Elite: Dangerous

[Ulminati]

I haven't had any CTDs yet. I bought an eagle, stripped it of everything to get the weight down and went into the great beyond to scan planets and moons. Boldly BROing where no BRO has Brah'd before.

 

[bonescraper]

Have you even bought the detailed surface scanner? I saw one earlier, but don't remember where. And what's your jump range? I heard they buffed the Eagle a bit.

 

[Ulminati]

The detailed surface scanner is expensive as fuck. I'm probably going back to populated space and doing some piracy to boost my jewgoldz soon. I kinda want a lakon-6 or cobra for the longer jumps

 

[bonescraper]

Since when 10k is expensive as fuck? I think you're mistaking it for upgraded discovery scanner.

Anyway, i can't find it anywhere. I'm pretty sure i could buy it for my Sidewinder in Eranin. Looks like it's bugged or even intentionally limited to the Sidewinder.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=46052

 

[Mortmal]

I can see this game being ruined by what is very likely an unsecure and client-trusting multiplayer protocol which will make it into Diablo 1/Diablo 2 with Open Battlenet. Everyone will fly around in the best ship with the maxed out money.

This will screw everything from PvP to economy, and even retard the so-called "single-player" mode which will still be impacted by the economy from multiplayer.

In short... they better have real single-player, and not just always-connected bullshit.

My biggest fear too, if we get something nice and beautiful humans ruins it. If theres no anti cheat system, it will be even worse than everyone playing in the best ship , you will be ganked by invisible, invincible russian hackers and lose everything. If a simple memory edit client side works, i wonder what kind of horrors you can do.

 

[Raapys]

I'd assume ship hit points, cash balance and most other stuff is on the server no? So even with no anti cheat the worst case scenario would be limited to bots of various kinds; miningbots, autopilots, aimbots, tradingbots.

 

[shihonage]

Having seen what hackers have done to supposedly server-driven FPS Tribes: Ascend, I'm very pessimistic. By default, naive developers always trust the client too much in order to create smooth local movement and menu responsiveness, and their servers are unprotected.

Tribes wasn't just limited to aimbots. They went deeper and pretty much hacked the server memory remotely, so other players were randomly teleported into the sky or ground. There were similar stories with some MMOs, where entire swaths of players were killed off by teleport.

And of course the aimbots were present and very deadly and game-ruining. With quick-hitting weapons like lasers, Elite is very open to that exploit.

If there's no true local mode, you'll be forced to play in pseudo-single-player with fucked up prices and faction flags. Then they'll try to patch it and end up removing dynamic world parts from the game, and give up on the "main mode" because the netcode will require a complete rewrite, which never happens until the sequel.

 

[Blaine]

Well, in ED, maneuvering your ship is typically very important in bringing your weapons to bear. Aiming is pretty important (as is fine-tuning with micro-maneuvers), but maneuvering is the prerequisite. I doubt a botting program written by amateurs could maneuver towards a dynamic target with any degree of aptitude. It could certainly do things such as activate the laser only when a hit is guaranteed or probable while a human does the maneuvering, and assist with micro-maneuvers. Still a big deal, but a whole different world from FPS aimbotting.

I actually played Tribes Ascend extensively (700+ hours), and while there certainly were botters and cheaters, actually running into one was rare. The most I ever saw was someone "lag-botting," which may not have been intentional. Intentional lag-botting is when someone induces high ping/latency in their connection, which causes their model (and more importantly, their hitbox) to jitter, rubber-band, and lag, so that they become much harder to hit. I saw several videos made by aimbotters, though.

My point being it's not necessarily going to MEGAKILL POWERNUKE THE ENTIRE GAME if a small portion of players cheat.

It is a shame though that there's no user-hosted private multiplayer option.

Also, time-lapse orbital action:

http://webmshare.com/play/MAWGr

 

[praetor]

any info on how long will the Mercenary edition pre-order be up for grabs? on the website it's written "until release", does that mean when they announce a definite release date the merc edition will be up until that day/the day before?

 

[J_C]

I don't think bots and cheaters will be a problem. As I see it it is always the FPS games which are attracting the dumbest, filthyest players. And usually those games are the ones which are hurt the most by this. ED and space sims are still a niche genre, I think (I hope) that mostly players with a decent ammount of IQ will play it.

Also, if cheating will start to be a problem, I can't image the devs doing nothing, if they spent this much time and resource into a multiplayer game.

 

[SuicideBunny]

any info on how long will the Mercenary edition pre-order be up for grabs? on the website it's written "until release", does that mean when they announce a definite release date the merc edition will be up until that day/the day before?

probably yes. keep in mind that it's still supposed to come out this year.

 

[Azazel]

Playing this game in an altered state with a HOTAS, Voice Attack, and an Oculus DK2 is pretty much the closest we will ever come to matrix levels of immersion. Mother of god.

 

[Blaine]

Playing this game in an altered state with a HOTAS, Voice Attack, and an Oculus DK2 is pretty much the closest we will ever come to matrix levels of immersion. Mother of god.

You'll really want a 4k resolution Oculus Rift or similar (and a monstrous GPU) for best results there.

http://vr.mkeblx.net/oculus-sim/

 

[shihonage]

I actually played Tribes Ascend extensively (700+ hours), and while there certainly were botters and cheaters, actually running into one was rare. The most I ever saw was someone "lag-botting," which may not have been intentional. Intentional lag-botting is when someone induces high ping/latency in their connection, which causes their model (and more importantly, their hitbox) to jitter, rubber-band, and lag, so that they become much harder to hit. I saw several videos made by aimbotters, though.

My point being it's not necessarily going to MEGAKILL POWERNUKE THE ENTIRE GAME if a small portion of players cheat.

And I played for 956 hours.

I've encountered numerous cheaters, the most prominent one being the guy called "|||||||||||||||||", also known as "barcode" who regularly joins West servers and skews the game toward whichever team he's on. He's used player-teleporting hacks before, as well as INF detection, but now he's just using some kind of aimbot combined with hitbox reduction.

There's also an aimbot floating around used by player "Rielelela" or similar, which works very well for close-up plasma shots.

There are a number of documented people using energy hack where they can stay in the air indefinitely.

There's another guy that randomly joins a server under varying names and messes with its memory, thus everyone randomly teleports into the sky.

There are also "accepted" hacks like Nova Colt and Eagle Pistol continuous fire and lag reduction ones.

Unlike a better thought-out game with solid netcode and some cheat detection (Quake Wars), these cheaters can absolutely wreck the matches. In Quake Wars it was much more difficult to win with just an aimbot, because there was a deep strategy layer and the cheater got killed off one way or another.

In Tribes there's much derp and an aimbotter is god. A similar story is going to happen with instahit lasers of Elite: Dangerous if there's no server authentication of player actions, no Punkbuster or anything of the sort.

This story happens again and again. If it CAN be hacked, and it is reasonably popular, it WILL be hacked. Back in 2004 I left a UT2004 clan I cofounded after people started appearing in our instagib games, spawn in any faraway corner of the map, and instantly turn it into a graveyard.

Cheaters are the Ebola of online games.

 

[Destroid]

I actually played Tribes Ascend extensively (700+ hours), and while there certainly were botters and cheaters, actually running into one was rare. The most I ever saw was someone "lag-botting," which may not have been intentional. Intentional lag-botting is when someone induces high ping/latency in their connection, which causes their model (and more importantly, their hitbox) to jitter, rubber-band, and lag, so that they become much harder to hit. I saw several videos made by aimbotters, though.

My point being it's not necessarily going to MEGAKILL POWERNUKE THE ENTIRE GAME if a small portion of players cheat.

And I played for 956 hours.

I've encountered numerous cheaters, the most prominent one being the guy called "|||||||||||||||||", also known as "barcode" who regularly joins West servers and skews the game toward whichever team he's on. He's used player-teleporting hacks before, as well as INF detection, but now he's just using some kind of aimbot combined with hitbox reduction.

There's also an aimbot floating around used by player "Rielelela" or similar, which works very well for close-up plasma shots.

There are a number of documented people using energy hack where they can stay in the air indefinitely.

There's another guy that randomly joins a server under varying names and messes with its memory, thus everyone randomly teleports into the sky.

There are also "accepted" hacks like Nova Colt and Eagle Pistol continuous fire and lag reduction ones.

Unlike a better thought-out game with solid netcode and some cheat detection (Quake Wars), these cheaters can absolutely wreck the matches. In Quake Wars it was much more difficult to win with just an aimbot, because there was a deep strategy layer and the cheater got killed off one way or another.

In Tribes there's much derp and an aimbotter is god. A similar story is going to happen with instahit lasers of Elite: Dangerous if there's no server authentication of player actions, no Punkbuster or anything of the sort.

This story happens again and again. If it CAN be hacked, and it is reasonably popular, it WILL be hacked. Back in 2004 I left a UT2004 clan I cofounded after people started appearing in our instagib games, spawn in any faraway corner of the map, and instantly turn it into a graveyard.

Cheaters are the Ebola of online games.

Unreal engine is so common the people who make the hacks must know it inside out by now.

 

[Blaine]

And I played for 956 hours.

Most played: DMB

Well, at least you played a fair amount of JUG. I got pretty good with it, and my favorite line after using the LMG to cut down a couple of guys trying to get rid of me shelling their base was, "Thanks for the ammo". Guaranteed to increase butthurt 100%.

I don't know when you started or quit, but I started in beta and quit around the time they added a bunch of weapon side-grades and weapon XP. The developers turned to shit not long after that, so I figured I got out at a good time. I can't even remember my character name now, but the vast majority of my time played was on SLD, followed very distantly by RDR and JUG, and I never could get the hang of INF.

 

[shihonage]

I started in beta and quit a couple of months ago. Nobody used saber anymore, because its avoidance has become as instinctive as a man protecting his balls from being kicked.

I stopped using DMB as main a long time ago. The game's balance turned to shit after they gave light classes DMB-like weapons, and their netcode allows the light classes to get away with murder.

So at this point the only reasonable heavy is Brute with Nova Colt and Survival Pack, because I can hitscan most people with it, and it moves 25% faster than other heavies. Jug can be situationally useful but people using custom crosshairs and visible hitboxes and whatnot with SLD can cream most other classes...

... except Brute.

And then I read some more shit about weapon reload exploits which explained how some people managed to squeeze more shots into a similar time interval... there's just a lot of terrible coding and exploits involved there...

In comparison my time with Quake Wars was p. awesome despite having highly questionable wireless connection at the time. The netcode was just rock-solid, everything happened as you'd expect.

 

[Blaine]

I quit in August 2012. I remember that because that's when our Hatteras vacation was, and then I had a busy couple of weeks when I got back... and I found I'd gotten incredibly rusty at the game in just a few weeks' time. At that point I figured I'd had enough anyway, and stopped playing. I must have averaged a couple of hours per day while I was active.

The fact that you played two years longer than I did may have something to do with your seeing a lot more bots, since Hi-Rez and the game went to shit.

That reminds me, I made a bunch of TA nice memes xD myself.

 

[SuicideBunny]

all that cheat talk makes me remember jumpgate and netdevil stating that any more people hacking server unannounced will be banned...

 

[Destroid]

When they took the whiteout grandes from the raider I was so sad

 

[Blaine]

When they took the whiteout grandes from the raider I was so sad

I could never get into RDR, except on Crossfire where for some reason I found it kicked major ass. On Raindance, I loved playing JUG.

For everything else (by "everything else" I largely mean base rape; I didn't much like defending or carrying the flag, unless the team needed it), I always preferred SLD. The SLD spinfusor, Thumper DX, Utility Pack, and Grenades allowed being an immense faggot, blowing your load on the flag as rapidly as possible, getting up to shenanigans inside, or analizing enemy JUGs.

I had so many amazing moments playing SLD that you'd really had to have be there for, like Blue Plating a passing PTH in midfield for the first time due not to luck but to the preternatural target-leading instincts that come from playing for an ungodly long time; executing some perfect insane maneuver and Blue Plating (or grenading) the enemy PTH 0.4 seconds before he was about to score; or punishing stupid TCNs or BRTs time and time again inside their base until I wonder why they haven't ragequit yet.

The rarest thing in TA was meeting a highly skilled TCN (I'm not talking about SMG hitscan aimbotting either), and holy fuck, a good TCN is fucking ANNOYING... especially on Arx Novena.

 

[Destroid]

Yeah I wasn't too happy when they gave TCN that buffed thumper. I played since beta before they even had the current class system so I witnessed a lot of change in the game, not always for good. Mostly I played pathfinder with the bow towards the end of my run.

 

[bonescraper]

So, i found this big boy on the galaxy map.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VY_Canis_Majoris



Since they actually bothered to rerpesent hypergiants with their on sprites, and since the game usues 1:1 scale for celestial objects and distances, this thing will be a sight to behold. I can't wait to go close enoguh to see it in my own ship.

 

[Trash]

That's pretty fucking awesome. One Kickstarter that really has eclipsed all my limited expectations and has by all reports turned out into something neat already. Can't wait to get my grubby paws on this one.

 

[Runciter]

So the recent removal of any remaining semblance of Newtonian flight in the last beta update has caused a huge uproar on the Frontier forums and it looks like FD will be reintroducing it in the "Flight Assist Off" mode. Who would have thought that the unwashed masses would prefer a space ship actually behaving like it's a ship in space?