It's the player who should think twice. You know you're participating in an open galaxy where player vs. player interaction can occur. This can be either good or bad. Either for a particular reason or no reason at all. There are players who are not into combat and squeeze every bit of cargo space, jump range or whatever out of a ship, sacrificing defensive capabilities as a compromise. Which is perfectly fine if you want to take that risk. But complaining afterwards when you got your fragile ship destroyed is not fine. But luckily for people like that there's the OP 'Internet Cut Off Kill Switch' countermeasure, which Frontier doesn't care about you using it. So why the salty tears over NPC's who kill you or PK'ers? Instead you should wonder yourself why players are armed to to the teeth, trying to do as much damage as they can in the shortest amount of time. No matter how strong their ship, most times they can't beat the most OP countermeasure there is. I wonder why posts like these are popping up like weed and important topics like anti combat logging measures are not.
Solving the pve/pvp problem.
- Thread starter GlitchedVision0101
- Start date
Most of what you’re talking about is insurance fraud and can be dealt with algoritmically. People who are repeat slot suicides can be weeded out from the insured pool.
Most current suicides are effective because they use tiny, easily killed ships. These ships also have low rebuy, so would not constitute an effective avenue for insurance expense griefing.
And does the current system really work the way you’re spelling out? I thought the ship had to be speeding at the time of impact, not destruction, for an offense to be committed. Easily fixed if I’m incorrect on this point.
Because combat logging is a legitimate playstyle if the game doesn’t include a specific mechanic prohibiting it. If you don’t want to waste your time building a combat-ready ship, don’t attack other players who aren’t required by the game to just sit there and be killed.
It’s hardly “dangerous” if there’s no danger the griefing target won’t just yank their internet and leave you gankless. You know you’re participating in an open galaxy where logging can occur.
/sarcasm
No it's not
Quitting the game through the in game menu is what isn't considered an exploit by Frontier. The sad souls who combat log when in danger usual just alt-F4 or dashboard out on consoles. Wouldn't be surprised if you're one of them. It's a huge problem and I fully understand why people who enjoy PvP combat in any form whatsoever are frustrated by this. Because of that OP exploit this threat is moot. I hope the PvP community will feast on as much as they can during DG2, even though I'm not one of them.
To further add how bad combat logging really is...
In the past when doing some research on combat logging I decided to let an NPC whittle down my hull and dashboard out. My question at that time was how would the game deal with this. Instead of a re-buy screen I got my ship in perfect state with 100% hull and shields. Which is just ridiculous. The act of combat logging is a severe one. It's as if the combat never happened for the combat logging player. For the attacking player however ammo and time is futilely spent together with possible repairs on the ship.
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I'm aware this is abuse. Hence the sarcasm. I don't combat log, and I don't condone it for PVP play. It is a griefer move to quit on someone who is earnestly interested in PVP combat in line with what the game intends.
But I don't blame anyone who combat logs to avoid griefing. And the people hunting DWII ships are largely engaged in that kind of activity, and if the game won't punish that play style, the only option that players have is to respond in kind, and attempt to play in a way that spoils the fun of the griefer.
I'd prefer we avoid combat logging by changing the incentives for all involved so that nobody feels the need to ditch to avoid a gank. If it were a fair transaction, with the risks and rewards not so far out of whack, I think fewer players would be tempted to abuse both ends of the scenario. I think more people would play in open as well, and provide more players who would engage in PVP.
Ironman PVP, if you start a fight with a player who has not got a bounty, is not an opposing faction, Power play, or does not have report Crimes off, or one of many actual reasons to PVP and you lose, there is a 75% chance your escape pod fails and your Cmdr is wiped and you have to start again...Make PVP Dangerous again 
Ironman PVP, if you start a fight with a player who has not got a bounty, is not an opposing faction, Power play, or does not have report Crimes off, or one of many actual reasons to PVP and you lose, there is a 75% chance your escape pod fails and your Cmdr is wiped and you have to start again...Make PVP Dangerous again
Thankfully, "because I felt like it" is a perfectly valid reason to initiate PvP, so not one player will be running afowl of your rather heavy-handed system.
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this exactly was the point of my thread. I want to find ways that make it more inviting for players like myself to join open without the threats posed by griefers on both sides of the combat logging issue. I will never combat log and if I enter open and get blown up I'll just accept that rebuy screen because I know it was my fault that I'm staring at it to begin with. I just want to ballance things for the good of the game and community as a whole so we can stop fighting over pvp related issues and have good times.
Okay. But how is the game supposed to programatically determine that the player who attacked you was doing so "because it was fun" rather than "because they wanted some BGS effects" or "their squadrons are in conflict" or similar?
The big problem with ideas like this is that players already have the option to make their ships immune to ganking in exchange for reduced profit on the successful ones: it's called "fitting a proper full-sized shield". That plus sensible flying will get you enough time to high-wake.
If players aren't willing to do that, the chances of any significant number buying the optional insurance is pretty low, which makes it not much of a deterrent to attackers.
If you think about the "normal" hotspots - engineers, Community Goals - even if the targets were insured it probably wouldn't be a big deal for the attackers.
* Existing bounties have a rebuy-based component already. The bounties earned are already pretty large in some circumstances.
* People don't generally carry masses of trade goods or exploration data to visit engineers.
* Trade CGs are often for relatively cheap goods, mining and salvage CGs even more so. Combat and Warzone CGs wouldn't be protected - and shooting down the other side before they can reach the station to cash in should be considered perfectly valid tactics in a Warzone CG anyway. And exploration CGs are so rare the attackers could just take the week off anyway...
So you're probably not doing very much to increase the bounty on a lot of commanders.
I also don't particularly like pinning bounties to the rebuy cost suffered by the victim, because the more expensive ships are the ones more able to defend themselves.
- blow up trader Anaconda: rebuy probably around 10 million
- blow up combat Anaconda: rebuy probably around 50 million
The combat Anaconda is better able to defend itself ... but costs more to kill. Similarly
- blow up T-6: rebuy plus cargo combined probably under 1 million
- blow up new player in Freewinder: ooh, it might have a few hundred Credits in cargo, how will the attacker ever pay that off?
A system which encourages people to specifically attack the smallest ships least able to defend themselves, and ignore bigger prey, is not a good PvP incentives system. (Frontier have rightly done this the other way round in C&P as it is - you get substantially bigger bounties for killing things *smaller* than you are) If you're in a ship with a 10 million+ rebuy, you provably have the resources to defend it yourself. It's attacks on actual beginners which should be discouraged.
There are also other implementation details which I think are tricky to resolve.
Let's say we've got an expedition out there in uninhabited space. Everyone is insured. Three players end up in the same instance - an armed expedition escort, an explorer, and an attacker. None of them are winged up.
The attacker goes for the explorer, who it turns out does have a decent shield and is able to high-wake. The expedition escort opens fire on the attacker, and destroys them. How do you put in unexploitable rules to set up "at fault" in this scenario so that the expedition escort does not get hit with the attacker's insurance bill ... but if the attacker had got a kill they'd have been hit with the escort/explorer's bill?
Do those rules also work if the attacker deploys hardpoints a bit far out, and the escort opens fire first to protect the explorer? Or if the instance they meet up in is supercruise, the escort spots CMDR ReallyFamousGanker, and pre-emptively interdicts them?
The same issues apply in inhabited space - I've escorted a lot of explorers back home, and if I see a Clean player with an interdictor lining up behind them, I'm not going to wait for them to obtain a bounty before acting. It doesn't happen that often, but some of my colleagues have ended up with bounties to keep explorers safe.
The interaction of cargo insurance with piracy is also tricky.
If cargo is only insured if it was on the ship at the time of destruction, then for a big T-9 full of Void Opals (say), the new technique will be to disable the ship, repeatedly hatchbreak it, and then destroy it once the cargo is no longer aboard to be insured for a significantly reduced bounty. (Or even let it just float in space as losing all that cargo will provide plenty of salt even if the ship remains intact, and then they don't get hit by this at all)
But if cargo is insured against loss as well as destruction, this can be exploited to get free cargo.
Thanks for taking the time to post a substantive and considered reply; I appreciate your engagement with my proposal.
On your first point, I was trying to set out my own framework for griefing, so it could be understood what particular behaviour I was trying to target. Intent is not something that can be programmatically determined, as you say, but the intent does tend to drive certain patterns of action in the current system that we can attempt to target through policy countermeasures.
Respectfully, I think this overestimates the effectiveness of shields against a well-fitted and practiced attacker, and more importantly, underplays the difficulty of fitting said shields. Most of the gank-proof builds proposed here recommend fully engineered prismatics with multiple engineered shield boosters. That’s weeks of play at minimum for a new player. And if I compare the shields provided by those builds with the potential damage dealt by a volley of fully engineered frag cannon, I’d go with something more akin to “resistant” rather than “immune”.
I also think there are many players for whom insurance would fit their playstyle better than the demands of fitting a gank-resistant ship, much in the same way that not all people respond to the threat of armed robbery by personally arming themselves. Many seek broader policy solutions instead.
I don’t think robust insurance is a solution to all abuse, but it helps balance some of the abuse where the potential loss is currently most out of alignment. The rebuy for most pilots in those situations you have enumerated is already low given the notoriety discount, and without expensive cargo on board, the loss is manageable. I’m trying to focus on those situations where the loss is more significant, which have become targets for griefing.
And yeah, your insurance probably wouldn’t pay out in a war zone, those should be dangerous! My proposal is about realigning the geographies of risk to a more consistent mapping, not eliminating that risk.
I agree that this insurance mechanism doesn’t offer much in the way of penalty for wanton attacks on beginners, which is why i’m suggesting it augment rather than replace the C&P system.
I think most variants of this resolve fairly easily. If the attacker has fired on the explorer, they’re no longer a clean ship, and are a fair target. If the attacker has merely interdicted the explorer, still not a clean ship, still a fair target. I think ramming the explorer is the most likely edge case, but I’m not sure we want to empower the escort to enforce moving violations via summary execution.
Perhaps more difficult to make those calls as the escort, but again, this all depends on a witness electing to report the crime when they next dock. Who is going to report the escort?
I think this scenario is also an indictment against the expungable and time-limited nature of bounty and notoriety in the current setup. CMDR ReallyFamousGanker should probably be permanently marked, but alas.
This is an interesting case, and I have no solution.
At least that gank pattern takes a lot longer and offers a chance for others to respond before the ship is destroyed.
I agree completely.
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They do, because the forums tend to overkill on engineering well past the point of diminishing returns. Necessary if you want to *fight* PvP, but not necessary for running, which takes a lot less time.
A properly sized standard shield with G3 engineering and G3 boosters provides more than enough fraction of the G5 prismatic to survive long enough to escape - on a big ship by simply tanking the frags, on a smaller ship by deflecting enough to allow evasive action to deal with the rest. And that can be achieved very quickly, as I mentioned upthread.
The Prismatic is nice on a non-combat build to get the same size shield on a smaller internal, and so leave more space for other things, but not at all essential.
Sure, but what are the situations where there's a significant loss over and above the already notoriety-discounted rebuy such that it might serve as a deterrent to an attacker, but the likelihood of an attack is sufficiently high that you don't end up paying way more on the insurance [1] than you'd ever lose to attacks.
Cargo is only likely to be substantial in value for people flying the big ships - who have the funds to defend themselves - outside of a CG context. In that case the chance of meeting an attacker is usually fairly small anyway. So most of the time you're going to be paying the insurance premiums for nothing.
Mining is particularly tricky: the sensible insurance price for cargo is the *buy* price because that's what you actually lose and it's not possible to determine what the sell price would have been because the game doesn't know where they'd have sold it - but of course mined cargo has no buy price. So insurance probably not helpful there either, not that most miners (last week's CG aside) are likely to be facing much in the way of hostile players.
Exploration data in most cases pilots have very little of on board ... in the cases where they do, they have 20,000 choices of return system most of which are highly unlikely to contain a (player) attacker and if they do, unlikely to contain an attacker who is specifically after their exploration data and therefore would be *expecting* their target to have billions in insurance they'd have to pay ... so no deterrent.
And ... thinking back to some of my more interesting escortees ... if you allow BGS-motivated combat as legitimate, stopping an explorer getting back with a few dozen pages of systems is actually one of the more effective forms of BGS PvP. It's one of the few cases where someone might actually be carrying enough transactions at once that it's not just a complete waste of time to try to hunt them down.
DW2 is a unique case and I don't think should be considered too much here - hard cases make bad law. The expectation of the organisers was that the whole thing would take place in PG where attacks were unlikely. Some participants have chosen to go in Open ... others have had to for now because the flood of signups near the end meant they couldn't process PG requests fast enough (and better PG management tools would be very helpful there) ... but it's the only expedition of that size - the next largest being DW1 which was ten times smaller - and the only one ever to attract any significant number of hostile pilots. It'll probably be years (DW3?) before anything similar happens again.
Uninhabited system, so there's no clean/wanted distinction to help. You could introduce a similar tracking system for who had been hostile to who but there would be interesting - and confusing - issues depending on how persistent that was (same instance?, same system?, same day?, etc.) and how widely the status was displayed.
Ramming is a pretty effective way to destroy weak-hulled ships, so probably would be used if not discouraged. It's also a better-than-nothing way to potentially throw off someone's aim. (You also of course don't want people ramming explorers in ships even weaker than the explorer is to land them with an insurance claim)
On the sort of expedition that needs escorting, I wouldn't want to rely on every single explorer, returning to dock three months later, remembering exactly which of their pile of "attack reports" should be filed and which should be discarded.
And that's before the attacker's friends happen to have seen it and turn you in, of course.Basically my concern is that at the moment I can escort an explorer back and if I have to pick up a bounty and some notoriety along the way, that's not ideal and I'll need to deal with that afterwards, but it's not career-ending either, so I can defend the explorer with full force and make sure their data returns safely.
[1] Of course, this is how real-world insurance works. You should expect, and usually hope, to make a loss on any insurance policy you take out. But of course no-one's going to take out in-game insurance on that basis...
I'm still really doubtful how many people would actually use it - you'd only take out the insurance in circumstances you expected to be destroyed, but in those circumstances you've still lost the time (and for explorers, the first discoveries, etc.: cash value isn't a great substitute) and if you really expected to be destroyed at the point way back when you took out the insurance, you could have just done something different then.
On Möbius i find it very interesting: i frequently met people there till chapter 4 launched. Now, since chapter four and squadrons are around, the number of people i meet in Möbius is much lower than before. At the same time, it seems like almost each and any squadron, even PvP oriented ones, now have a PG of their own.
So on this aspect, squadrons actually seem to have failed. The idea was to get players together, but they now spread out over many more PGs than before. (That of course is, if my observation is true and not just based on my perception. I also recently mostly play at different times than i formerly did, that might also be a reason why i meet less people now. )
Thanks for your reply, good thoughts and some insights from a playstyle different from mine.
On this one point, I do think a lot of sadness for some folks on here could have been avoided if PGs weren’t the only solution to griefers that FD offers. I’d favour some form of game mechanic like I proposed, but it is a community maintenance failure that so many people who wanted to be part of DWII couldn’t play in a likeminded space of their choosing, and that many are learning the hard way that some consider open to be affirmatively-chosen PVP. On a meta level, the expedition has been widely hyped and coincided with discounts that brought a lot of new players in, I’m not sure we get to keep them in our community if we don’t have some way to make them feel like the game cares whether their grieved or not.
The system works that if a ship is destroyed and YOU are speeding after a collision, you are now considered guilty. And how the physics works, I can push you ship over the speed limit if you are flying just below the speed limit.
So scenario goes as follows.
I fly an "expensive ship" with very low hull, 1%, I have shields, I spot you trying to dock, I navigate behind you, hits silent running, boost, <BAAM> I pushes you over the speed limit, and explodes due to that 1% hull and I goes <KABOOM> and you just got pushed the speed limit and I died from a collision between us... you now have to pay my insurance cost... sounds fair eh?
Any of these things can be fixed, that is is not the problem, it is how much effort does it takes, and what else does the fix impact, and most of the time, a proper analysis of the problem is not done, and many of the suggested fixes, introduces new situations, like how quite alot of people wanted tougher takes on criminals, introduce C&P, what happened, the impact on griefing, was negligible, as these players tested and learned how the system works, but ordinary players, had to learn the hard way, that they where not excluded for breaking the law, so they got sent left and right to the detention center for tiny infractions, that before did not cause any problems at all.
Our Squadron doesn't have a PG. We play together in Open.
I'd say your observation is just based on your perception.
1) Playing in open isn't an intrinsically punishing endeavor, and for you to characterize it as such tells me that you either don't have much experience with it or are counting on others to not have much experience with it.
2) Being penalized somehow for losing a ship is always appropriate, as it provides incentive for players to develop their skills- or at the very least helps them decide which mode is right for them.
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Engineering significantly worsened the game in my opinion. I like the fact that it allows you to, say increase the jump range, but in reality what it does is turning Commanders into Demigods. Things are way out of bounds.
I used to play in Open all the time, because I thought of it as interesting to meet people randomly, but in reality there are two types of Commanders, those who flee in panic when they see a hollow rectangle on the radar, or those who attack you in blood-thirst, because apparently they are so bored that a stock Sidewinder is worth killing for no reason, with your massively over-engineered killing machine.
This game does Open play very wrong. I decided to play in Solo so I have not to witness the decay that is Open.
I used to play in Open all the time, because I thought of it as interesting to meet people randomly, but in reality there are two types of Commanders, those who flee in panic when they see a hollow rectangle on the radar, or those who attack you in blood-thirst, because apparently they are so bored that a stock Sidewinder is worth killing for no reason, with your massively over-engineered killing machine.
This game does Open play very wrong. I decided to play in Solo so I have not to witness the decay that is Open.
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You know, there should be a faction that controls a great number of systems, who are techno-purists. Engineered technology is strictly forbidden. An engineered ship automatically removes your permit to enter their system.
And game can get back to being good.
And game can get back to being good.
There is no problem. Open players like open, I play in solo and sometimes in pg. Open has nothing to offer me in terms of game play and as a solo player I have nothing to offer them. There is no middle ground, the three modes are here to stay. More power to all three modes.