It does happen quite regularly unfortunately and has done for many a year .
But it does prove a point about "Open only " threads when push comes to shove it's not "open " as many believe it to be but a series of Private instances?
Open-Only in PP2.0?
- Thread starter August Lagrange
- Start date
But it does prove a point about "Open only " threads when push comes to shove it's not "open " as many believe it to be but a series of Private instances?
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Plus the fact that Odyssey players have two versions of Open to choose from when not needing to go on foot.
Remove players showing in history tab if there has been no interaction. (scans, chat, etc).
Add a new module (Advance Silent Running) to make you not show in Night Vision, it should also remove the radar ghost totaly.Make it susceptable to hull damage, so it turns back to normal silent running if you take hull damage.
Show same power cmdr ships as Green, dont report a crime for small friendly fire on same power ships. Yet do report crime for large amounts of friendly fire. (ganker griefers).
Let players create a new friends list of Cmdrs, but its Same Power Friends. So that you can give access to your FC to Power Friends, for all the low cost goods you have, but not to the 3,000 players you friended over the last 10 years.
Make playing in open give more merits as its posible to be blockaded in open but not in solo. So successfully doing something in open is harder but the same rewards as solo atm.
EDIT. Fix any problems or concerns there are about people abusing the open = more credits.
Add a new module (Advance Silent Running) to make you not show in Night Vision, it should also remove the radar ghost totaly.Make it susceptable to hull damage, so it turns back to normal silent running if you take hull damage.
Show same power cmdr ships as Green, dont report a crime for small friendly fire on same power ships. Yet do report crime for large amounts of friendly fire. (ganker griefers).
Let players create a new friends list of Cmdrs, but its Same Power Friends. So that you can give access to your FC to Power Friends, for all the low cost goods you have, but not to the 3,000 players you friended over the last 10 years.
Make playing in open give more merits as its posible to be blockaded in open but not in solo. So successfully doing something in open is harder but the same rewards as solo atm.
EDIT. Fix any problems or concerns there are about people abusing the open = more credits.
At this point I'd settle for "not viable to engage in cheesy methods that are only viable in PG because players aren't dumb enough to fall for it" like AFK turretboating.
People AFKing/automating the game is something that shouldn't be happening in any mode. In the perfect-instancing open-only world that people dream of, such methods would be countered by someone poking their head into the res site, seeing someone doing it, and shutting them down until the person wakes up and notices that their ship has been blown up.
I don't know what balance tweak would be most effective for that - more aggressive NPCs in certain locations, a greater prevalence of phasing weapons, simply having NPCs spawn with smaller and smaller bounties as an instance drags on without any new players entering, there are a few I can think of. If someone's not in the same system as me at the same time then I don't particularly care what mode they're in, I'm more concerned about people being able to just switch their PC on and have it work merits without sleep or rest while I can only counter when I'm actually awake.
But even in Open it would be easy to make sure no-one else could get into your instance. FD need to tackle this by detecting the behaviour and saying it's unintended use of the game. (But that's not easy because it only relies on turreted weapon behaviour which is intended).
I once amused myself by designing a turret T10. I think it would have worked well, but I decided I'd rather play the game.
Though in PP2 even that wouldn't be all that effective.
- it's only really useful for Acquisitions (rarely contested) or Reinforcement (even more rarely contested)
- so you'd have to notice the merit count ticking up in a suspicious way
- then go to the system
- then search all the RES until you find them (which isn't getting you any counter-merits)
- then blow them up (which only stops them earning further merits)
- then a few hours later do it again (maybe in a different system)
I think "give all weapons phasing by default" would be needed, with the experimental just causing much increased bleed-through. Might be interesting in general.
Even then, I don't think it would really stop AFK bounty hunting for Powerplay specifically:
- your rebuy is paid from moderate ranks, at least when Reinforcing, so you can use an incredibly hull-reinforced large ship for it without concern about costs
- you don't lose any merits when you die
- three or four hours AFK merits while you sleep is still a lot better than none even if you can't come back the next morning to see it still going
Turning all combat instances (it's only really RES and nav beacons which aren't yet) into scenarios which end after 15-30 minutes would probably work. Active players either won't notice (because they'll need to return to reload) or can just do a quick instance hop (in laser/plasma slug builds) as they would with a CZ; AFKers are already being a lot less efficient per minute because turreted lasers are a fairly weak weapon, so it also running out after 30 minutes probably makes it completely useless for competitive play.
Remove "fire at will" option from turrets is the easiest way to prevent it.
I mean, at least a single pressure on the fire button shoud be needed to activate the turrets on a specific target, then they deactivate once the selected target is destroyed.
Easiest in terms of "smallest change" but not in terms of "no unwanted side effects". Stopping people fitting turrets specifically to go for secondary targets while they focus non-turret fire on something else would be a major change.
Things like that which would make a major difference to fair play aren't likely to be considered for stopping cheating.
...I know, but it looks like it's an easy go vs. setting temporary instances / scenarios for RES/CNB or reducing aggro from NPC pirates.
I reckon that spawning (randomly) engineered/ATR like pirates is another viable solution, besides that will also cause potentially issues to non-AFK farmers.
Maybe auto-kick AFK campers after 15...30 minutes of no control inputs? It would help with actual IRL stuff, too, like having to answer a phone call when departing Jameson and after long-winded priority IRL business returning to rebuy screen because some joker decided to ROFLstomp you. Of course, one could deliberately offset their joystick for a constant slow spin (basically intentional stick drift) or holding down "deploy cargo hatch" key, but that could be countered with "no change in control input" logic. And if someone uses a script to automate a control input every 10 minutes to enable AFK farming, that is now a clear TOS violation
One positive side effect will be no possibility to burn off notoriety by AFK-ing overnight on a landing pad, so embrace the criminal lifestyle or watch what you're shooting
One positive side effect will be no possibility to burn off notoriety by AFK-ing overnight on a landing pad, so embrace the criminal lifestyle or watch what you're shooting
Why not make things more fun for active players AND fix the problem at the same time? Just make the difficulty slowly scale up over time without limit. Active players would enjoy this and could take advantage of it, while afk players wouldn't be able to prepare for every eventuality and so would inevitably die eventually. Everyone wins.
That's great for stopping AFK bounty hunting to earn credits / reputation / bounties for influence where dying means you're down a rebuy and have nothing to show for it, but doesn't really help for Powerplay because you get the merits instantly when you kill the ship.
If your AFK build gets blown up after three hours by the steadily increasing difficulty, that's still three hours more merits than you'd have got by not doing that.
Afk type 10 scripting is banned am l right? (Type 10 being the optimal choice).
So why doesn't fdev ban them? And l mean ban for like 12 mths or something. Who would risk their account being banned for such a long period?
It needs to be policed.! Quite how idk but I'm sure fdev have the ability to monitor the game to see if unattended instancing is happening?
I remember the 'Egg' exploit in borann.
I don't know if anyone was banned for taking advantage of it. But my point is that gamers (cmdrs) take the risk ONLY if they know they can get away with it.
It's for the developers to curtail such activities.
So why doesn't fdev ban them? And l mean ban for like 12 mths or something. Who would risk their account being banned for such a long period?
It needs to be policed.! Quite how idk but I'm sure fdev have the ability to monitor the game to see if unattended instancing is happening?
I remember the 'Egg' exploit in borann.
I don't know if anyone was banned for taking advantage of it. But my point is that gamers (cmdrs) take the risk ONLY if they know they can get away with it.
It's for the developers to curtail such activities.
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to be honest PP or not is kind of irrelevant imo
the fact it is possible to build a ship capable of allowing a person to go AFK whilst it farms shows something has gone wrong with the balance imo.
i get around it by deliberately NOT building such ships. everyone of my ships need hand holding and indeed i have lost my strongest ship when i trusted my deadly npc to guard it whilst i was in my slf... of couse some would then accuse players of flying paper ships which are not spaceworthy but for me it keeps the game fun against npcs and fights are not long drawn out battles.
it does mean i do not go near metabuilt murder boats however as all of my ships would melt in seconds without scratching the paint on those.
(the exception being my thargoid fighting ships, they are as strong as i could make them as shown when attacked by a couple of murderhobos looking for lols.
i could not hurt them of course with my thargoid weapons but equally neither did they hurt me much, i eventually had to run away but i had more than enough time to fly around them before casually jumping out. it was all very dull however.
the fact it is possible to build a ship capable of allowing a person to go AFK whilst it farms shows something has gone wrong with the balance imo.
i get around it by deliberately NOT building such ships. everyone of my ships need hand holding and indeed i have lost my strongest ship when i trusted my deadly npc to guard it whilst i was in my slf... of couse some would then accuse players of flying paper ships which are not spaceworthy but for me it keeps the game fun against npcs and fights are not long drawn out battles.
it does mean i do not go near metabuilt murder boats however as all of my ships would melt in seconds without scratching the paint on those.
(the exception being my thargoid fighting ships, they are as strong as i could make them as shown when attacked by a couple of murderhobos looking for lols.
i could not hurt them of course with my thargoid weapons but equally neither did they hurt me much, i eventually had to run away but i had more than enough time to fly around them before casually jumping out. it was all very dull however.
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Scripting it almost certainly would be - Frontier has been fairly clear that you're not allowed (except when you are, of course) to generate multiple game inputs from a single control input or through automated means.
But if you can just leave the ship with no control inputs at all (having flown it into position normally) and it stays alive and achieves something that's not something Frontier have said is banned. It certainly could be against the EULA if they chose it to be - but then, so is everything, and "it's okay to do this, so long as you remain sat at your desk so you could in theory press a button if you wanted to, not that you'll need to" is very hard to enforce.
That's my understanding. They haven't banned AFK "play"; in fact they deliberately allow it in other contexts (notoriety reduction) and it uses intended game features (turret fire-at-will).
The real reason not to do it is because it's boring. I also suspect that with the time spent stacking missions to set an AFK session up, a player could have gained the same rewards in normal play.
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Yes, which is why it's a fairly low priority in general - sure, you can get a bunch of credits that way, but the prerequisites are to have an expensive ship with high-end engineering, so you're probably past the point where it really matters how many credits you earn anyway.
Powerplay again is slightly different in that
- it's explicitly competitive
- because the aim isn't credits, there's no need to spend time stacking missions up as they're irrelevant for merits
The real… futility… about the whole notion “Open Only” PowerPlay 2.0 remains the fact that this game is not designed to facilitate direct PvP combat. After a full quarter of PowerPlay 2.0, I’ve only encountered direct opposition twice, and only when I deliberately went to a station I knew was being “blockaded,” and I only knew about said blockade because I saw a forum post about it, a week into the blockade.
IIRC, that blockade failed to even instance me with active opposition roughly 98% of the time, and on most visits I saw at least three other completely unopposed commanders in my same instance.
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: if you have to jump through hoops to get PvP to work, whatever advantage you expect to gain from “Open Only” will fail.
IIRC, that blockade failed to even instance me with active opposition roughly 98% of the time, and on most visits I saw at least three other completely unopposed commanders in my same instance.
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: if you have to jump through hoops to get PvP to work, whatever advantage you expect to gain from “Open Only” will fail.
I think there's a solid argument to be made for Open only/mode balancing, but it is definitely futile to hope that Frontier will implement the massive changes needed to accomodate it. Over a decade of design decisions accomodating/relying on the ability to just switch off opposition is a lot to overcome.