Tagging Mechanics.

[TommyShelby]

This thread is for continued discussion of the tagging mechanics. 

I don't want to see Cutters tagging bigger ships and pulling them in battle and being able to keep them in battle, it's ludicrous and i honestly thought we already had a mechanique that prevented this. It's come to my knowledge that cutters can however pull bigger ships (SoL and such) into battle somehow and that needs to stop. 

I also do not want to see anyone be pulled into a battle only to have the enemy sit outside their own effective range simply to keep you tagged in battle. 

 

Currently the game mechanics allow both of the above scenarios to happen and so we will, no doubt, see it happen again. 

Please share your ideas and thoughts on how to solve the issue. (I quoted the few suggestions/idea's/constructive post's that were made in the previous discussion, please read them before posting.)

If all parties want to resolve the rule set they should stop blaming and name calling and focus on the ruleset ONLY. or this topic will be locked

 

Focus on how it should work and what should be allowed and what not.

 

preferably in a structured format

1.

2

3.

 

 

My concern here is twofold, but falls under the same thing - Determining intent.

 

1.  Long-range tagging is often done with the intent of destruction.  For example - I run a Trinc with long 9's as bow chasers (used to be 12s, darn rebalancing!) and 32lb carronades as broadsides (used to be 32s and 24s, hurrah rebalancing! )  I often chase after vessels, slowly whittling down their sails at extreme range until I can close up the gap, and then destroy or capture them.  The intent IS to win.

 

2.  These same mechanics are being used to hold someone in with no possibility of victory.  Maybe these guys did intend to win.  Maybe they even thought they would, no matter how misguided.

 

Both of these fall under intent.  How can we possibly code to determine intent of the aggressor?  And even so, how can we prevent that from being heftily exploited?  (Any new mechanic comes with new exploits, and the more complex the mechanic, the more complex the exploit.)

 

What was displayed here were Fabian Tactics.  I would likely do the same in these guys' shoes.  I'm not even sure about calling it griefing, because while the intent was not to win the small battle, it was to win the larger port battle.  Here, delaying tactics are seen to be used to win the larger battle.

 

Here, the nuisance, I argue, is a valid tactic for a larger strategic goal, and that coding it out would be clunky at best, and introduce more and more intricate problems to deal with.

 

 

Idea:

 

1. Range based tagging system

2. Tagging range based on the effective gun range of the enemy ship

3. no more additions 

 

 

 

1. Delaying tactics with obvious intent to win a larger goal is allowed.
2. Wasting time for someone with no intent except to anger the other party, griefing, be disallowed. 
3. Don't assume malice what can be attributed to ignorance. No game mechanics need introduced that would create new exploits or problems, simply a tribunal discussion between the community to determine intent.

 

 

 

First, if you are curious how to hard its to demast a Santi with a trinc and a consti, ask your fellow pirate to test it out. try to do it at the same distant.

Second, you were able to kept him in the battle because some of your cannon balls hit the Santi sail, as a result you deal some damage to him. After that, all of your balls hit his hull at max distant, so there is not damage at all.

 

 

The different between you and the pirate is that you try to get close to the ship so you can actually deal damage but in this situation, they try to stay at max range and their cant hit the sail of the Santi to deal damage anymore.

 

 

 

Ideas:

1: we will need a set of distance in battle, if you are somehow far enough for a set amount of time, you can leave since we have no circle of  death in OW battle. 

2: reduce tagging distance for based the type of ships: cutter, yacht, will have the smallest tagging distance, max will be some frigates since it their job.

    Also, at the moment, at the max range of tagging, no long guns can actually reach their target

3:

 

 

To Admin and for discussion:

 

Distance based timers might solve the issue. (Depending on the set distance of course)

 

EDIT: To win vs a santi you need to get close and stay out of its gun arcs. Staying out of its gun range will make it impossible for you to do any damage to it. You didnt know that before, now you know. If you want to learn it, contact me in game or ask Manuva on SLRN, he can show you, im sure. 

 

 

Distance based timers might partly solve the issue.

 

 

If developers want to endorse this sort of "strategic play" that leads to hours of boredom, that is cool, but it would be better for the game to think of ways to keep fights from devolving into completely pointless max range kiting fests where one side can't even shoot, because that is total crap gameplay.

 

I would suggest making max range gunnery have more realistic accuracy, i.e. basically hopeless and unlikely to achieve hits consistently enough to hold someone in an instance.)  No frigate in reality was ever able to attack an SoL and fire on it from long range over and over again without taking return fire.  If a ship was using heel to extend their max range, they would not be hitting anything, because they wouldn't be hitting anything at max elevation with no heel regardless.  There is no situation where a frigate with 18s / 24s would be in range of an SoL, but at the same time the frigate would be out of range of the SoL's 32 / 42 pdrs.  Completely artificial situation.

 

 

[TommyShelby]

Basically imo you cannot blame ppl for abusing the games mechanics. If it's in the game, it will be done. (ship cloning, chainboarding, alts and so on... just to mention the more popular stuff...) There is no way to solve the stuff by applying some kind of ruleset. With more ppl joining we will have tribunals every day on these things. And you cant ban people for analysing and using the games mechanics to gain an advantage. Thats basically what "skilled" gameplay is about.

 

That's why these things need to be dealt with by ingame mechanics. 

 

Why does something like this even have to be dealt with?

Because it's annoying, frustrating, time wasting and generally no fun at all and defeats every point of playing a game.

That's why "griefing" (whatever that actually is) is "forbidden".

 

If Tommy was caught in that battle, with you actually fighting him, getting close, maneuvering, threatening his stern, forcing him to pull out all kinds of tricks out of his sleeve like backward sailing, surpriseboarding, single shotting and so on, while you would have been maneuvering like crazy, trying to not overshoot, staying out of the arcs, allways knowing that your next moove could be your last, because you have no room for error vs such a behemoth, allways on your toes, celebrating every rake you get in on him, then the whole battle would have been 1 strategically valid in the bigger picture and 2 fun for all of you. (He would still hate you for taking him out of the important fight , but at least he would get a proper fight instead and not just afksailing.)

 

But in games people will use every part of the games mechanics to gain an advantage, since gaining an advantage seems to be more important to many people, than actually having fun. That's why we need the games mechanics to be rock solid to prevent fun killing behavior.

 

Maybe a distance based tagging system could solve that, if the distance is low enough. (We would need to do proper focused testing on that to figure out a good distance.)

I need sleep but i personally think the distance based tagging system might work. I'd like to know what you all think are pro's and con's of a having a distance based tagging system. 

 

Format;

 

Distance Based Tagging System. 

Pro's:

1. 

2.

3.

Con's:

1.

2.

3.

[Puchu]

Reedit to fit the form:

 

 

Pros: 

1. A distance based tagging system would also make ships without chasers valuable.

2. Less panic in big fights, less sudden disappearing of Sols.
Less "Who has ... tagged? Someone f..cking tag him. Why the f... did noone tag him?"

 

Cons:

1. If the range is too high keeping ppl in battle without doing dmg to them would be too easy

2. If the range is too low, ppl will escape too easily.

 

 

Difficulties:

 

But we would have to do real proper testing to figure out how far the distance from the enemy should be.

 

Ideas:

 

It might be good to make that distance based on the effective gun range of the enemy. (less for carronades, more for longs)

[Scorpio Shirica]

Someone said something in that earlier thing that struck me. A Cutter whose shots simply bounced off a hull wouldn't stop a fleet from reinforcing another, nor would a frigate failing to do any damage to a Ship of the Line truly be able to slow it down.

 

Maybe a damage threshold should be in place for keeping someone in battle, like a full penetrating shot that can clearly damage the enemy ship over time needs to be required to keep a ship engaged. 

[akd]

Someone said something in that earlier thing that struck me. A Cutter whose shots simply bounced off a hull wouldn't stop a fleet from reinforcing another, nor would a frigate failing to do any damage to a Ship of the Line truly be able to slow it down.

Maybe a damage threshold should be in place for keeping someone in battle, like a full penetrating shot that can clearly damage the enemy ship over time needs to be required to keep a ship engaged.

But also a distance threshold for the other end, because it is pretty crap when you hit someone in the side / stern at close range and it does no damage because all of the "integrity" has removed, and then they blink out of existence right in front of you.

[Scorpio Shirica]

is there a way to calculate in-engine what damage would be if integrity was there? 

[CommodoreWesley]

Distance system.  Once a ship is 2000 units away from any enemy ship, that ship will be able to escape from the battle.  It makes sense, and I don't think that there needs to be any more extra features added like timers and such.

 

(max carronade range is 500, max medium is 1000 and max long is 1200 I believe)

 

And for those that worry that this will make players able to escape from them early on in the battle instance, then the attacker did not engage them close enough on the Open World before dragging his target into the battle instance.  Also, the attack circle can also be set to be the 2000 units away mark, solving the issue. 

[Captiva]

After reading the initial Tribunal thread, and this current thread, I believe that CommodoreWesleys' suggestion carries the most weight. Pointing fingers regarding foul play when there are no specific rules against the accused foul play, rings a little hollow to my ears. Tactics and strategy in the real world do not have rules. Unless it's a "written in stone", "no excuses"  rules violation, or an out-and-out abuse of the game mechanics, then, all is fair in love and war. 

 

At this point I believe that enough information has been presented to the developers so that they can and will make the right call.

Edited January 8, 2016 by Captiva

[Hexcaliber]

Smaller ships such as brigs and sloops were often part of fleet actions both as the eyes and ears of a fleet, to haras and break up formations, and for taking prizes.

 

Due to their greater maneuvrability and acceleration, they were able to keep out of the arc of larger ships, while hammering the sterns, sails & masts of anything they were directed to engage. Many were too low in the water for line ships to engage at closer ranges, keeping a fleets frigates engaged as they were forced to chase them off. Pirates almost exclusively relied on heavily over gunned smaller vessels for engaging larger merchants, some of which matched the build of smaller line ships, if not their crew, discipline, and training.

 

From a game play standpoint, there is no reason smaller ships should not be able to tag and engage larger ships keeping it pinned down. Clearly they are never going to do any real damage to the hull of larger ships, and place themselves at great risk to pin the enemy down, a single mistake can mean their destruction. Given the risk the smaller ship places itself at, it should be perfectly viable as part of a larger group strategy. Take away any ships sails and she becomes a sitting duck regardless of her size.

 

Allowing smaller ships to tag larger ships keeps them relevant, and gives them a place in the overall scheme of things, beyond just starter ships. It also helps open up game play and strategy thereby forcing fleets to think about their composition.

Edited January 8, 2016 by Hexcaliber

[Otsego]

Game Mechanics that can be exploited will be exploited. I don't want too restrictive tagging mechanics but when it comes to griefing we need some mechanic to prevent that.

Edited January 8, 2016 by Otsego

[z4ys]

Idea: A distance and time combined taggig system.

1.if both ships are in/under a certain distance to each other - no timer runs down

(that would make frigs without chasers useable for pvp gameplay)

2.over that distance timer runs down and only pen hits reset that timer

3.when both ships are over a certain distance (max gun range + 200m for example) it is possible to leave instantly.

So we have 3 timer radiuses.

- small circle = distance

- medium circle = tagging (like it is now)

- large circle = distance again

Edited January 8, 2016 by z4ys

[balticsailor]

I think the main reason there is no distance based system, is that constant distance checks between multible objects are expensive caluations that would produce alot of sever load.

 

But maybe instead of a fix timer that resets every time and flexible timer that increase the more damage you take could work better. Probably best linked to the proportional dmg to correlating hit pool of the ship (hull, crew or sails/mast).

 

Could also help keeping ship that got heavly dmg in a big fight from from jumping out of battle while being shielded by allies.

 

Not quite sure which number would be needed here, but keeping some one tagged with chaser guns will hunting him down still needs to work for similar sized ships, so two/four bow chaser hitting every like 50% of their shots (through multiple sails) should be enought to keep some one in battle.

 

But cases where you only get a few no pen hit at max range or smaller ships doing relatively low dmg should allows the timer to run out between the broadside reloads.

[Snoopy]

I think the system is good the way it is now with one change required:

 

Tags on AI or third party ships should not drag somebody in if his BR would refuse a direct tag.

The BR diff system is actually working - a cutter cannot drag a SoL into battle by tagging it.

 

This would mean that a hunting pack of SoLs with a tagging frigate need to loosen up their formation to let themselves be dragged in.

Once they close ranks they are immune.

A PB attack force needs to stay really tight.

[CommodoreWesley]

Actually, the main thing that that having a distance associated escape window will change mainly is that more Ships of the Line will be lost in large battles as it it will be practically impossible for the ship to escape out of the battle instance once they are severely damaged.  That would be more of an effect to the game than people trying to tag people to keep them out of the big battles.

 

Also, a distance system is exploitable, if a Pickle and a Victory attack a lone enemy Sani, the Victory can just sail away while the Pickle run towards the Santi to "stern camp" it, preventing the Santi from leaving the battle.  However, this would require that the enemy would have to have a close or equal battle rating to the enemy that they are fighting.

 

Baltic also has a good point about the amount of data being transferred may increase, which might be a penalty for people with poor internet connections (like me...).  It would be nice to see if someone would be able to make a calculation about how much data that will be.  I don't think it will be a lot, but I have little to no knowledge on the transfers of server data.  

[Laik]

Timer dependant on distance at which person was tagged. For example, up to 500m, 5 minute timer. At medium ranges, 500-1000m, 2 minute timer. At long ranges, above 1km, 30 seconds. These are just some arbitrary numbers to illustrate the idea. This serves double purpose.

 

First, it allows ships with no chasers to actually have a chance at running down the enemy without having to attack from leeward. For example, with 5 minute timer a Renommee could actually succesfully chase after someone, turning once every few minutes to fire a broadside and using rest of the time to make up lost distance with it's superior speed. Right now it needs to turn almost every minute to shoot and in the process bleeds so much speed that it can barely catch anyone. 

 

Second, at extreme ranges, chases often come down to 2 outcomes (if the chasing party can consitently hit with chasers). Either a chased person gets slowly worn down by chasers and eventually killed after hour-long chase or the person manages to run down the timer and click out. Both cases aren't precisely fun for either of sides. With a 30 second timer at such a distance, it would mean that the chasing party would need to hit almost every chaser shot to keep enemy in the instance which is no small feat and thus gives the 'victim' bigger chance of getting away (when tagged poorly on the OS) and saving both sides' time.

 

Additional, just as important, effect of a short timer at extreme ranges is curtailing of a situation like the one mentioned in the Tribunal. Short timer + huge damage fall-off at extreme distances would mean that the 'griefed' player could just cut sails and wait for enemy to miss or get a 0 dmg hit and click out. 

[Ned Loe]

In real life situation if small cutter fired on a Frigate or Line ship, they would wipe that tiny boat from the face of this Earth with one broadside and kill everyone. Everyone knew this and would not risk life of whole crew for suicide attack. You need example? Take a look at one of the episodes from Black sails where 2 frigates are trying to attack 1st rate ship and get blown to pieces, 90% of crew killed and wounded. 2 Frigates Carl!

 

In my opinion tagging right now needs more work. I do not like timer, it should be instant hit when close to enemy ship. Why we need timer on OS? It just looks like player is sailing a ship then screaming - I am attacking you! I am next to you, but wait! I have timer...hold on...oh almost there! .. oh still 5 seconds...just give me a sec and I will attack you ..lol

 

Oh well, we have what we have. 

[Quineloe]

I have nothing to add regarding game mechanics, because I have a mere 10 hours in this game so far. I just wanted to say how much the very existence of this thread, describing this very issue, scares me. Far more so than any "pirates farming each other" or infinite money exploit thread ever could.

 

 

I seem to recall this very issue completely ruining PVP in a certain previous game, where entire groups of heavy warships found themselves unable to defend their ports because the enemy attacked in superior numbers, and had for each group set aside one or two small tagging ships, who would do nothing the entire time but attack the large group on the OS over and over to prevent them from attacking their own groups who were raising unrest. The game moved from big groups with heavy ships deciding the outcome of a port flip very quickly to who could keep the other side from playing the game better by tag-wars.

 

Bonus points for forcing them to sail to the escape point for 20 minutes by constantly tagging them with long guns, so by the time they got out, the whole thing was over anyways. 

 

I stopped enjoying playing "Tag" around 25 years ago. I'm sure not one of you would be willing to spend an hour in a yard, playing Tag. It's a game for small children, yet grown men seem to be fine playing it in a video game.

 

I'm not sure what everyone else here is for. I know some are here to read that single line of text saying "you won" as often as possible., with little regard of how they won. The pure mass of player migration from that game to here basically ensured that.

I remember 6vs6 or 24vs24 fights to be the some of most fun I've had in a video game, and I remember how a 5 vs 24 with the defenders sitting AFK in the fort while the attackers waited an hour to take the town being the absolute low point of entertainment I've ever had in front of a PC. Or the opposite, defenders with a full fleet being forced to wait for 2 hours for the battle timer to pass because if they all left, that one ship the enemy brought would magically take the town even though there's no chance the player could pull such a feat - it swung both ways.

 

So I can only speak for myself. I'm here for fights where I can't tell from the start how they will end. For fights where neither my defeat is guaranteed, nor my victory. For being challenged and succeeding despite being fired upon until the last minute, not where my opponent throws his hands in the air and just waits for the ordeal of being killed to be over. And for losing fights, and thinking about what I could have done better, instead of knowing that the fight was lost from the start.