Engineers Let's talk Engineering Odds, Legitimately

[Ziljan]

During the Salome event training with certain notorious members of the community, some facts bubbled up to the surface amidst the lies, and in "training" some unnamed top PVPers were bragging about their stratospheric ship stats. This revelation shone a light onto the degree of engineering involved in creating certain notorious PVP ships. One ship in particular had a reported 10500 MJ shields, as well +140 rolls on dirty drives and similarly high rolls on weapons (and other internal modules). I ran the math on engineers and in order to achieve this combination of multiple-god rolls on a single ship, would result in an astronomically low chance of success even with a monumental legitimate effort.

Exhibit A) According to sources who have achieved these so called "god rolls" legitimately, it took about 100-200 attempts to get a single god roll, and some experts put to the odds of a single god-roll at roughly 0.5% or probability P=0.005.

Exhibit B) So for a single module if you amassed mats for 100 grade 5 attempts, your odds of failure for a given roll are P = 0.995 and P^¹⁰⁰ = 0.6 for 100 rolls. That's a 60% of god-roll-failure for 100 attempts, or a 40% chance of god-roll-success if you prefer.

Exhibit C) Now lets say that a ship had 15 such god-rolls on their ship. What are the odds that they could achieve this legitimately with 100 rolls for each module on their ship? If they have a 40% chance of success for each module then for 15 modules they have a P^¹⁵ = 0.4^¹⁵ = 0.000001 chance of getting all 15 modules god-modded legitimately. That's literally a 1 in a million chance of success after accumulating a total of 15 x 100 x 3 = 4500 materials !!!

Conclusion: Even if 1000 of the most dedicated PVP players in Elite attempted this level of engineering on even 1 of their ships, then there should be approximately 0.001 ships in the Elite universe that actually succeed in having these stats legitimately. Hence the odds of the sum of the ENTIRE player base catching up to the fleets of known engineer-exploited ships are extremely LOW over the remaining lifetime of ED.

 

[Thetele]

And thats why the rng crafting was bad idea, why we had so much hate towards frontier after they revealed how crafting will work. Like they went and picked the worst possible way to do crafting/looting.

Its just adding more grind, kills any tinkering with the ship builds and means some people will never be able to be competitive. Like I, i have been able to do 5-10 rolls at best for some grade 5 mods. I simply can't stand how boring material gathering is and how all efforts are wasted when crafting.

 

[Sysmon]

Is your point that there is a significant indication of a cheat or exploit being in use, or is it that some people have spent an inordinate amount of time getting the best possible rolls?

Should they be commended for having sacrificed so much game time on it? Is it dividing the community between those with that kind of time and those that has not got that much time to play?

Does it really matter, except in regards to the lack of effective in-game policing and crime/punishment mechanics?

S

 

[MissMeYet]

I've had exactly 2 God rolls since I started playing. I've got a G5 Overcharged MC with 19.5 damage (but I was stupid and didn't bother with a special effect, so it sits unused since the colour isn't the red or green of Incendiary or Corrosive), and a FSD that's at 52% increase. All told those 2 rolls add up to maybe 50 legit spins of the RNG game.

Edit to add that it seems to me the RNG gives out a much better result when you are near the end of your available materials. It's happened many times that I'll show up with enough mats for 30 spins, but the best results come on roll 28 or 29. Anyone else?

 

[Ziljan]

Is your point that there is a significant indication of a cheat or exploit being in use

If the odds of 1000 PVP top tier achieving this level of engineering are approximately Zero even with inhumane level of engineering effort/grind, and there probably aren't even 1000 PVP players that are that insane in the game, then yes I would say that the odd proliferation of FLEETS of ships with this level of engineering is a clear sign of exploits and cheats.

But more importantly, if Frontier fails to remedy the situation by either removing these hacked-assets from accounts or making them easily available to ALL, then PVP will be ruined for the foreseeable future of the game, since there is no way humanely possible for legitimate PVPers to catch up.

 

[Sysmon]

If the odds of 1000 PVP top tier achieving this level of engineering are approximately Zero even with inhumane level of engineering effort/grind, and there probably aren't even 1000 PVP players that are that insane in the game, then yes I would say that the odd proliferation of FLEETS of ships with this level of engineering is a clear sign of exploits and cheats.

How we sort cheats from hard efforts is a difficult question though. Others have posted about an exploit requiring Dangerous or Elite ranking and possibly also low latency. Is that what you are referring to?

S

 

[Kyokushin]

During the Salome event training with certain notorious members of the community, some facts bubbled up to the surface amidst the lies, and in "training" some unnamed top PVPers were bragging about their stratospheric ship stats. This revelation shone a light onto the degree of engineering involved in creating certain notorious PVP ships. One ship in particular had a reported 10500 MJ shields, as well +140 rolls on dirty drives and similarly high rolls on weapons (and other internal modules). I ran the math on engineers and in order to achieve this combination of multiple-god rolls on a single ship, would result in an astronomically low chance of success even with a monumental legitimate effort.

Exhibit A) According to sources who have achieved these so called "god rolls" legitimately, it took about 100-200 attempts to get a single god roll, and some experts put to the odds of a single god-roll at roughly 0.5% or probability P=0.005.

Exhibit B) So for a single module if you amassed mats for 100 grade 5 attempts, your odds of failure for a given roll are P = 0.995 and P^¹⁰⁰ = 0.6 for 100 rolls. That's a 60% of god-roll-failure for 100 attempts, or a 40% chance of god-roll-success if you prefer.

Exhibit C) Now lets say that a ship had 15 such god-rolls on their ship. What are the odds that they could achieve this legitimately with 100 rolls for each module on their ship? If they have a 40% chance of success for each module then for 15 modules they have a P^¹⁵ = 0.4^¹⁵ = 0.000001 chance of getting all 15 modules god-modded legitimately. That's literally a 1 in a million chance of success after accumulating a total of 15 x 100 x 3 = 4500 materials !!!

Conclusion: Even if 1000 of the most dedicated PVP players in Elite attempted this level of engineering on even 1 of their ships, then there should be approximately 0.001 ships in the Elite universe that actually succeed in having these stats legitimately. Hence the odds of the sum of the ENTIRE player base catching up to the fleets of known engineer-exploited ships are extremely LOW over the remaining lifetime of ED.

literally EVERYONE who was aware of that bug now have ships with 140+ DD, uber boosters, uber shields, cool rails, and everything stacked on at least 2-3 ships.
Almost EVERYONE who you do not want to meet in the galaxy - have that ship.

Who will NEVER get that ship? YOU (including me)
Because its almost impossible by statistic to roll that everything in proper way.

So what You can do?
1. Become a lord of Eravate, hunt asps, sideys, explo conda's.
2. Become a PvE master
3. Pack the sack and move on to the Star Citizen in 2047

PvP sign-ups are already closed. You have ZERO chances with your rolled ship against a person with maxxed one. Its no matter of your skill. In that other ship even monkey can drive and will always win.

Only one reasonable solution is redesign engineers, puth all rng into the trash and make it in a sliders way to give everyone same chances to build his very own ship.

the best one suggestion: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/6ft2z2/serious_engineers_and_the_grind/

Sliders:

Change Engineers from being completely RNG-based to being slider-based. Increase the mats costs by 5-10x for all I care, but let me choose the specific stats I have on the mod and see the drawbacks, that way I can completely plan my ship to fit together perfectly. I don't need +35% power on my plant to run my build, I only need +10%, so let me sacrifice some power for a little more integrity without doing 200+ rolls to get there.

This will enable builds that can be perfectly crafted by the pilot to meet their exact needs. Explorers can optimize their FSD to get them the max range they want with their builds. Combat pilots can squeeze a little bit more speed/agility out of their ships by surgically shaving weight off their modules and shoving all their points into a higher optimal multiplier on a drive mod.

On top of that, building a new ship after a meta change would take a fraction of the time, so FDev could mess around with values a lot more without ing off the entire community, because all you'd need is one set of mats to get the exact values you'd want. This would also promote build diversity because it's no longer a 200 hour grind to fully outfit a ship just to see if it works.

But as we all know - it wont happen.

 

[Manticore]

Is that what you are referring to?

I used Engineers for the first time last week to max the jump range and thrusters on the Anaconda. The results were quite good; it seemed to work well. You roll for a modification and, if not satisfied, you discard and roll again as long as you have the materials available for the modification.

Now I'm reading that there is a huge exploit that could attract bans. Unfortunately all the information on it seems to have been redacted by the mods.

So, without explaining how to achieve the exploit, can anyone tell me exactly what the outcome of the exploit is?

I don't think I did an exploit (you clean it up yourself!) but I'm new to Engineers (despite having 18 weeks in game) and I really don't know what this exploit is all about.

 

[Ziljan]

How we sort cheats from hard efforts is a difficult question though. Others have posted about an exploit requiring Dangerous or Elite ranking and possibly also low latency. Is that what you are referring to?

S

Frontier already figured out how to ID the engineering menu cheat. I have no idea what other cheat you're referring to, but I suspected that it existed as soon as 13th publicized the existence of a year-long exploit. They would never give up one toy unless they had a better one waiting at home.

literally EVERYONE who was aware of that bug now have ships with 140+ DD, uber boosters, uber shields, cool rails, and everything stacked on at least 2-3 ships.

No doubt. But should they be allowed to keep these mods? That would be a grave mistake. And if they did so without making this level of modding easier to achieve legitimately would be an even greater mistake.

 

[Ziljan]

So, without explaining how to achieve the exploit, can anyone tell me exactly what the outcome of the exploit is?

The exploit was almost impossible to do by accident, and resulted in getting G5 rolls for the cost of G1 mats allowing you to roll an ungodly number of times until you achieved rolls that were 33% higher than a normal maxed out roll.

 

[Kyokushin]

No doubt. But should they be allowed to keep these mods? That would be a grave mistake. And if they did so without making this level of modding easier to achieve legitimately would be an even greater mistake.

As always, FD will write a scary post 'to make it look good, how they are against exploiting bla bla bla', and finalli as always, NOTHING will happen, and even IF someone will loose his uber roll, then maybe 2-3 witches will be burned and nothing more, because its almost impossible to verify who rolled what. They was aware of it since 2.1 and DID NOTHING, as they are doing nothing against other exploits.

In the other hand, IF, someone will loose his assets, IF someone will get banned, then ALL people who used Quince, Robigo, and other relogo cancer, should also loose exploited assets, money, ranks or be banned.

Exploiting quince = exploiting RNG

both exploits are giving advantage and saving a lot of time.

FDev because of they ignorant approach to security and patching exploits in fact are encouraging to cheating and explaining a cheating as a 'normal thing'. Its very damaging to playerbase, especially for players who want 'just play the game', without stupid activities like relogging. These players will be always on the tail in that game.

I am loosing my desire to play Elite. I love starships, but that exploiting crap is too much than i can handle.

 

[Ziljan]

Does it make that much of a difference? That's a genuine question from someone who dabbles in PVP now and again. I can't help wonder whether those that have exploited start to soften and rely on their ships advantage rather than raw ability. If only pilots would emerge that can best these exploiters in genuinely engineered ships. I feel they would exceed Elite status and become legendary!

Yes it really does. Even if you only look at slug-fest defense, it's the difference between 30000 MJ effective shields and 24000 MJ effective shields. If you combine this with god-roll DPS and premium synthesis ammo, hull amor, and dirty drives, overcoming the stat gap with "skill" is like fighting 2 players vs 1. And no, there is nothing saying that these guys have gone skill-soft. If anything quite the opposite since they have the stats to compete/practice at the highest levels on a daily basis.

 

[Bunkerkind Anni]

whats the statistical chance that the server detects a cheater in a peer2peer 1vs1 pvp fight?
you know, when only the matchmaking and the end result is handled by the server...

 

[Virgile]

The only way to experience fair pvp is through CQC.
G5>G1 exploit is kind of discouraging when you play the game following the rules...

 

[Vorxian]

basically circles back to everyone saying the silly 'casino' idea was a daft one.

case has been presented.

 

[Manticore]

The exploit was almost impossible to do by accident, and resulted in getting G5 rolls for the cost of G1 mats allowing you to roll an ungodly number of times until you achieved rolls that were 33% higher than a normal maxed out roll.

Thanks for that. I didn't get any of that when I engineered the Anaconda. Just wanted to make sure I hadn't rolled my way into some "toxic" mechanic that would get me a ban.

Now she's pretty good on thrusters though which will be great if I ever decide to do some combat.

 

[Virgile]

basically circles back to everyone saying the silly 'casino' idea was a daft one.

case has been presented.

Was there ever a poll on the subject? (I guess there was many...)

 

[Deleted member 115407]

Thanks for that. I didn't get any of that when I engineered the Anaconda. Just wanted to make sure I hadn't rolled my way into some "toxic" mechanic that would get me a ban.

Now she's pretty good on thrusters though which will be great if I ever decide to do some combat.

No you're fine. I recommend you continue engineering your ship - it's quite addicting. You start with one mod, and the next thing you you know you're buying new ships just to mod them.

 

[jasonbarron]

For the record. Most people who frequent the forum know how quick I am to take up the side of the PvP community. Every since 2.1 dropped I became fascinated with combat and determined to become proficient at it. Since 2.1 I've been determined to "git gud."

So just a couple quick thoughts on the subject, and I think Ziljan's excellent thread is a great place to put them:

There are no god rolled modules on any of my ships, legit or otherwise.
I have always denigrated cloggers; I am totally backing off that stance. I now no longer point the finger of justice at them, nor blame them for their actions.
I strongly considered beginning to god roll my modules last night, with the firm belief that if I don't do so that Fdev will just close the loop, make some tough talk, then let it go, all the while leaving an armada of god rolled ships flying about that there will be simply no point in fighting with a normal ship. Ultimately I just shut the game down and walked away. I'm not doing it. As far as I'm concerned Fdev has enabled Open to be ruined, and I don't feel like joining that particular rat race just to stay current. If Fdev somehow surpasses expectations and actually restores some integrity to their game, I'll be happy to come back. I really hope they surprise me. Surprise us all.

Until then, I'll just give ED a rest and lobby for change on the forum.

 

[WR3ND]

For Frontier – but more importantly to me – for the game to remain credible in terms of any form of legitimate PVP outside of CQC, these exploit modded modules need to be removed from it at the very least, in my opinion.

I also think that in this case, significant action against those accounts that took part in these exploits is warranted, though that is a secondary concern to me.