Private Group Mode Flag

[Wrecked]

With all the hubbub around ganking and harassment going on in Open and Player Groups, and along with the heated debate between Open and Open PVE, what if there was a compromise?

Would players generally be in favor of a flag that allows you to mark your private group PVE Only and upon setting this flag in your private group, any form of damage dealt from one commander to another would be completely mitigated.

This would solve the problem people have with attempting to create a PVE only player group, only to find that they need to spend time managing players because gankers get into the group and start causing trouble. This was most recently an issue in the Distant Worlds 2 Fleetcomm private group. The group was intended to be strictly PVE, but gankers infiltrated and caused problems. This forced the moderators of the group to spend significant amounts of time removing these players from the group. Actions similar to these during live streams sparked a response from FDev regarding the harassment policy.

All of these issues could be easily avoided if a system were created around preventing player vs player damage and linking the switch for that system to a Private Group PVE flag.

 

[Maolagin]

With all the hubbub around ganking and harassment going on in Open and Player Groups, and along with the heated debate between Open and Open PVE, what if there was a compromise?

Would players generally be in favor of a flag that allows you to mark your private group PVE Only and upon setting this flag in your private group, any form of damage dealt from one commander to another would be completely mitigated.

Highly unlikely to happen, because that would involve FDev maintaining different game physics for different modes. And so immersion-breaking, that I doubt all that many PG admins would be interested in using such a feature.

That said, some kind of optional PvE flag for PGs isn't a bad idea, because as you say, it legitimately is a lot of work to police bad behavior in a large group. But as I see it, the kind of feature that would be both reasonable to implement and popular enough to see use would be more like an automated helper, than a hack to the game's core mechanics.

As an example, suppose a PG had a "good behavior" flag that could be set by the admin. When set, it ties into the existing crime detection code so that IF a player takes an action against another player, that results in a bounty (or, if in a lawless system, would otherwise have resulted in a bounty), THEN the player is placed on probation from that group. Probation would function like a shadow-ban (i.e. player can still play in the group, but it functions like Solo), but the PG admin gets access to a list of players on probation. The admin can reinstate players, kick them, or do nothing.

A feature like that would not eliminate 100% of griefing deaths, but it would dramatically limit the damage one player could cause. Any single pilot intent on being naughty would be capable of (depending on implementation) only harming a single ship or a single instance's worth of ships before the shadow-ban kicked in, rather than causing unrestricted mayhem while waiting for a report to filter up to the PG admin through other channels.

 

[Brrokk]

Excellent idea.

 

[Wrecked]

Highly unlikely to happen, because that would involve FDev maintaining different game physics for different modes. And so immersion-breaking, that I doubt all that many PG admins would be interested in using such a feature.

That said, some kind of optional PvE flag for PGs isn't a bad idea, because as you say, it legitimately is a lot of work to police bad behavior in a large group. But as I see it, the kind of feature that would be both reasonable to implement and popular enough to see use would be more like an automated helper, than a hack to the game's core mechanics.

As an example, suppose a PG had a "good behavior" flag that could be set by the admin. When set, it ties into the existing crime detection code so that IF a player takes an action against another player, that results in a bounty (or, if in a lawless system, would otherwise have resulted in a bounty), THEN the player is placed on probation from that group. Probation would function like a shadow-ban (i.e. player can still play in the group, but it functions like Solo), but the PG admin gets access to a list of players on probation. The admin can reinstate players, kick them, or do nothing.

A feature like that would not eliminate 100% of griefing deaths, but it would dramatically limit the damage one player could cause. Any single pilot intent on being naughty would be capable of (depending on implementation) only harming a single ship or a single instance's worth of ships before the shadow-ban kicked in, rather than causing unrestricted mayhem while waiting for a report to filter up to the PG admin through other channels.

This sounds like a good compromise actually. Rather than redoing game interaction mechanics, having a mode that polices itself sounds good. Although I would take it one further in that you are not just shadow banned for a period of time, but are automatically kicked and banned from the group entirely if you incur a bounty for killing a commander. However, again your suggested mechanic could be exploited by suicidewinder players coming out of a station and killing themselves on another player character, resulting in that innocent player getting a ban.

Although this idea would probably be simpler to implement, it still doesn’t deal with the fact you mentioned that if there is a way to actually kill another player, gankers will figure out a way to exploit it. And, gankers aren’t really deterred by rules, so you can still count on them infiltrating even if it is to only get that one gank in. You’re also correct that you’d also still have coordinated ganking efforts where multiple gankers would get into one of these PVE private groups and execute a coordinated gank at a gathering place for a big event such as DW2.

I still think it should be possible to track damage source and determine whether it is from a player or not and program the damage to either trigger or not trigger based on the game mode. All other aspect of the game stay the same and no need for another branch of the game code. And, regarding immersions breaking, once gankers realize they can’t harm other players in a private group, they wouldn’t bother going into those groups because there would be no point. None of the true PVE players are going to be attacking each other, so the immersions part would just work itself out.

 

[Maolagin]

Although I would take it one further in that you are not just shadow banned for a period of time, but are automatically kicked and banned from the group entirely if you incur a bounty for killing a commander. However, again your suggested mechanic could be exploited by suicidewinder players coming out of a station and killing themselves on another player character, resulting in that innocent player getting a ban.

That's exactly why I would make it a probationary status. The suicidewinder mechanic no longer gives a bounty so long as the targeted player stays below the speed limit near the station, but there are more advanced ramming tactics that can still result in involuntary bounties. With a probation list, the player can simply message the admin to explain what happened and request to be unbanned.

You’re also correct that you’d also still have coordinated ganking efforts where multiple gankers would get into one of these PVE private groups and execute a coordinated gank at a gathering place for a big event such as DW2.

Unless something very weird is going on, it should always be the case that there are many more legitimate players than PG infiltrators. But yes, my option would only limit the damage they can do, not prevent it entirely.

I still think it should be possible to track damage source and determine whether it is from a player or not and program the damage to either trigger or not trigger based on the game mode. All other aspect of the game stay the same and no need for another branch of the game code. And, regarding immersions breaking, once gankers realize they can’t harm other players in a private group, they wouldn’t bother going into those groups because there would be no point. None of the true PVE players are going to be attacking each other, so the immersions part would just work itself out.

There is an engineering effect that is basically a "no friendly fire" mode, so the code to do it in a more general way might exist. But aside from development effort, there's two other problems here. First, simply nullifying damage doesn't account for various delayed-damage tactics. With the current C&P system, there's a notion that if you interact with a clean ship in various reckless ways, and that ship explodes for any reason shortly after, you get a bounty. It isn't perfect, but that mechanism is the best we've got for detecting the assorted "pushing ships into hazards" forms of attack. To straight up nullify that, you have to go all the way to having player ships phase through each other, which would be a serious change to the existing mechanics. Second concern, I would be worried fighting in Open alongside players coming from a PG where friendly fire is impossible. Trigger discipline is an important skill in ED combat after all.

 

[Misty_Dark]

With all the hubbub around ganking and harassment going on in Open and Player Groups, and along with the heated debate between Open and Open PVE, what if there was a compromise?

Would players generally be in favor of a flag that allows you to mark your private group PVE Only and upon setting this flag in your private group, any form of damage dealt from one commander to another would be completely mitigated.

This would solve the problem people have with attempting to create a PVE only player group, only to find that they need to spend time managing players because gankers get into the group and start causing trouble. This was most recently an issue in the Distant Worlds 2 Fleetcomm private group. The group was intended to be strictly PVE, but gankers infiltrated and caused problems. This forced the moderators of the group to spend significant amounts of time removing these players from the group. Actions similar to these during live streams sparked a response from FDev regarding the harassment policy.

All of these issues could be easily avoided if a system were created around preventing player vs player damage and linking the switch for that system to a Private Group PVE flag.

problem with this is that to make it not abusable, you would have to remove all direct and indirect damage dealt by another player.


Disabling weapons fire is the "easy" one, but what about collisions? I simply ram you death. So we need to remove collision damage, and we keep keep physics of collisions, now I can push you into all sorts of bad situations, so I could now push you into an obstacle, that kills you. So this is an obvious abuse of the system but hard to programmatically keep track (not impossible), so the easiest way to solve this is to remove collisions between players. Which now will allow us to pass through others players ships at will. Which is quite immersion breaking.



It sounds so easy, but without proper analysis of the consequences this will most likely end up being terrible bad, I used to believe that a simple toggle like this should be a nifty solution, until i started to go through all the scenarios players already uses to mess with other players and now all forms of PvE only flag, PvP allow flag etc, will have some glaring issues. And the fix for those issues will create game breaking changes to how things works.

 

[Maolagin]

problem with this is that to make it not abusable, you would have to remove all direct and indirect damage dealt by another player.

Agreed. Curious, do you have any thoughts on my alternate proposal in the second post?

 

[Misty_Dark]

Agreed. Curious, do you have any thoughts on my alternate proposal in the second post?

I can see how such system could work, and make the effort from griefers alot higher to infiltrate and disturb private groups, as this would automate the response so it would be active 24/7 without the group owner have to be online and act on this. So for griefers attacking players, they would only be able to kill one player, and then they should get insta kicked to menu, so at most if a group of griefers infiltrate a group, they can each kill a player before getting kicked, instead of today, where a small group can kill many more players before they get kicked from the group, depending on how fast the group owner can act on this.



It still would have the issues with suicides against speeding ship etc, but we have already had instances where the security ships was so busy playing the latest mobile games, so they ran into player ships and then promptly blamed the player for the collision. So being mindful about their surroundings near a station is still the players responsibility, regardless if it a player or a NPC ship they have a collision with while speeding.


So overall this should not disrupt the game to much, it would be like an extra layer on the existing C&P system, only affecting Private groups, that the group owner can enable/disable.