Solution to All Log-Out, Log-In OW Abuses

[Wesreidau]

You are free to log out at sea, but when you log back in, you are several kilometers from where you logged out in a random direction. "Drifted with the tide" as it were. No more logging out on top of a port and logging in the moment the port battle opens. You would instead be logging in a few kilometers away and forced to sail to your destination. Also no more logging out in a trade lane and logging back in when your spy buddy tells you a merchant is near your hiding place. Thus, we may have a large clan log out at the gates of a port battle, however when they log in they will be scattered from the point they logged out from. Their solution is to log out somewhere to sea and log in where they'll have time and concealment to regroup into their battle order, then sail in just as if they'd left from a normal port.

 

You can still log out in the open world, you just can't log back in with certainty to any specific position. Thus you can't exploit your logging in.

 

Keep in mind this is not disconnect-reconnect teleportation. Your ship must leave the open world first, and to do so, you currently must sit still and vulnerable in the open world for two minutes.

 

I'd love to hear what's wrong with my proposal. I really would. Not "something would get exploited", not "you'll log in on dry land because the devs won't think to check that", a specific problem. If you hit log out, sit two minutes perfectly still, log out, and log back in randomly bounced in another direction a few kilometers... so what? You could have just sailed there in two minutes without being a completely vulnerable static target for two minutes. And since you don't know which direction you're going, you're more likely to be farther from where you want to be than closer. The only possible way to gain is to teleport back in and be a few kilometers upwind, the odds of which are about one in six. Otherwise you could have gone further faster by tacking. Or you spawn in on the wrong side of land, which itself can be prevented by just making sure no land is between your spawn and where you logged out. 

 

And what, you log out and back in before the two minutes are up, hoping to randomly pop out away from a pursuer? You log back in exactly where you were, same as currently. Its only after your ship is removed from the open world that your position is scrambled.

 

What does everyone want? A chance to screen, and a chance to attack distant ports without hours of sailing. A chance to log out in the open world when life demands your attention without being called an exploiter. This solution is a trifecta.

 

Our Bermuda port battle could have played out with French, Spanish, Swedish and Danish ships all logging out at specific grid coordinates over the horizon from Bermuda, logging back in at a synchronized time, assembling their battlegroups from the few kilometer scattering from the log-in effect, and then sailing a wave of screeners to sweep the British patrols into assorted small battles before the SOL line launched the port battle. No hours of sailing on the port battle day. Just a chance to participate in distant attacks without hours of sailing and without bypassing the honest effort of screeners. And, since you log in scattered, a fleet camping your log-out point will have no luck as well!

 

But until we agree something needs to be done about PB camping, I'm going to say this.

 

If you think PB login camping is a perfectly fair thing to do, keep doing it.

 

If you think PB login camping is a dirty underhanded trick, abuse the hell out of it until its against the rules. The moment its against the rules, stop.

 

And if you think this suggestion will solve PB login camping, don't "like" it. Quote it all over the forums, especially in threads complaining about PB login camping.

 

[Hagen v Martius]

It would work, yes. And probably even better - as in "immersive" - than just another log-out timer.

 

However, I'd say that the effect should occur after a set amount of time, say 30 minutes of being logged off.

Otherwise a simple crash could send you into the middle of an enemy fleet and stuff like that.

Edited October 26, 2016 by Hagen v Martius

[Sir William Hargood]

I love this suggestion. It works well all round in my opinion and I would even go further by saying the closer you are to an enemy port/ shipping lane....the more scrambled your re-entry position should be and potentially say 10-15 minutes sailing off of your original position (okay that may be a tad harsh...but you get my drift... ).

Lets face it there is absolutely no place in an eighteenth/nineteenth century sailing warship game for magical fortieth century Star Wars type warp drive mechanics. +100 for your suggestion.

I like it a lot...and if you don't then you probably enjoy game exploits.

[Anolytic]

• Wesreidau likes this

 

 

About your suggestion. You ask for specific objections, so I'll give you some. First and foremost I am quite certain it would not be a simple thing to code (or to run on the server), and it is not a good enough solution to anything that it would be worth the effort. A lot of points on the map are simply not amenable to this solution, being narrow straits, shallow waters, lakes and so on. 

 

Apart from that.

People who sailed into dangerous waters would be able to attack a trader, leave to battlescreen and wait for a while and have a pretty good chance of being out of those dangerous waters.

People would be sailing a trader, have to log out to go to work, and log back in only to find themselves drifted to shore next to a busy port and get instantly ganked.

People who sail together would not be able to take a break for dinner, etc because they would be spread out afterwards.

Players would constantly get ganked because they respawned in a bad spot through no fault of their own.

In a lot of situations you would be able to calculate where you would likely respawn.

 

You go on about the Bermuda port battle, but the real issue there is that defenders can sabotage a port battle to create empty port battles with no attacker entering. And it doesn't even take a lot of players or a lot of effort. I love the new ROE attack circles, but until port battle entry is fixed for the attacker, they ruin RvR and log-off at sea is the only possible workaround available to players. A few defending suicide ships can easily attack both a screening fleet and a port battle fleet to prevent it from ever entering the port battle. 

 

After a nation has spent a great effort to activate a port battle, they must be able to enter that port battle. No way would an attacking fleet ever invade somewhere and then sail home to wait 46 hours before attacking again to conquer. The 46 hour wait is artificial. It is to make sure that both sides can get 25 players into the port battle. It is not to allow the defender to sabotage the port battle from even happening.

[JobaSet]

The Drifting is cool but wont happen sorry mate.
     Logging out like that is OK I got no Problem and most Don't with That,  
       That said the login in front of a port and instantly being able to join a port battle is a Care Bear enhancement and they keep adding them . (I can't even Join a Mission for 2 min but a Care Bear gets a free ride into a port battle with no risk at all none).  Others include The most long standing problem to date for PVP is Just the Staying on the battle screen and/or logging off at it, But lets not forget about the new Running to the 500 new Massive fleets Awesome enhancement,  Running to the Towers another enhancement, this one is not so bad,  Fleeing a Hostility Mission in progress This is the cream of the crop enhancement (Don't forget the Battle screen thing here again) You can leave and not lose Any/Zero hostility points I mean none. (But u gained some from the 1 NPC that You sunk out of 5). The servers are turning into Care Bear server no risk.   

[Wesreidau]

Good, specific criticism. Specious and pleading, but specific. I'll dissect these neatly.

 

First and foremost I am quite certain it would not be a simple thing to code...

 

A 3-D model of a first-rate ship of the line pattered on shipbuilder's drawings is not a simple thing to code. This is as taking the grid reference saved as your log-out position, selecting a number between 0 and 359, selecting a point X units away in that position, and checking if its a valid position for that ship to sail in, repeating if its an invalid point until a valid point is found, then logging you into it. Its programming 101. Worst case, you hit one tiny patch of deep water in shallows and are stuck. F11, the devs have a mapper paint that spot as shallow like it should be, and you log out, wait two minutes, and log back in. By all odds you've teleported back to free sailing.

 

People who sailed into dangerous waters would be able to attack a trader, leave to battlescreen and wait for a while and have a pretty good chance of being out of those dangerous waters.

 

Attack a trader, win, log out, wait a few minutes, log in, be a random direction and two minutes sail away from a revenge gank? So it solves players camping where a buddy's trader got ganked? Its not a bug, its a feature. People have been complaining about revenge ganking and its counterplay battlescreen idling for the whole year! Add drift to returning to open world from a battle (with all your fellows at the same spot!) and we're killing yet another bird with the same stone.

 

People would be sailing a trader, have to log out to go to work, and log back in only to find themselves drifted to shore next to a busy port and get instantly ganked.

 

However its a known risk, and one mitigated by logging out further from shore. And odds are you'll be further from shore than closer when you log back in. Someone may just a soon consider himself lucky to log back in next to the shore batteries of his destination as unlucky to be further to sea. But its a known risk, and being based on chance can't be capitalized on or used by your enemy.

 

People who sail together would not be able to take a break for dinner, etc because they would be spread out afterwards.

 

Stop a fleet at the same spot, log out, and log back in on command. After two minutes of sailing you're entirely reformed. If you wanted to instantly be reformed, consider taking the clan's meal breaks at free ports or friendly outposts. And since this is a scheduled log-out, you could head off coast before you do so, to minimize the risk of getting attacked while scattered.

 

Of course, synchronized log-out, log-in is exactly how PB login camping works, so I wonder if they were all taking a multi-hour dinner break and logged back in for the St. George's Town port battle.

 

Players would constantly get ganked because they respawned in a bad spot through no fault of their own.

 

Its currently chance that you'll log in on top of a ganking fleet. Yet we see no constant complaints of this on the forum because of the invincibility timer intended to mitigate this. You still have twenty seconds to set sail and start running. If you want to be completely safe when you log out, pull into port. The risk, once again, is known and no greater than before. The exploit of PB login camping is gone. 

 

In a lot of situations you would be able to calculate where you would likely respawn.

 

You currently know precisely where you respawn. There are perhaps a handful of deep bays where you'd be certain to respawn at the mouth of the bay because its the only water two minute's sail away. So what? We're back to exactly where we were in a handful of specific cases.

 

I'm going to like this post too. Deal with it. 

Edited October 26, 2016 by Wesreidau

[Wesreidau]

It would work, yes. And probably even better - as in "immersive" - than just another log-out timer.

 

However, I'd say that the effect should occur after a set amount of time, say 30 minutes of being logged off.

Otherwise a simple crash could send you into the middle of an enemy fleet and stuff like that.

 

A simple crash I return to in under two minutes wouldn't drift me, but its possible someone might position a ship at a port battle 25 minutes ahead of time while defenses are lax and then log back in on top of the swords. So I'd say ten minutes to drift you. Good catch.

[Elouda]

You could scale the drift by time - nothing for the first 5 minutes, then a linear increase to the full amount until 30 minutes has passed. This would also resolve the 'revenge gank avoidance' aspect of this, as it would mean that a simple hop-on hop-off wouldnt induce the full drift.

 

I still think that just no logout in hostile county regions would be better, but this is also a good solution, and probably less harsh.

[Wesreidau]

Revenge fleet gank avoidance may not be a problem at all, depending on your point of view, but scaling drift to time spent logged out to a hard limit at thirty minutes? Possible, but it does let a group of people log out and back in on top of a gank target if they can do it quickly. By insisting on the full measure each time someone's logged out for more than the allotment we make for crashes and disconnects, we reduce the chances this can be gamed.

[CptEdwardKenway]

What about sending the ship into a random direction? Would solve that problem.

Edited October 26, 2016 by CptEdwardKenway