

[Cmdr Sharky]

So you think there should be no more traders in open?

Please stop talking on behalf of people other than yourself. I'm a trader, I'm happy playing in open, and I always will be.

 

[Udayana]

Ok so there's clearly two side of this. One is a bug/network issue and the other is people killing the process. So how do you differentiate between the two?
I never been successfully interdicted by a commander. One time i think a CMDR interdicted me, I'm not sure though because when i submit there was nothing there. But rest assured, i always submit to interdiction and definitely not killing my process.

 

[Snakebite]

With a couple of beam lasers on my old type 6 I managed to boil a few pirates (mostly NPCs but there was one player in an Eagle that got a nasty surprise), although the "flying sauna" got a little toasty in the process. Spamming them with missiles tended to work too. My upper limit of what I was prepared to give a pirate without a scrap was where the cost of the cargo I dropped passed the cost to refill empty missile racks.

Traders can fight back, assuming they are flying something with more than the single hardpoint on a hauler. Sometimes submitting to the interdiction only to roll on into the fight surprises pirates.

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.

 

[Chukk]

My experience shows me, I get killed more often trading, even when seeing considerably less humans than when doing combat. Are you saying that for me trading is less risky than combat, even though in trading my losses are more often, and greater, and it only depends on how many humans I encounter? Does this mean that the past has no business in my calculation of my own risk, and only the future potential for meeting humans?

I get attacked about 1% of the time from humans in my combat ship, I get attacked about 50% of the time in my trading ship, is this something I should consider in my risk assessment?
Also, I include attempting to get behind me in super cruise also an attack, should I disregard that?

Should my risk include the consideration of return on investment, or money at all? I go out in my viper and do one bounty for 10k, and my viper is almost 100k to replace, thats 10% ROI, I go out in my trading ship, and make 500k in one run, and risk about 15 million to replace everything, thats about 4% ROI.

If you are dying too much in your trade ship, you're doing it wrong. I mean, I don't what else to tell ya, bud. I don't have any issues when I trade. None. Zero. I haven't lost a single credit to being killed by an enemy player in my trade ship.

I know my experience isn't unique because I have a friend whose grinded out 80+mil credits in his Type-7 without being interdicted, as well.

What systems are you trading between? If you don't mind me asking, that is.

 

[Robert Maynard]

I believe they're adding functionality that means your ship stays in game, on autopilot for 15 seconds if your connection drops.

Sounds quite reasonable - the AI could try to flee to SC (thus changing instance) then simply be removed from the game (unless destroyed, of course).

It'd also be great if there was a certain amount of time you had to wait to log in again if this occurs. Realistically, it's be 30 seconds. I vote for a week

Which would penalise players with less than perfect connections as much as it would players who do actually disconnect.

 

[Poy]

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.

I really prefer this option myself. I can already read the NPCs saying "Commander, please drop out of FSD for random scan or be interdicted" (10 seconds to comply)

* Chaff is too powerful: Chaff launcher capacity is being reduced (and the munitions is being made more expensive). Like a few other modules that use resources, our initial numbers managed to get out of line with other module balancing passes.

Is it ? I mean I've had a few PVPs with chaff and it seemed to be more or less balanced, the question that I'm asking myself however is: how does chaff affect NPCs, because it doesn't seem to disrupt turrets at all...

It's also worth noting that a bounty is not simply a fine to pay (otherwise it would be called a fine). It is also a green light for you to be attacked. In fact, this is undoubtedly the more serious part of the punishment. I think we still have some way to go to tweak background events to pick up on Commander bounties more (as in, when you fly around with a bounty the game takes it into account when deciding what to generate in the game world near you).

Speaking of bounties, yesterday I was attacked by a player, he did not get a bounty, when I returned fire however I got 600 CR bounty + the bounty for murder, it happened several times too...

* Combat Logging: unfortunately there isn't a panacea we can apply to make it go away. We're investigating various options to mitigate the issue. I can't really add anything more at this point in time, other than to say that we're aware of the issue and we're looking at what we can do to both "escapee" and "victor" to improve the situation.

Would it appear to harsh to make the timer 30 seconds/1 minute if not remove the ability to do it altogether when engaged in combat, I mean if the goal here is for the players to run for their life instead of disconnect then the FSD way should be the fastest. Or make it as it was proposed to be, the ship stays in the instance under NPC control etc...

 

[CMDR_Justin_Bieber]

If you are dying too much in your trade ship, you're doing it wrong. I mean, I don't what else to tell ya, bud. I don't have any issues when I trade. None. Zero. I haven't lost a single credit to being killed by an enemy player in my trade ship.

I know my experience isn't unique because I have a friend whose grinded out 80+mil credits in his Type-7 without being interdicted, as well.

What systems are you trading between? If you don't mind me asking, that is.

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?