DevTracker: About Interdiction

In some systems interdictions will be a crime. You need to have a legal reason to interdict someone - so they should be wanted.

Interdictions is actually more controlled than free form flight, so it's not quite the same thing.

I also want to stress that automatically following ships is not something we're terribly keen on, and it's certainly not the core component of a grouping system, by a considerable margin.

So I kind of refute a the claim that not having it means there is no grouping. As I said before: the goal here is to enable players to have fun together.

Assuming that the initial interdiction is one on one, surely the skill in piloting from both the defenders and attackers will be the deciding feature in terms of who turns up to help.

I take the point about a trader trying to escape, but: most ships can survive a bit of a beating and interdiction can take time, so as long as we can signal it clearly enough, additional defenders can muster and start getting ready to help even before the interdiction completes. The result could be that (again, based on player skill – but that's a good thing, right?) the actual time "alone" with the bad guy might be very small.

Interdiction is not an instant affair. It can take a variable amount of time based primarily on each player's ability.

If we can give wing members enough feedback quickly enough (including highlighting the interdiction event), we might be able to create a situation where unless the victim is astonishing out-played during interdiction, their wing men would gain valuable time to react, start to close distance, target the ships involved, then (again, as I've suggested might be possible) use relaxed requirements for dropping out. In an extreme case, given long enough, some or all wingmen (from both sides of the engagement) might be able to drop in almost at the same time as the initial interdiction.

Of course, there are interesting corner cases, such as ships attempting to "wrap up" escorts by interdicting them, leaving the "prey" vulnerable to other aggressors. Possibly it might be that in such a case the prey would want to act like an escort, just to keep near to its defending players. There's also the argument that to break up a group in such a way would require at least as much skill as to defend against it.

There are lots of interesting design challenges and options whatever happens, that's for sure.

Putting things another way: many times a challenge has been issued to us Devs that there's nothing to do in super cruise, no reason to employ skill while flying. I think that drive slaving potentially only adds to this, which is why i'm cold on it, whilst the alternatives should actually promote game play. So this seems reasonable to me.

So it's my hope that by explaining things, folks can see why we make the decisions we do – it's to make and support as good a game as we can make.

What i mean is actually more about the way super cruise acceleration works. We deal with absolutely massive variation in speeds (players can be travelling at 30kms per second or hundreds of times the speed of light, with vast acceleration and deceleration). It's (assuming you can find and communicate with the person) not too difficult to get into the same area as other ships (relatively speaking of course, super cruise distances are huge), whilst technically challenging to do it automatically if you suffer any game communication issue.

For me, the real issues here are things like feedback (trying to find out where the hell everyone is) and simple things like finicky dropping out at the right spot (again, having to know where it is) complying with the fairly precise requirements (distance, speed, angle). These are much more likely to be much easier to tweak and get basically the same result: players that can easily find, travel and transition together.

The reason interdictions have a "behind target" requirement is to prevent them from being too easy to initiate. The act of circling around/manoeuvring into position also sometimes allows observant pilots the chance to work out that they are in danger.

There's some amount of sci-fi magic context in that the act of interdiction attempts to force the vessels to face away from the direction of travel, disrupting the frame shift space compression (which also fits in with our technical requirement of not allowing backwards travel).

I think it's perhaps a bit of a non-sequitur to suggest that because FAO combat at standard speeds is deep (assuming you mean EFAO combat in Elite, of course, apologies if you did not) then FAO travel in super cruise is equally deep.

The truth is that FAO in super cruise wasn't ever supported for the game. It got into a live build more or less by mistake, and introduced some technical headaches into the bargain. Because we never intended to support it for super cruise, there was no mechanical benefit to doing it, whilst on the flip side it made dropping out at the correct place unnecessarily difficult.

However, I'm not going to say that people could not possibly enjoy FAO super cruise, or that it took away from the ambience. Sliding past a stellar body at superluminal speeds – ya, I can see that's pretty cool.

Right now though, we're at a stage where to put it back in, in a way that doesn't break the tech and make the coders club us senseless in anger, means three things: some decent time spent on making it worthwhile, in concordance with our other game mechanics, such as interdiction, and the acceptance that it would have to be limited (no more than around 90 degrees angle from direction of travel.)

Like I said before, we've got some ideas that I think might be pretty cool, but I'm afraid it's going to have to wait, we've simply got bigger fish to fry at the moment.

I hope this at least helps to explain our position a bit, though I'm not saying that you should automatically agree with it, of course.