A suggestion was made.
I think it merits some consideration. CQC has not worked as well as it could. I tried to get an engagement several times and got no takers. That was some time ago, and maybe such is not the same again. The attraction of CQC was that you did not have to put your ship (and more importantly, crew) at risk. Maybe there could be a way to emulate that advantage to make the suggestion above happen.
My suggestion is pretty simple: Set up a "Sandbox Mode" PvP competition for a very highly coveted rank of "Elite Dangerous" that requires you to excel at PvP combat. One player configures his/her ship for the competition and registers it. While they are online playing, it is visible to all other players. They can see his/her configuration and decide whether or not to take them on in a friendly competition. If they decide to accept, they take the current ship they are running and "throw the glove down" by accepting the challenge. (they could go and configure their ship and then come back again to see if who they wanted to challenge was still available) The player that initially registered their ship will get a message in game, along with the stats of who is accepting their challenge. They can either accept the challenge, or void their registration. If they are AFK, or do not otherwise respond within a certain time frame, their registration is voided. (and a message will be generated for them to know this) Note that they could be currently running a different ship. Their challenge ship could be an Anaconda, and they could be making a trade run in a Type 9. The moment they accept it, it will cut their play as if they had lost their connection, load up their challenge ship, and let the competition begin. For the duration of the competition, neither player is treated as being online. The one who accepted the challenge may themselves have a configured registration, and you don't need to void that out, or have them dump on the "Sandbox Mode" by accepting another challenge.
Points are awarded for victory, partial victory, or opponent disconnected. Victory is that you destroyed your opponent. Partial victory is that one decided to disengage before allowing themselves to be destroyed. (which should be a valid option) If anyone disconnects, or is disconnected, their opponent should get the same points as if they had successfully disengaged. IF both are disconnected, say by a server hiccup, both will get partial victory points if they scored at least one hit on shields or hull before the disconnection occurred.
It could be a simple point system, with no regards as to the status of the pilots (Ranking) or the ships involved. It could be that it considers the comparative combat worthiness of the ships. I think that would be wise. A Federal Corvette taking out a sidewinder should not be worth much, but an Asp Explorer taking out an Anaconda should be worth a little above the average amount. I would also suggest that you can only get points for one Victory against another player. If you only got a partial victory against another player, you could still get differential points. The reason I suggest this is simple: You don't want people getting their friends to just be willing targets to allow them an easy progression in this. There should be no limitation on how many times two players can compete against each other. They just should not get points for additional victories. If they must have a positive win/loss ratio better than one to one, this is not a problem. Certainly, one player may help another by losing a lot of such completions, but only at the expense of making that rank unobtainable for them. Note that if the win/loss ratio is adhered to, it is mathematically impossible for all players to obtain this rank.
Yes, there are going to be ways to cheat. However, Frontier should be able to access combat logs and determine if cheating obviously occurred. If one player does not seem to be actually competing, such as by not deploying their weapons, it is pretty clear that such would be a cheat that no points should be allowed for that "combat". This is only going to be able to be determined for actually obvious cheats. I don't expect them to monitor all such encounters, only those where some flag is raised to make them look into it. It could be that some people will purchase another account in order to have their friends bump them up. That would be very expensive in real world dollars if they did that. On top of that, it gives Frontier revenue to keep the game going and alive. I don't like "buying" rank, but you can already buy accounts that are already built up, if you did not already know that. So, at least there is a positive of some sort to people who choose to cheat that way. They would only get one victory max for every account they bought.
Some will advance simply because they are wise in which challenges they accept. That is perfectly acceptable for me, although I cannot speak for others on that. It still should be hard to obtain.
I would suggest that there be two flags that are set when a ship is registered. The first is "Deadly Play" where you actually lose your ship and crew if you lose in this combat. You will get a chance to re-buy with insurance, but will still lose any crew members employed. Victory in this case should be worth much more. Default should be off for this, with a warning of potential consequences if you set this flag on. If this flag is set, the second flag will not be available. That second flag is for "No Points" for play. If set, the combat will not count for points, (positive or negative, win/loss ratio, etc.) and is just for outright friendly competition and test play with another player. If someone is trying to accept with either of these flags set, they should get a warning.
No doubt, anyone who has interest in this will have suggestions of how to make this better, or even suggest point scales, etc. I encourage all to make embellishments/improvements that you can see. The more robust this is, the more likely it is to succeed.
;'{P~~~
I think it merits some consideration. CQC has not worked as well as it could. I tried to get an engagement several times and got no takers. That was some time ago, and maybe such is not the same again. The attraction of CQC was that you did not have to put your ship (and more importantly, crew) at risk. Maybe there could be a way to emulate that advantage to make the suggestion above happen.
My suggestion is pretty simple: Set up a "Sandbox Mode" PvP competition for a very highly coveted rank of "Elite Dangerous" that requires you to excel at PvP combat. One player configures his/her ship for the competition and registers it. While they are online playing, it is visible to all other players. They can see his/her configuration and decide whether or not to take them on in a friendly competition. If they decide to accept, they take the current ship they are running and "throw the glove down" by accepting the challenge. (they could go and configure their ship and then come back again to see if who they wanted to challenge was still available) The player that initially registered their ship will get a message in game, along with the stats of who is accepting their challenge. They can either accept the challenge, or void their registration. If they are AFK, or do not otherwise respond within a certain time frame, their registration is voided. (and a message will be generated for them to know this) Note that they could be currently running a different ship. Their challenge ship could be an Anaconda, and they could be making a trade run in a Type 9. The moment they accept it, it will cut their play as if they had lost their connection, load up their challenge ship, and let the competition begin. For the duration of the competition, neither player is treated as being online. The one who accepted the challenge may themselves have a configured registration, and you don't need to void that out, or have them dump on the "Sandbox Mode" by accepting another challenge.
Points are awarded for victory, partial victory, or opponent disconnected. Victory is that you destroyed your opponent. Partial victory is that one decided to disengage before allowing themselves to be destroyed. (which should be a valid option) If anyone disconnects, or is disconnected, their opponent should get the same points as if they had successfully disengaged. IF both are disconnected, say by a server hiccup, both will get partial victory points if they scored at least one hit on shields or hull before the disconnection occurred.
It could be a simple point system, with no regards as to the status of the pilots (Ranking) or the ships involved. It could be that it considers the comparative combat worthiness of the ships. I think that would be wise. A Federal Corvette taking out a sidewinder should not be worth much, but an Asp Explorer taking out an Anaconda should be worth a little above the average amount. I would also suggest that you can only get points for one Victory against another player. If you only got a partial victory against another player, you could still get differential points. The reason I suggest this is simple: You don't want people getting their friends to just be willing targets to allow them an easy progression in this. There should be no limitation on how many times two players can compete against each other. They just should not get points for additional victories. If they must have a positive win/loss ratio better than one to one, this is not a problem. Certainly, one player may help another by losing a lot of such completions, but only at the expense of making that rank unobtainable for them. Note that if the win/loss ratio is adhered to, it is mathematically impossible for all players to obtain this rank.
Yes, there are going to be ways to cheat. However, Frontier should be able to access combat logs and determine if cheating obviously occurred. If one player does not seem to be actually competing, such as by not deploying their weapons, it is pretty clear that such would be a cheat that no points should be allowed for that "combat". This is only going to be able to be determined for actually obvious cheats. I don't expect them to monitor all such encounters, only those where some flag is raised to make them look into it. It could be that some people will purchase another account in order to have their friends bump them up. That would be very expensive in real world dollars if they did that. On top of that, it gives Frontier revenue to keep the game going and alive. I don't like "buying" rank, but you can already buy accounts that are already built up, if you did not already know that. So, at least there is a positive of some sort to people who choose to cheat that way. They would only get one victory max for every account they bought.
Some will advance simply because they are wise in which challenges they accept. That is perfectly acceptable for me, although I cannot speak for others on that. It still should be hard to obtain.
I would suggest that there be two flags that are set when a ship is registered. The first is "Deadly Play" where you actually lose your ship and crew if you lose in this combat. You will get a chance to re-buy with insurance, but will still lose any crew members employed. Victory in this case should be worth much more. Default should be off for this, with a warning of potential consequences if you set this flag on. If this flag is set, the second flag will not be available. That second flag is for "No Points" for play. If set, the combat will not count for points, (positive or negative, win/loss ratio, etc.) and is just for outright friendly competition and test play with another player. If someone is trying to accept with either of these flags set, they should get a warning.
No doubt, anyone who has interest in this will have suggestions of how to make this better, or even suggest point scales, etc. I encourage all to make embellishments/improvements that you can see. The more robust this is, the more likely it is to succeed.
;'{P~~~
