Once you have understood this, it should be clear by now that there will always be a certain disparity between those who are using UPnP (the most trivial but also most risky solution) or port forwarding (a bit more "twiddling" solution) and those who are using conservative but secure standard settings. Statistically, the former will always have a higher probability to meet other players because he will never need a host in any given instance, cause he always will be the host (if no others with these settings are available).
Or the other way around, those running conservative (but safer) router settings will always have an inherent advantage - if you still consider flying in Open as a generic disadvantage that has to be "balanced", as you never hesitate to point out.
It was nice of you to start a conversation on technical aspects on Friday evening...
I understand those concerns. And I had given them a good thought last time you shared them.
Again, the bottom line is - as long as there are people which are eligible to be hosts, this risk does not go anywhere.
And Fdev already has means to check your internet connection setting - so I am sure it can make enabling either UPnP or port forwarding as a requirement for again, optional "game mode".
So those risks will not go anywhere. And even if the internet will be full of guides how to minimize the probability of meeting other people - there still won't be any 100% solution. I do not have exact figures on used types of connection setups, and I am not sure if it would even do anything.
And when one side would try to minimize said probability - the other side would start to maximize it.
And we are talking money here. It is not worth to even covering up direct Artmoney cheating (dunno if it is covered even). What is there to say about probabilities? Again, we are talking about 1-5%. That is 1-5 mil from each 100...
And, by the way, abandoning this bonus mode would be the first course of action, rather than trying to cheat, as long as it would be vaguely forbidden by Fdev...
Disbalance would still be present, unfortunately. But the situation will be better overall. No government hesitates to stimulate some part of an economy because of fears that too much enterprises would start to pose as stimulated ones.
And client-server structure for SC movement will not make it worse than it is now. And we have matchmaking server in place already, so it would require only some tweaks in the output of it.
For other types of movement, there is no better solution than PnP. Still, some sort of dynamic distribution on servers would be acceptable. I do not remember flight model in Plantetside2 being lacking.
But many PVP players can, and have, wrecked other PVP players participation with utterly trivial means.
It's not something easily fixed.
I don't think it's a good thing, but with all the pew-pew scrubs saying "git gud", I absolutely do find that hardly any of them ever gitted gud enough to stop whining about it
As for banning players with bad connections - that would simply become the new meta.
I agree, the fix is not easy - yet is it impossible to detect in real time if the connection was interrupted one node after the user, or relatively close to him route-wise?
Leaving those types of connection losses unpunishable is an option as well.
You say I am trolling and talk about how you know hardcore games... Do you whine on Fallout when you forget to sleep on Survivor mode and you die and all your progress is lost? Because that is how you are acting here while at the same that you want hardcore you try to justify your bailing on Open because "everyone else is doing it". Your whole argument is vaporware...
You do not switch from Survivor to Casual in 6 seconds (without a console, ofc). And remember that in ED no matter which difficulty settings, everyone is on the same "scoreboard", with the same scores, and with the same rights.
It is a truly remarkable situation when increasing difficulty can only lead to worse scores.
