Forums » Bugs
Station guards still used in exploit
Station guards attacking a TKOS player are unable to distinguish when they are hitting a player cap ship. This exploit was used again yesterday where a player moved his trident to NFZ after being de-sheilded. The exploiting player parked his ship in the dock, causing the guards to shoot the cap ship to try to reach him. The player cap ship was destroyed with little effort from the exploiting player.
That's one perspective. Is this a bug or a feature? It's been like this for many years. Is the NFZ supposed to be a safe haven? I don't know what the devs intend, they can tell us.
That's one perspective. Is this a bug or a feature? It's been like this for many years.
I mean.. how would this possibly be a "feature"? Do you think we intended for players to use the station guards and strike forces to "help" you to destroy innocent and unrelated vessels, by intentionally triggering TKOS?
There are a lot of comments that one might reasonably make about that.. but I'm hard-pressed to imagine how someone could view it as an intentional design goal.
Lots of things about the game have "been like that for many years", like for instance, the fact that the game is slow to load and stutters the renderer on "unexpected" asset loads (like someone warping in).
But, does anyone think that was a "feature"? Of course not, it's just a technical limitation.
This is just another technical limitation. It's a problematic issue to solve in a completely generic and broad way, because (at first glance) it requires NPCs to start doing a ray cast constantly while engaging with targets, to make sure there's no other ship in-between. You scale that up to every second, with every ship (and every turret), and suddenly a capship battle becomes an impossibly high CPU-load on the server.
So, now you're trying to find other ways of optimizing it.. "well, it can only check in a NFZ.. maybe.. or only certain types of bots, or maybe they only check sporadically" blah blah. It gets more complex, more involved to implement, and requires lots of testing for various configurations, plus on-going thought for future sector changes.
I'm sure there's some way for us to work around it, that's fairly reasonable; we've talked about it a few times internally. But we haven't put the development energy into it yet. That is what it is, we're a small team, and obviously we've also been a small team "for many years" as well.
But, it is not a "feature", or desirable.
Anyway, noted that it is still an issue.
I mean.. how would this possibly be a "feature"? Do you think we intended for players to use the station guards and strike forces to "help" you to destroy innocent and unrelated vessels, by intentionally triggering TKOS?
There are a lot of comments that one might reasonably make about that.. but I'm hard-pressed to imagine how someone could view it as an intentional design goal.
Lots of things about the game have "been like that for many years", like for instance, the fact that the game is slow to load and stutters the renderer on "unexpected" asset loads (like someone warping in).
But, does anyone think that was a "feature"? Of course not, it's just a technical limitation.
This is just another technical limitation. It's a problematic issue to solve in a completely generic and broad way, because (at first glance) it requires NPCs to start doing a ray cast constantly while engaging with targets, to make sure there's no other ship in-between. You scale that up to every second, with every ship (and every turret), and suddenly a capship battle becomes an impossibly high CPU-load on the server.
So, now you're trying to find other ways of optimizing it.. "well, it can only check in a NFZ.. maybe.. or only certain types of bots, or maybe they only check sporadically" blah blah. It gets more complex, more involved to implement, and requires lots of testing for various configurations, plus on-going thought for future sector changes.
I'm sure there's some way for us to work around it, that's fairly reasonable; we've talked about it a few times internally. But we haven't put the development energy into it yet. That is what it is, we're a small team, and obviously we've also been a small team "for many years" as well.
But, it is not a "feature", or desirable.
Anyway, noted that it is still an issue.
Ignorant idea...but perhaps victim cap ships are protected from damage by guards entirely until the 15 minutes expires or they leave the sector? This bug is only exploitable where a cap ship is involved...or the station compensates the player an amount equal to or greater than the insurance mission cost (hypothetical lawsuit)
Make a Suggestions post, please.