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ECCM SPAMMING cheat, suggestions for control |
Grmm
Grand Admiral
Joined: March 30, 2004
Posts: 8
|  Posted: 2005-07-29 01:33
Eccm spamming is turning the eccm on and off in rapid succession. The purpose is to bypass the normal cloaking operation of the K'luth, and reveal thier location.
Normal eccm use raises the signature of any ships in the surrounding area by leaving it on and allowing a ship with a low or negative signature to be seen.
Cloak is cloak, darnit! When did Captain Kirk ever have an easy time finding a cloaked ship till it fired or became uncloaked? The K'luth ships are very weak in comparison to the same ranked ships in the other factions and need cloak as the balancing factor. When they fire they need to be uncloaked. The balance against the K'luth normally is the firepower of the other factions! Using eccm spamming to cheat the game code and reveal the K'luth unfairly is just that, CHEATING.
Now here is the other interesting unbalanced issue with the K'luth being able to hide. If as a K'luth you use ecm's to try and offset the loss of effective cloaking: They don't work! surprise! They find you and fire weapons at you just fine (same as cloaked) with a negative signature! When you are ICC: They work great! Almost as good as cloak! Maybe its because the K'luth don't normally run eccm's and spam them? The choices... hmmmm.. Get rid of the cloak, and put what in its place?.. Run eccms to find the (cloaked )ICC and raise your own signature. Do like a lot of people are doing now and spam beacons all over the place?
I posed the question in the chat room on eccm spamming and received a good question. How could it be enforced? I think the answer is in how it can be controlled. If it can't be fixed fast in the code, its my suggestion to add a long time delay on eccm use. At least one player cannot sit there and turn it on and off in rapid succession to target all the K'luth. Believe me it works! I played ICC and checked it out. It also seems to work a long distance away from players with - signatures.
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Nax
Marshal
Joined: May 12, 2005
Posts: 768
| Posted: 2005-07-29 06:19
In general, yes. If you're "spamming" eccm by turning it on/off rapidly to gain an advantage, that would clearly be inappropriate (cheating). But, being able to ping cloaked units does not require you to do so. The simple act of using the system/turning it on is enough.
Aka, using eccm precisely as intended results in cloak-pinging.
At this point in time, ECCM pinging is not ruled an exploit. Further, at this time, the ability for ECCM to ping cloaked units has not yet been determined to be a feature or something to change. Although, it is more likely that a change is coming.
Nax
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Sauur
Chief Marshal
Praetorian Wolves
Joined: November 30, 2004
Posts: 475
| Posted: 2005-07-29 06:48
Ahh, Now I understand how I was being tracked and fired upon by a destroyer and station for about 5 mins even though I had never uncloaked or attacked anyone.
They were constantly pinging me and predicting where I was going to be and manually firing, though never hit. Just could not work out how they always knew exactly where i was.
Now I am aware - the new tactic is cloak and then dodge constant enemy fire for as long as you choose to stay in the area.
At least now I know the bug I can play accordingly.
I should think area of effect weapons would be a nuisance though.
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Enterprise
Chief Marshal
Joined: May 19, 2002
Posts: 2576
From: Hawthorne, Nevada
| Posted: 2005-07-29 07:45
I decided to check the RoC for the exact wording...
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3.1.9 Cracking / System Exploitation
d. Exploiting any bug or weakness in the DarkSpace Game System is forbidden.
This includes not only the exploits listed in section 3.3 of this document, Game Exploits,
---------><---------
Players are required to communicate any bugs or weaknesses they discover to PaleStar via email or any official bug-reporting facilities provided by PaleStar. Distribution and/or publication of information about any bugs or weaknesses in the DarkSpace Game System for the purposes of encouraging exploitation by any other DarkSpace Players and/or Staff is forbidden.
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I think this is self explanitory...
If ECCM pinging was designed to be there, I think that is the single stupidest and most flawed idea or concept ever thought up for K'Luth,
-Ent
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Koda
Marshal
Fatal Squadron
Joined: August 29, 2002
Posts: 1384
| Posted: 2005-07-29 09:47
Your absolutely right Ent, the kluth are the stupidest thing ever thought up. 
The kluth Faction has ruined this game ever since it was put in. There has been nothing but exploit after exploit with this faction, only leading to an overall unbalanced game for atleast the last 3 years that Ive played. I wouldnt feel this way about the kluth if these problems had been worked out in the year 02. But seeing how we rapidly Nearing 06, i dont feel so bad about what im saying.
I would rather see a 3rd and a 4th Humanesq faction before actually wanting to bring back what the kluth were.
But who knows
we could always Juice up all the ruptors to 10x dmg and make the AM mines do 20x dmg and send emails to all of EVIL and PB players that never play anymore, just so we can get good old warm fuzzy feelings about the kluth again.
so to sum this all up,
I dont think you and the Dev's are reading from the same page anymore..
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Binks
1st Rear Admiral
Joined: November 28, 2003
Posts: 469
| Posted: 2005-07-29 10:14
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On 2005-07-29 09:47, CharAznable wrote:
The kluth Faction has ruined this game ever since it was put in. There has been nothing but exploit after exploit with this faction, only leading to an overall unbalanced game for atleast the last 3 years that Ive played. I wouldnt feel this way about the kluth if these problems had been worked out in the year 02. But seeing how we rapidly Nearing 06, i dont feel so bad about what im saying.
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Lol...a classic MMO arguement..."They're the only faction who cheats"...every faction cheats, and every faction has had equal opportunity to cheat.
I propose that, to fix eccm pinging, after eccm has been activated the cloak resets itself to draw enough power to cloak it at whatever the highest signature it had while cloaked simply put, if I turn on 4 lvl 0 eccms the luth's sig would jump 12, the cloak would then compensate by putting out enough energy to make it's sig -12. Then if I ping eccm again, nothing happens because all it's doing is bringing his sig up to 0...
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Captain Sternn
Grand Admiral
Joined: March 18, 2004
Posts: 225
| Posted: 2005-07-29 13:07
I don't have a problem with eccm pinging to uncover a cloaked ship, but it should be that ...pinging.The device needs to have a hefty timer on it..its only meant to give someone a momentary flash that says "hey wake up there might be a cloaked ship in the area"...not as it is used now with lots of people cycling them on and off like now, so in a fleet vs. fleet situation it gives a almost constant update on enemy locations...not to mention the new fighters seem particually adept at firing on a ship with an intermintant signal.
Perhaps even an area is also limited to number of eccm running in said area at once?
I don't claim to have the answers but maybe all that eccm and intermitently flashing and the AI defences all locking on and firing on said targets at once might be a cause of some of the lag experienced in close fleet planet operations?I know its a bit of a stretch but i'm assuming that AI usage would be more when it initially aquires,tracks,intercepts and fires on target..whats the cost of 50 fighters...missiles and the rest of the stuff you'ld normally encounter when those objects attack a ship that is mostly there..then occasionally lose target then reaquire...I don't know...just sounds resource intensive to me.
I propose 1 eccm ping per 20 secs with a built in latency of 2000 millisecs...enough to let you know you might not be alone but useless for actual targeting...and fighters/missiles wouldn't react to these sensor ghosts.
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Enterprise
Chief Marshal
Joined: May 19, 2002
Posts: 2576
From: Hawthorne, Nevada
| Posted: 2005-07-29 13:41
Quote:
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On 2005-07-29 10:14, Binks(Give Midshipmen Sup/Engy) wrote:
Quote:
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On 2005-07-29 09:47, CharAznable wrote:
The kluth Faction has ruined this game ever since it was put in. There has been nothing but exploit after exploit with this faction, only leading to an overall unbalanced game for atleast the last 3 years that Ive played. I wouldnt feel this way about the kluth if these problems had been worked out in the year 02. But seeing how we rapidly Nearing 06, i dont feel so bad about what im saying.
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Lol...a classic MMO arguement..."They're the only faction who cheats"...every faction cheats, and every faction has had equal opportunity to cheat.
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Classic, yet valid.
Many older Kluth in every version exploited and abused to the very fringe of legit every possible thing they could. I can fully say, for both ICC and UGTO, those two factions have never gone that far to win.
There are KLuth players who play for fun, but most of the time I run into older Kluth players, who use every trick in the book to win win win. If they don't it turns to complain complain complain.
Note I said some Kluth, not all.
However the KLuth faction has been the source of the most devious of these exploits, and I would not be sorry in the least to see it gone.
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I propose that, to fix eccm pinging, after eccm has been activated the cloak resets itself to draw enough power to cloak it at whatever the highest signature it had while cloaked simply put, if I turn on 4 lvl 0 eccms the luth's sig would jump 12, the cloak would then compensate by putting out enough energy to make it's sig -12. Then if I ping eccm again, nothing happens because all it's doing is bringing his sig up to 0...
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A quick explanation of how ECCM pinging works.
For the most part, ECCM pinging relies on latency to work right. The ECCM pinger, simply turns it on normally first, this rarely reveals the enemy cloaked ship.
When its pressed rapidly, the cloak does compensate fast enough, just not fast enough for the server, for this reason, it appears that the Kluth cloak lags behind to the pinger and their allies, and reveals those ships.
This is more of a bug than a function of the game...
-Ent
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Nax
Marshal
Joined: May 12, 2005
Posts: 768
| Posted: 2005-07-29 15:25
Perhaps you are misunderstanding my statement above.
At this time, I am making no official comment about whether it should or should not be possible to use ECCM to 'ping' a Cloaked unit.
I am, however, Officially stating that because the mere use of the ECCM system creates the pinging, that players using the system precisely as you did under 1.482 AND precisely as you do in the tutorial...that this does not fall under exploits at this time.
However, this does not mean that the use is encouraged.
Nax
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Shigernafy
Admiral
Joined: May 29, 2001
Posts: 5726
From: The Land of Taxation without Representation
| Posted: 2005-07-29 15:44
In other words, you need not "ping" in order to get the pinging effect.
To control it, then, the solution would be to ban all types of Electronic Warfare devices.
Not a pretty picture.
(Just giving you the more practical side of the issue)
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GothThug {C?}
Fleet Admiral
Joined: June 29, 2005
Posts: 2932
| Posted: 2005-07-29 21:07
oh great so yer saying if you rule it as an exploit they cant do it? good. however they're gonna disobey the rule and Ping anyways which is why if it happens im gonna be reporting some bad players I.E jack and his ECCM Pinging Habit >:)
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Doran
Chief Marshal
Galactic Navy
Joined: March 29, 2003
Posts: 4032
From: The Gideon Unit
| Posted: 2005-07-29 21:46
where did i read this... dont see it in the dev log but thats kinda where id expect it to be..
somebody [important] mentioned [offhand remark or forum post] that eccm [hax] now affects the energy drain of cloak [cant see em] like the ecm-style cloaks [old]
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Shigernafy
Admiral
Joined: May 29, 2001
Posts: 5726
From: The Land of Taxation without Representation
| Posted: 2005-07-29 21:57
I think I suggested that at one point, but I've never seen it officially.
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Doran
Chief Marshal
Galactic Navy
Joined: March 29, 2003
Posts: 4032
From: The Gideon Unit
| Posted: 2005-07-29 22:00
and it'd work too..
get to leave cloak as totaly undetectable while is running, give human players a method of finding kluth if they use a bit of teamwork, and a reasoon to leave eccm on or off instead of toggling it, and cuts down on the beacon spam except in cases where you really need that special slot for a reactor or ecm like for a bomb run
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Maskerade
Grand Admiral
Galactic Navy
Joined: March 21, 2002
Posts: 638
From: Canada
| Posted: 2005-07-30 03:55
Quote:
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On 2005-07-29 21:46, Doran (Give Midshipmen Sup/Engy) wrote:
where did i read this... dont see it in the dev log but thats kinda where id expect it to be..
somebody [important] mentioned [offhand remark or forum post] that eccm [hax] now affects the energy drain of cloak [cant see em] like the ecm-style cloaks [old]
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the higher the ECCM the higher the energy cost on the cloak. For the unbelievers grab a kluth scout or frigate and upgrade the engines ( a must as cloak will suck you dry without upgrading ) and go to a planet. It is easier to see in the smaller ships, the higher the ECCM, the slower you must go to keep power balanced.
It was something that was noticed while fighting around a planet that had crazy amounts of sensors bases - think it was 5 or 6. I can normally do about 11gu (no aux power)and stay cloaked with balanced power, in this case it was closer to 6-7gu(with aux power)
As for the pinging, there should be a delay on the pinging until the device is active for a set period of time. This way wearing out the key gives the player no advantage. Beacons effectively remove the cloak and the Kluth must decloak to do anything anyways. We can surprise attack but we are no longer first strike so that shifts balance (countering the cloak)alot right there.
[ This Message was edited by: Maskerade {C?} on 2005-07-30 04:02 ]
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