Agree but with an Open PVE mode im not sure how many would be left in the Old Open to see it
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Solution for Ganking
- Thread starter Sirlance
- Start date
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I suspect if hell froze over and an Open PvE mode was added, the amount of threads about the "normal" open being too empty would skyrocket.Agree but with an Open PVE mode im not sure how many would be left in the Old Open to see it
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Perhaps Open access to being able to affect other players via direct PvP & BGS manipulation could be unlocked through compulsory training scenarios that require the player to learn to survive some tough NPC scenarios by building survivable ships & learning not to run in a straight line?
Agree but with an Open PVE mode im not sure how many would be left in the Old Open to see it
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I doubt the population would decline as precipitously as you assume, but an emptier Open mode is still all-round better than an Open mode catering to, and continually sabotaged by, people who don't want an actual open mode.
Indeed, I suspect that the removal of player controlled instancing weights would increase the average size of populated instances around well-trafficked areas, even with a fairly significant reduction in total mode population. Might make encounters in less well-trafficked areas a bit rarer though.
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As apposed to an Open mode sabotaged by griefers who don't want an enjoyable Open mode?
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Quite possibly the same people.
I don't believe most gankers are griefiers, or vice versa, mostly because it's obvious to me that direct PvP, where it is explicitly allowed, is an inefficient way to harass other players.
If they're doing it in order to bother people, as in that is the primary consideration, they are probably going to want to bother as many people as possible as much as possible. Combat, without being used in conjunction with cheats, is very bad at this relative to other tools. Efficiency, at whatever their goals are, is definitely going to be a concern.
If they aren't doing whatever they're doing it to bother people, meaning whatever grief they cause is incidental to their own entertainment, then I can't really consider them 'griefers'.
If Open were split into two modes, with no other changes than CMDR on CMDR damage/collisions disabled in an explicitly PvE mode, essentially none of the remaining ganking will be done to harass people, because the PvE mode won't support the mechanisms required, and all the people that could be bothered by 'non-consensual' PvP will have moved to the PvE mode...either way, there will be no pool of victims to support the activity, no matter the absolute or relative population of these modes. Essentially all griefing done through the game client would be done via chat, via block, via being a lame duck/fith column wingmate, or by idling on landing pads in high traffic areas. That stuff is all used now, for the express purpose of harrassing other players (though certainly not only for that purpose), but is overshadowed by the minorty of griefiers that are also content creators, who wouldn't get any clicks from such profoundly boring-to-watch content.
Since nearly no one who would stay in the standard Open mode can be griefed via a gank, other measures would be required to reduce griefing. The same would almost certainly be true of Open PvE, but advocates for this mode seem to lack the imagination requried to see beyond PvP, so may need to experience the problems first hand before realizing it.
Sounds like coold idea. If you hard earn the privilege to PVP, you wouldn't waste it for ganking. I doubt gankers are so patient to even finish such a testPerhaps Open access to being able to affect other players via direct PvP & BGS manipulation could be unlocked through compulsory training scenarios that require the player to learn to survive some tough NPC scenarios by building survivable ships & learning not to run in a straight line?
A very simple solution would be to just increase the amount of NPC security forces that show up when you report crimes to the point where a wing of gankers could not beat or outrun them.
I think tying any discouragement of unwanted PvP attacks to crime would make PvE crime even less fun than to it already is, although more highly skilled players (or ones that want to be) might enjoy the extra challenge.
If one is clearly about to get 'ganked' by a bunch of Cmdrs the last thing you want to do is feel you have to wait until they start firing to defend yourself. IRL pre-emptive self defence is a thing, the game doesn't have that though if the about-to-be-attackers are clean. With your proposal either they fire first & you (presumably) go to the rebuy screen (they won't care if they do too) or they bait you into commiting a crime & you get the security forces after you.
If you think someone is attacking you because they think you look like easy pickings, try to not look like easy pickings. You don't need to be the fastest gazelle in the herd, just not the slowest
These kind of assumptions are always pretty dubious. The more prolific/infamous gankers have extreme levels of patience and are generally highly proficient in the game.
Of course, gating Open access to those who could actually pilot would indirectly reduce ganking, probably by a lot, because their wouldn't be as many clueless pilots around. It would also never be implemented, because an enormous swath of the player base would balk at the idea.
A gank is already generally a sub fifteen second event, probably around five seconds of that from the time damage is dealt to the time most victims explode. Any longer than that and many targets would have logged out or jumped away.
Are you proposing NPC security forces to drop in instantly and then be able to reliably down a fully padded combat vessel in less than three seconds? That might work, but it's a grossly heavy-handed solution, devoid of any context, which would undermine much of the game's narrative.
Even ATR, with their reverberating cascade burst lasers, stretches the bounds of what Frontier is willing to implement. Frontier have also been highly resistant to applying different C&P rules for CMDR on CMDR vs. CMDR on NPC violence (and with good reason, IMO).
One time I was minding my own business in a RES, just taking a break from BH and enjoying the view. Then the sound started stuttering a bit and a blazing fight with some players in a corvette wing taking on an anaconda just rolled into my view and then rolled out like a ripple in reality. Then I was left alone again with my quiet view of the RES.
The BGS is the best thing they ever made. If only they built on that instead of letting it wither on the vine and turn into PMF nonsense.
If this was directed at me, I always argue in good faith and aside from a fairly obvious joke or two, I've been nothing but sincere. Not sure what could have given you the impression otherwise.
I am a bit insulted that you think making suggestions that would never be implemented is somehow more constructive than pointing out the flaws inherent in said suggestion. If you're interested in a solution to a problem you perceive, it would behoove you to suggest something that Frontier would be willing to do. If you think my criticism was in error, you might try pointing that out instead of accusing me of dishonesty. Otherwise, you should probably just put me on ignore if you don't think I have anything of value to contribute.
I do think PMF's were a mistake. Allowing CMDRs to join minor factions in a more official capacity would have been nice though.
There are certainly inexperienced and/or incompetent gankers, and they surely outnumber the more competent ones, but the prolific gankers are generally not inexperienced. Denigrating the abilities of all gankers because you don't like how they use those abilities doesn't do anyone any favors, it just leads to an inaccurate picture of the game and the opposition.
I'd wager I've encountered significantly more gankers than yourself, because they've attacked my CMDR, many times, over the last ten-plus years and 9k+ hours. I've also fought many of the same CMDRs in PvP tournaments (when I participated in those things), or duels, where everyone involved was in the best PvP ships that could be built at the time. There has always been a core minority of gankers that are quite skilled. Some of the best pilots I've ever fought were in SDC and it's predicessors/successors.
The largest advantage the more experienced gankers have is experience. Combined with mechanisms heavily slanted toward defense, experience is also what allows unarmed traders who have any appreciable level of it, to generally easily escape gank attempts, and why I pointed out that a mandatory training, if done for relevant skills, would dramatically reduce ganking. As it stands, one can seemingly be a member of the Pilot's federation without even knowing how to pilot a ship. The game's tutorials have also become significantly worse (as in watered down) over time.
I don't really think it's practical to force players to know anything to play, and I'm sure FDev would never go for it, but Riverside's idea, if applied to Open as a whole, could certainly result in nigh ungankable CMDRs.
For what it's worth, these are the kind of gankers I benchmark myself against:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dnDsHT9QSA
Both of those CMDR are gankers (and would not be ashamed to admit it) that I've fought multiple times and they are both significantly better combat pilots than I am. Yamato2012 was former SDC and deZep was the leader of RoA. Yamato was also probably one of the top ten pilots in the entire game at one point and deZep is one of the only people to have ever successfully ganked my CMDR. It took five or six ships (and about twenty railguns) against my CMDR's shieldless blast-from-the-past meme FAS, but I gave a best-effort escape attempt and failed...which is astonishingly rare, something that's only happened to my CMDR a handful of times in the last decade (not counting betas) and several hundred encounters.
Anyway, the average ganker might be a hopeless slob, but the top gankers spend most of their time honing their skills against peers, who are some of the best PvPers there are, and then gank the rest of the time.
I'm less familiar with the current (post-Odyssey) crop of gankers, but I do recognize at least a few competent pilots in that leaderboard that was posted in this thread a while back.
Both of those CMDR are gankers (and would not be ashamed to admit it) that I've fought multiple times and they are both significantly better combat pilots than I am. Yamato2012 was former SDC and deZep was the leader of RoA. Yamato was also probably one of the top ten pilots in the entire game at one point and deZep is one of the only people to have ever successfully ganked my CMDR. It took five or six ships (and about twenty railguns) against my CMDR's shieldless blast-from-the-past meme FAS, but I gave a best-effort escape attempt and failed...which is astonishingly rare, something that's only happened to my CMDR a handful of times in the last decade (not counting betas) and several hundred encounters.
Anyway, the average ganker might be a hopeless slob, but the top gankers spend most of their time honing their skills against peers, who are some of the best PvPers there are, and then gank the rest of the time.
I'm less familiar with the current (post-Odyssey) crop of gankers, but I do recognize at least a few competent pilots in that leaderboard that was posted in this thread a while back.
I am very supportive of a gated PVP, imo in the same way that has rez gives more benefits, i think there is a good rationale for there to be a flat say 20%-30% bonus on every activity in Open PVP, the game should clearly state the risks, and otherwise Open PVE should be a thing, and the default thing for new players (essentially recognizing and wrapping the AXI, Mobius private groups into an official mode making them more accessible)
What I think is possibly the worst aspect of the current state is that high-information players either have the experience to deal with gankers, or the knowledge to seek out PVE PGs, but low information players are the most vulnerable due to their ignorance and the most likely to be incredibly upset and have their progress disrupted.
The second worse aspect of Open (pvp or pve) is the netcode issues that make instancing sometimes a quick crash to desktop, which often happens to me due to my geography and ISP, so I highly also recommend the game recognizing and splitting players that cause each other crashes, if a revamp of netcode is too hard to sort out.
What I think is possibly the worst aspect of the current state is that high-information players either have the experience to deal with gankers, or the knowledge to seek out PVE PGs, but low information players are the most vulnerable due to their ignorance and the most likely to be incredibly upset and have their progress disrupted.
The second worse aspect of Open (pvp or pve) is the netcode issues that make instancing sometimes a quick crash to desktop, which often happens to me due to my geography and ISP, so I highly also recommend the game recognizing and splitting players that cause each other crashes, if a revamp of netcode is too hard to sort out.
Huge swaths of the galaxy are nearly devoid of CMDR, so applying a bonus to Open where there is minimal chance for an encounter doesn't make a ton of sense, especially if it's easy to switch modes the second someone does show up. Not to mention the possibility of playing Open in name only without significant reworking of the game.
If certain gameplay and network mechanisms were addressed I wouldn't be opposed to some kind of mode bias, but too large of a bonus will be a perverse incentive and will attract players that don't actually want to be there...something that Open already struggles with.
Information has always been a problem. The Codex was supposed to mitigate the learning curve a bit, but it's actually gotten worse over time. There hasn't even been an updated offline manual since 2.4 and the new game launcher that came with Odyssey removed the link for that. On top of this the more advanced tutorials were pulled a long time ago and many of the official videos are outdated. There are even whole swaths of the forums, which still contain relevant information and developer posts, that were archived long ago, breaking links and making them harder to search.
Not like this. In fact, we have an explicit parameter, the security of the system.I think tying any discouragement of unwanted PvP attacks to crime would make PvE crime even less fun than to it already is, although more highly skilled players (or ones that want to be) might enjoy the extra challenge.
If one is clearly about to get 'ganked' by a bunch of Cmdrs the last thing you want to do is feel you have to wait until they start firing to defend yourself. IRL pre-emptive self defence is a thing, the game doesn't have that though if the about-to-be-attackers are clean. With your proposal either they fire first & you (presumably) go to the rebuy screen (they won't care if they do too) or they bait you into commiting a crime & you get the security forces after you.
If you think someone is attacking you because they think you look like easy pickings, try to not look like easy pickings. You don't need to be the fastest gazelle in the herd, just not the slowest
If you're a criminal just stick to anarchy and that's it. And if you want to attack someone in a high-security system, be prepared to take a lot of risks.
Why is no one surprised to see a patrol intercepted in a military system?
I always didn't understand, what's hard to do?
A merchant flies in with a report of crimes against him on.
Attack him, check system security, and if it's anarchy, no one flies in.
If it's high security, a bunch of ATRs show up instantly. Does that look complicated?
2. If there will be an open PvE mode, then first of all people will leave the single mode and all sorts of PGs like Mobius.
3. We can fight gankers without problems, but we can't do anything else but bounty hunting.
Even trading is counted in the amount of profit per hour, what about escaping interceptions?
Or the same AH, if you do AH you can't hurt a ganker, etc.
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There is no risk, Open players and gankers have repeatedly said its easy to avoid being blown up, so is the bonus one for wasted time?
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