Why are players treated differently then NPCs?

[Armour]

If FDEV introduced an additional galaxy-wide Pilot's Federation bounty for blowing up their membership, with the proviso that said members had to remain identifiable as such, there would be a decent safety benefit to keeping your ID tag on, so it wouldn't be all in favour of going incognito.

 

[Cody]

All this is futile - as I've said upthread, it ain't changing now!

 

[popuptoaster]

All this is futile - as I've said upthread, it ain't changing now!

Luckily it's not your decision.

 

[Cody]

Luckily it's not your decision.

<grins> Aye, true enough - and I'd like to be wrong!

 

[ZombieF1]

It would be nice if FD would comment on this, with all the history on this issue.
.
I've just deleted my 100 million CR save and started from scratch. One of the reasons being that I got tired of being concerned about getting blown up (3.3 Mil rebuy) and am going to play differently (enjoying my Sidey). If I'm going to be rather unconcerned about getting attacked, then I think it would be preferable for me if I could switch off insta hollow blips on other players - it would make it more interesting (and less jarring) for me, without having much of any effect on others.

 

[withnail]

Luckily it's not your decision.

He's right though.

Fwiw, I would prefer to have the Cmdr tag turned off and have NPC's and players look the same.

Wouldn't even bother with the transponder. But that's my personal choice.

 

[Olrik]

A short summary. From Sandro Sammarco, lead designer - May 2014,

So what are we left with? To my mind, the decision is going to be about choosing one group over the other, or try to get a compromise. This then, is why in the DDF thread I was a mild advocate of an opt-in transponder mechanism. Just for the record, here's a brief run down:

* By default, no human players can be mechanically identified and labelled as such. There is no additional camouflage either - if you reveal that you're a human player or someone works it out, you can't rub this knowledge out.

* You can turn on a transponder signal in your ship. All players piloting transponder on ships always instantly know that each other are human. This device does not offer any additional detection capabilities - you still need to be able to detect the other player's ship as normal.

* If you are in a wing (a group of allied players) any member turning on the transponder turns it on for all members of the wing.

* Once you have turned on the transponder, turning it off has no effect on ships that have already made use of the information - in the current location. The knowledge would likely only reset once that particular session had collapsed (no one present in the locale).

Right, so why did I favour this? Because I think it offers *something* to both sides in this thread. Players who purport to want to have social/game play interaction will turn their transponder on. This doesn't paint a target on them, because only fellow transponder users will see them as human, and they will be visible as human in return.

Players that want to keep the mystery keep their transponder off. They will never know who's real beyond what they can discern from ship actions.

The win for me though is the fact that both sets of people are in the same space. They can still interact - nothing stops that. Sure, either side can be sore about the fact that not everyone is playing the game exactly the same as them. But I constantly see comments like "splitting the user base is bad!" and "we want to player together!" - and well, this would be happening. Importantly, it would be happening in a relatively fair way.

... And just to be absolutely clear: my personal preference would be to never truly know who was human with the following exceptions: player friends formed through an out of game world friend system could always be visible as such, and players in game could mechanically reveal their human nature to specific targets: both of these features would help towards social gaming in a safe and controlled manner where both parties consensually agreed to break immersion for the benefit of multiplayer interactions (and both would be reversible). This stance is similar but not identical to the transponder option.

The reason I don't advocate it as the right way is simply because it is less fair, favouring one camp over the other. That's not necessarily an issue, but in this particular case I feel the improvement I perceive it would offer to the game is less than the penalty of putting off more folk even more vehemently. That's just my perception mind.

So, the question is: What happened since then? does the concept of an opt in transponder mechanism still has legs?

 

[jabokai]

You may well be right, I don't know. But, you may just as easily be very wrong and you can't know either. Let's try it for a month and see what happens. Even do it in a Beta so that it is opt-in to try it.

No, I don't know, hence the "IMHO".

The time to introduce this was before release - this is a fundamental change to multiplayer that now goes against the expectations and experience of the playerbase for no real gain (an indeed - actually a loss for a significant portion of players).

A short summary. From Sandro Sammarco, lead designer - May 2014,

So, the question is: What happened since then? does the concept of an opt in transponder mechanism still has legs?

They realised it wasn't a good idea and quietly dropped it? Only a post from Sandro, in this thread, will convince me otherwise.

 

[insanephoton]

I wonder what happened to the 'serious consequences' of attacking a Pilots Federation member? Wasn't that supposed to be one of the justifications for players being easily identifiable?

 

[AnnuverScotinExile]

They realised it wasn't a good idea and quietly dropped it? Only a post from Sandro, in this thread, will convince me otherwise.

Unlikely, since it remains a good idea . Sandro talked at length about compromise and not favouring one PoV, and the status quo very much does favour one 'side', and a side with less than 20% of the people who voted on the issue.

No, just like so many other things, there was too much to do to meet their externally imposed date in December, and they never got around to it.

Unfortunately, I think that those that think it will not change now are right. Not for good reasons, but because the noise from those that felt they were being treated badly by the change (yes, that less than 20% who are obviously so much more important than the remaining 80%) would be deafening.