On Darth Malgus lately, there is a [self-censored] that keeps on making new characters and suicides as many times as possible, which is usually about 15+ times in a deathmatch.

 

Some sort of mechanism is absolutely necessary to weed out these S/D'ers. If people self-destruct near-immediately upon spawn, repeatedly, and don't do any damage, some sort of sanction needs to be effected.

 

Here are some possible remedies:

 

- Allow vote kicking of people even if they "contribute" by putting dents in their own capital ship.

 

- As mentioned above, implement some sort of self-destructor detection mechanism. There is a huge difference between someone deliberately having to fly around a bit and maybe fire a bit on enemies before S/D'ing, compared to just nosediving into the capital ship immediately. Hence, gearing such a mechanism towards detecting near-insta suiciders is a possible rememdy.

 

- Implement a combined "distance + timer" mechanism, which simply does not count deaths that occur too close to the spawn point and in relation to spawned-in time. This would also serve to eliminate the sometimes occuring spawn point stomps plus prevent newer players who choose spawn points under fire so to speak, to stand a better chance or at least maybe not go "I'll never play GSF again" after having been exploded almost before the hyperspace-grahpics fade away.

 

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These are just some possible solutions more-or-less off the top of my head. I think the easiest to implement would be "allow vote kick of non-contribs with zero dmg and 1+ deaths". But not necessarily the best.

 

My apologies if this has already been "discussed and dismissed".

There is a player on Star Forge who is notorious for this. Someone told me that there was a whole group that did that on Satele Shan. The motivation supposedly was to end matches so fast that they could get their weekly (and big conquest points during some conquest weeks) as fast as possible.

 

It is not that hard to figure out what is happening. Zero damage and double digit deaths match after match is pretty obvious. If someone dies 14 times and the difference between opposing kills and deaths is more then that, it is clearly self-destruct. I say ban them, or at least ban them from GSF.

It would definitely be nice if there was something in place to handle players that only care about self destructing. Maybe something like 5 deaths in 30 seconds would remove the player from the match.

Granted, I've been in death matches where the dominating team is camping the spawn points and just obliterating everyone shortly after spawning. Although, if the dominating team knows that they'll cause the match(es) to end prematurely due to everyone on the opposing team getting kicked, then maybe they wont camp the spawn points so much.

 

Honestly, I don't know what a good solution would be for this, although I agree that it would be nice to have something in place to prevent those that only have the intention to self destruct to farm and/or throw the match(es).

Yeah I had the misfortune of dealing with this last night on Satele Shan. Player SD 25 times, represented half of the 50 points of the other team. I tried to initiate a Vote Kick but right-clicking wouldn't do anything. They were in my game-assigned 4-person sub-group (obviously not a premade, I solo-queue.) I'm guessing you can only vote kick when they are in "non-contributing" mode? They were imperial and I was on a republic toon, so I wonder if that is also a restriction?

 

I mean I accidentally self-destructed twice in that match, but I also scored a handful of kills. Honestly, I think, for the most part, players know when they are being griefed by a SDer. To that end, it seems that Vote Kicking is the only way to deal with the problem real-time. Self-policing, as it were.

 

The downside is that it is possible that some people could abuse Vote Kick to grief a bad pilot or even just someone they don't like. This only becomes significant if there is a coordinated effort, for example, members of a 4-person premade group collude to vote-kick a player on the team but not their group. But, perhaps Vote Kick could require unanimity, like it does in ground content?

 

Fortunately, as bad as it is when it happens, I don't see it too often. I mean last week was the Gree event and GSF has highlighted objectives during it, and I never saw any SDers in all my matches last week.

Thanks for making this public Yama. Absolutely needs to be taken care of. I agree vote kicking might not be the best solution but it would be the easiest. I don't think people vote kicking players they don't like is going to be an issue, yes some will try it but make sure it needs to be unanimous to kick someone and that won't be an issue.

 

On the whole GSF is considerably less toxic than ground pvp (or any other game content to be fair) and much more friendly. So apart from the odd bad egg, I don't see people trying to vote kick someone they don't like being a problem.

 

How do you tag Eric Musco into this so that it appears in dev tracker? Anyone know how?

 

- Nodaro.

Something definitely needs to be done, it's getting ridiculous.

 

Perhaps something like 5x self destruct without doing any damage and without being damaged by other players could trigger an autokick? Could still be gamed, but it'd be better than nothing.

He's back again tonight. 3TDMs now, 20-30 Self destructs each time. He'll keep this up all evening. Devs, please do something.

Be sure you make tickets for self-destructors in game

 

Bioware has always taken same-faction pvp and wintrading seriously. Create reports and encourage others flying with you to do the same. Because of the skill delta between GSF pilots, it's not obvious to any automated detection whether someone is self destructing deliberately, or is simply an absolutely terrible foodship. Reports can help custserv quickly differentiate between someone terrible and someone malicious.

Two of the characters I've seen doing this on the Darth Malgus server are levels 1-10 and are not in any guild. They also have no legacy name. I only saw one of them at a time so probably the same person. They were doing it for several hours across several evenings a week or two ago. I've not had much time to fly lately so not sure if it's the same person keeping it going. They are just doing it to be a troll.

Tonight I saw this twice. The team that had the player in question would have had a clear win otherwise. The player seems to want only to sabotage, because I cannot see that there is anything to gain by deliberatly loosing a game which your team would have won anyway (and within just a minute).

 

This problem appears so often that it really should be dealt with. Vote-kicking is tricky - there is a large risk for abuse or that it does not work (if too many votes are required to actually kick a player)., but an automatic detection system should not be that difficuilt to set up. The system would not necessarily have to kick the player, but could for example alert customer service.

 

And most important of all: Customer service must react swiftly and take actions. It is very disturbing that this problem can occur several nights in a row.

No I agree with Verain on this one. I’m not confident any sort of automated system would solve the problem. They can’t even figure out how to stop a nested repair drone bomber in TDM not get the dreaded non-contributor status. You’d think repairing damage with your drone would count as contributing to the system. Until they can get that fix I don’t want them implementing any sort of algorithm. Perhaps it’s just my cynicism, but it’s more likely to catch an innocent noob accidentally flying into an asteroid than reliably get the cheaters (and only cheaters) out.

You do not accidentally fly into an asteroid 20+ times in a game.

 

And as I said, the automated system could just send an alert to a living BW employee, who should be able to figure out if it is a new pilot or someone sabotaging the game.

You do not accidentally fly into an asteroid 20+ times in a game.

 

And as I said, the automated system could just send an alert to a living BW employee, who should be able to figure out if it is a new pilot or someone sabotaging the game.

 

But that’s not entirely automated is it? It still requires a living person to verify whether the self destructs are intentional or accidental. Furthermore, you’d need at least three employees per server per day, and I can’t imagine they would pay to keep someone on call 24/7 just to police GSF matches. They don’t even have 24 hour customer service as it is. They only have personnel monitoring whether the servers go down or not ... and it might not even be in house, but rather a pager goes off if the servers go down or something. That team probably monitors the online status of multiple games and is unlikely to be versed enough in a small aspect of this game to be responsible for responding to pages in the middle of the night for people upset in a GSF match.

 

So no, I don’t think a bioware policing presence real time is likely.

My suggestion is that an automated system could send out alerts to a human intellegence. If an experienced gsf player can tell a saboteur from a new player then so should a Bioware employee. They don't need to respond immediately - it would be quite sufficient that somebody reads the automated alerts and investigates recorded game statistics during the next work day.

 

The point is that I do not believe in an automated system would be reliable enough to block players from participating or open for vote-kick on players that are not flagged as non-contributing. And I believe that a temporary ban for first time offenders (and a longer ban for players who are repeatedly sabotaging games) is more discouraging for this kind of behaviour.

 

Anyway, if there are better suggestions for what can be done then I will gladly support them. I just hope that BW takes this problem seriously.

There is a player on Star Forge who is notorious for this. Someone told me that there was a whole group that did that on Satele Shan. The motivation supposedly was to end matches so fast that they could get their weekly (and big conquest points during some conquest weeks) as fast as possible.

 

It is not that hard to figure out what is happening. Zero damage and double digit deaths match after match is pretty obvious. If someone dies 14 times and the difference between opposing kills and deaths is more then that, it is clearly self-destruct. I say ban them, or at least ban them from GSF.

I know EXACTLY who you're talking about.

 

Can we also talk about what I think are blatant hacks?

 

I'm not pitching a fit about my lack of skill. I'm a low-skill to average player on my BEST day.

 

But there are certain players who don't seem to be bound by the normal rules of the game. There are certain folks who can torpedo lock me three or four times in a row WAY faster than a fully-upgraded ship should be able to reload once or twice. My Distortion Field missile break ALWAYS seems to fail against these players. It doesn't break their current lock, nor does it keep them from acquiring another one instantly.

 

They also seem to be able to acquire locks THROUGH very large pieces of debris. I can be on the other side of an asteroid, and STILL get locked and blown up.

 

Another one is infinite thruster boosting. I particularly notice this on gunships that do NOT have an Engine Overcharge buff. They seem to be able to outboost my scouts, even when I DO have the EO buff. I know you can optimize for engine speed and efficiency at the cost of damage, but this is WAY beyond that.

 

Thanks for listening. At first, I thought these were just bugs in the game itself, but the ONLY seem to favor very specific players...