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Players are not cheating in PvP fighter combat.
Players have made increasing numbers of accusations of PvP "cheating" against one another, over the last few years.
Some amount of this always happens in any multiplayer game, but it's been particularly intense for us, lately.
Additionally, these kinds of assertions are corrosive to the game community:
- Observers of public accusations, like newbies, may assume that cheating is real and commonplace, as it is in some other games.
- Even in private discussions, groups of unhappy players may form "echo-chambers" where they support each other's misconceptions and become angrier and more frustrated over time.
We take the possibility of cheating very seriously, and we investigate things intensely.
Cheating in VO combat has never been a trivial thing, the game server is heavily monitored and safeguarded by a number of different systems, some of which outright prevent bad actions, while others passively throw "alarms" internally to tell us something is amiss.
Still, with so many people reporting issues to us, we were concerned that some new exploit might have emerged, perhaps something too "subtle" for our existing monitoring and prevention systems.
As a result, we halted most other development projects and dedicated much of the last six months to an extremely deep-dive on monitoring the game and building higher precision tools to monitor and prevent any type of PvP cheating. (Far longer than we expected, but it's a really technically involved issue).
Given all the factors involved: player latency, small disparities in clock timing, client and sector physics timestep framerates, and the fact that we're essentially chasing something we cannot independently reproduce, this resulted in an unprecedented amount of log analysis and game monitoring.
I can now tell you, with certainty, that we have found no evidence of PvP cheating over a extensive amount of time, including a variety of specifically-reported "cheating" instances.
I can use the phrase "with certainty", which I don't use lightly, because we're working with the actual logged locations of players in space, on a per-second basis.
Thus, we can see that if "Player X" (with a ship loadout of known-mass and thrust/drag curves) was at Y location, with velocity of Z, and then a second later was at Y+N location with a velocity of Z+V, we can determine their maximum accelerations over the period, and their peak velocities.
There are certain unique and rare cases where players may exceed velocity or acceleration limits, like getting thrown by a major explosion. But, aside from situations like that, we have seen no evidence of players exceeding speed or acceleration thresholds.
I want to be clear: We've examined weeks and weeks of logged data, both just random gameplay periods as well as reported incidents of "cheating", and it was definitively NOT happening.
We basically built an offline "simulator" to process per-second log information, and calculate the relative physics, and then left a big machine to crunch across a large aggregated log of many, many play interactions, and found.. nothing out of the ordinary.
There is no room for doubt in these situations, the data is very clear.
I have some concern that, even in the face of our definitive certainly, some players may still cling to the idea of "cheating". We've had difficult problems with conspiracy theories in the past coloring the perspective of the game community. I hope that won't happen here.
Additional anti-cheat systems are also being rolled out in the game:
As I mentioned earlier, we've always had systems in place that monitored player activity and did server-side simulations to "sanity check" values received from the game client..
The "You don't have enough energy to jump" type messages, for instance, those come from the server, not the client. Your powercell has always been simulated server-side with high precision. If anyone spent a second longer on turbo than expected, or fired an extra shot than should be possible, that system would notice.
We've now expanded on the systems to include a higher-precision player motion simulation than we had previously. Basically, the sector "virtually flies" a ship of the same configuration as yours through every motion claimed by your client, to determine the validity of those motions.
Again, we had versions of this already, but because of our concern about a possible "subtle" attack that only gave minor benefits, this new system has much greater precision and accuracy.
Similarly, we've always had systems that prevented shots from showing up where they shouldn't, or of the wrong type for the given addon. But, these have similarly been changed to be far more precise.
Basically: Don't worry about people cheating traditional fighter-based PvP
I'm specifically talking about anything directly impacting the "virtual physics" mechanics of PvP: weapon cheating, speed cheating, acceleration, powercell energy, turbo, etc.
It was already not very "meaningfully feasible" to begin with, and it's becoming effectively impossible.
We can say "effectively impossible", because we DO NOT trust the game client, and if a given online game title is willing to do high-accuracy server-side simulations of all player activity, anything "out of bounds" becomes evident.
Of course, future bugs or exploits could always happen, and we will continue to welcome Support Tickets on major concerns (always include your incident date/time).
But, in general: Stop worrying about it, and please stop accusing anyone else of cheating.
So what then, has been happening? Why do people claim cheating is a problem?
As far as we can tell, several different symptoms have contributed to the misconception of cheating in VO.
I will try to enumerate some of these cases below:
"I saw shots go right through Player X and not damage them!"
The sector is the absolute arbiter of "game reality", and it constantly makes decisions about whether everything appears to be "good" or not. This is a VERY longstanding and old system, which prevents cheating: it is not a new thing.
For instance, when you get the "beep" response on shooting another player, that is because the server (sector) has done a number of calculations on timing and location and determined that your "hit" was good.
If, however, the sector does not determine your hit was good, the hit may simply not be allowed to do any damage. This happens every day to a small minority of shots, because of player ping times and occasional packet loss (we actively monitor hit ratios).
Thus it is entirely possible to see remote shots from another player go "through" someone if the sector never claims they hit anything. The player who fired those shots will see them hit locally on their client (without a beep), but other "remote" players may not see them collide.
"Player X shot me, and then I got a message about 'high latency detected'!"
This is a system called Prediction Monitoring behaving as-expected, triggered by your network connection problems. The system was relased in July of 2020 after extensive requests on Suggestions.
Essentially, this prevents players from grossly manipulating their own ping times to cause their ship to jump around and be difficult to hit, which was a problem.
Instead, the server monitors your "predicted" versus "reported" path, and if the disparity is too great, the server will seize your ship and re-position it to where it thought you should have been (meaning: you won't "jump around").
This positional reset can be disorienting, so to minimize impact on PvE for high-latency players (botting, mining, etc), the system only enables if you're near an adversary who has fired a shot within 3000 meters of you. Essentially, it only enables on PvP combat.
This is a purely server-side mechanism, it is not influenced by anything other than the unique trajectories of individual players, which is impacted by their network latency (ping) and chosen movements.
Generally speaking, the system is tuned to not be a problem for anyone under about a 500ms ping, so most of the time it should be fine. But, the internet being what it is.. packet loss can happen to anyone: It doesn't matter how fancy your personal "fiber" is, the internet is a long wire, and it may traverse a lot of busy routers between you and our server.
At any rate, this system does not mean anyone is "cheating", nor does it forcing a position-reset on someone mean that they were "trying to cheat". It prevents an old, bad behaviour, with occasional negative ramifications for some people on really high pings.
"Player X is impossibly fast! He caught up to me in my Greyhound at full Turbo."
There seem to be several issues contributing to these misconceptions:
1) Vectoring: Unless a player is absolutely "dead-astern" of you (directly behind) when you hit Turbo, there's a very good chance they can make use of vectoring to catch you, by predicting your movements, and utilizing any small advantage of mass, rotation and acceleration curves (more on that later).
To put this simply, your adversary can "head you off at the pass" if they successfully guess where you're headed, and have an angle that gives them a small head-start on moving in that direction.
Predictive-analysis of an adversary is basically the most important combat skill in Vendetta Online, so if you're facing anyone of PvP capability, they're going to be pretty good at that.
Notably, a lot of players also seem to be pretty poor at judging when someone is "directly behind" them. We've had people submit all kinds of cases where they claimed this was true, and it quickly became apparent that they (the reporter/observer) were just wrong: their adversary was actually off to one side and flying a shorter distance to an interception point (the definition of vectoring).
For more information, here's a lengthy post from 2013 explicitly describing how advanced vectoring works, with some ship comparisons. Obviously, that post is over a decade old, this is not a "new thing".
2) Additionally, your adversary may have already hit Turbo before you did, and their ship's drag curve may be different from yours, and the network packet showing you that they're gaining may not have reached you yet.
If you consider that two players may easily be separated by 200ms (say both have 100ms ping times, and all packets transit the server), it's entirely feasible for a skilled PvP be making gains almost 1/4 second before you even realize it.
3) If you've launched from a station recently, there can be an additional challenge, as the station-launch animation prevents you from initiating turbo for two seconds. On the other hand, your adversary may have become aware of your launch almost immediately, and had 1.8 seconds to pick their vectoring goal (your likely jump-out destination) and be on their turbo first.
4) Beyond this, there is also more variation between ships than people may realize. Distribution of mass is a factor, and that means that in ships with equal mass and spin-torque, the one with a lower polar moment of inertia will still turn more effectively.
This is important if two players are zig-zagging (vectoring) through an asteroid field, and the pursuer is able to turn more quickly. After a few course-changes, the pursuer may have gained due to fractions of a second in turn speed.
If you compare a relatively long-thin ship against one that is a rounded flat model, the latter more evenly distributes mass across a disc. That means, given equal length and spin torque, the long-thin ship has to overcome more inertia at the outer ends when maneuvering, versus the disc-shaped vessel.
This likely contributes to statements, like those in the 2013 thread linked above, where TRS explicitly states "The greyhound is not a nationalist solution and has problems because it can't vector very well."
"Player X keeps discovering my hidden capship too quickly! Plugin cheats!"
We've had this asserted a bunch of times against a variety of players, and thus far, we've found nothing to support any actual cheating.
I think it's more likely that complaining players fail to realize the vulnerability of their own psychology. People are terrible at generating random numbers. They're similarly terrible at picking "random" locations.
Of all the empty sectors in a system, there are some that people tend to choose more often than others. People may not want to jump across an asteroid line, and be relatively close to a wormhole, etc.
Additionally, transiting empty sectors to search them doesn't take very long: the sectors load quickly, and it's easy to assess if they're empty and move on to another one.
From the sector-search patterns we've seen from players, they are not using exhaustive plugins or scripts to automate this, as that would probably be slower and less effective than their "good guessing" based on their personal experience.
The game itself allows multi-jump navigation, so simply shift-clicking on a bunch of likely sectors and checking them one-by-one is already pretty easy.
We are always open to on-going game tweaks and adjustment.
If some particular situation is overpowered and needs to be re-balanced in some way, we have a Suggestions Forum for that.
Of course, any change would need to be framed rationally, we aren't going to nerf X ship because "(specific person) keeps killing me with that".
Similarly, framing everything as "cheating" is unhelpful, and burns up huge amounts of developer time in essentially chasing "ghosts" which stem from human bias.
Vendetta Online is a skill based game.
That is the point. We should celebrate that, it's always been a core part of what we offer that is different from many other titles, particularly in MMORPG genre.
You will inevitably encounter people who have greater skill than you. That's okay! It can be a reminder to dust the rust off, or learn something new, or spend some time in "pews" with an adversary.
Public accusations of cheating is considered Toxicity and will result in administrative action.
We made the following statement back in March of 2023, which is becoming codified into an updated Terms of Service:
"Public accusations of cheating, on game chat, Discord or the Forums, are considered toxicity, and can result in the loss of chat privileges. If people have reason to seriously suspect an exploit or genuine cheating scenario, then opening a ticket to report the date/time/individual is the only logical course of action. Publicly accusing other people randomly, in a game that runs over a highly-variable and sometimes broken Internet, is always unhelpful (and usually incorrect)."
Again, as is obvious by our careful and technically-intensive analysis and response over the past half-year: we take accusations of cheating very seriously.
But, particularly when it comes to PvP combat, they are usually a big waste of everyone's time (especially developer time). Cheating, when it does happen, tends to emerge more in the economy, mining, and related areas, not PvP.
The accusations stoke misplaced "outrage" in the community, make the game less fun to be around, and drives away newbies and veterans alike.
So, moving forward, let's maybe just have fun shooting space-lasers at the other virtual ships, and worry a bit less about phantom issues like this?
Some amount of this always happens in any multiplayer game, but it's been particularly intense for us, lately.
Additionally, these kinds of assertions are corrosive to the game community:
- Observers of public accusations, like newbies, may assume that cheating is real and commonplace, as it is in some other games.
- Even in private discussions, groups of unhappy players may form "echo-chambers" where they support each other's misconceptions and become angrier and more frustrated over time.
We take the possibility of cheating very seriously, and we investigate things intensely.
Cheating in VO combat has never been a trivial thing, the game server is heavily monitored and safeguarded by a number of different systems, some of which outright prevent bad actions, while others passively throw "alarms" internally to tell us something is amiss.
Still, with so many people reporting issues to us, we were concerned that some new exploit might have emerged, perhaps something too "subtle" for our existing monitoring and prevention systems.
As a result, we halted most other development projects and dedicated much of the last six months to an extremely deep-dive on monitoring the game and building higher precision tools to monitor and prevent any type of PvP cheating. (Far longer than we expected, but it's a really technically involved issue).
Given all the factors involved: player latency, small disparities in clock timing, client and sector physics timestep framerates, and the fact that we're essentially chasing something we cannot independently reproduce, this resulted in an unprecedented amount of log analysis and game monitoring.
I can now tell you, with certainty, that we have found no evidence of PvP cheating over a extensive amount of time, including a variety of specifically-reported "cheating" instances.
I can use the phrase "with certainty", which I don't use lightly, because we're working with the actual logged locations of players in space, on a per-second basis.
Thus, we can see that if "Player X" (with a ship loadout of known-mass and thrust/drag curves) was at Y location, with velocity of Z, and then a second later was at Y+N location with a velocity of Z+V, we can determine their maximum accelerations over the period, and their peak velocities.
There are certain unique and rare cases where players may exceed velocity or acceleration limits, like getting thrown by a major explosion. But, aside from situations like that, we have seen no evidence of players exceeding speed or acceleration thresholds.
I want to be clear: We've examined weeks and weeks of logged data, both just random gameplay periods as well as reported incidents of "cheating", and it was definitively NOT happening.
We basically built an offline "simulator" to process per-second log information, and calculate the relative physics, and then left a big machine to crunch across a large aggregated log of many, many play interactions, and found.. nothing out of the ordinary.
There is no room for doubt in these situations, the data is very clear.
I have some concern that, even in the face of our definitive certainly, some players may still cling to the idea of "cheating". We've had difficult problems with conspiracy theories in the past coloring the perspective of the game community. I hope that won't happen here.
Additional anti-cheat systems are also being rolled out in the game:
As I mentioned earlier, we've always had systems in place that monitored player activity and did server-side simulations to "sanity check" values received from the game client..
The "You don't have enough energy to jump" type messages, for instance, those come from the server, not the client. Your powercell has always been simulated server-side with high precision. If anyone spent a second longer on turbo than expected, or fired an extra shot than should be possible, that system would notice.
We've now expanded on the systems to include a higher-precision player motion simulation than we had previously. Basically, the sector "virtually flies" a ship of the same configuration as yours through every motion claimed by your client, to determine the validity of those motions.
Again, we had versions of this already, but because of our concern about a possible "subtle" attack that only gave minor benefits, this new system has much greater precision and accuracy.
Similarly, we've always had systems that prevented shots from showing up where they shouldn't, or of the wrong type for the given addon. But, these have similarly been changed to be far more precise.
Basically: Don't worry about people cheating traditional fighter-based PvP
I'm specifically talking about anything directly impacting the "virtual physics" mechanics of PvP: weapon cheating, speed cheating, acceleration, powercell energy, turbo, etc.
It was already not very "meaningfully feasible" to begin with, and it's becoming effectively impossible.
We can say "effectively impossible", because we DO NOT trust the game client, and if a given online game title is willing to do high-accuracy server-side simulations of all player activity, anything "out of bounds" becomes evident.
Of course, future bugs or exploits could always happen, and we will continue to welcome Support Tickets on major concerns (always include your incident date/time).
But, in general: Stop worrying about it, and please stop accusing anyone else of cheating.
So what then, has been happening? Why do people claim cheating is a problem?
As far as we can tell, several different symptoms have contributed to the misconception of cheating in VO.
I will try to enumerate some of these cases below:
"I saw shots go right through Player X and not damage them!"
The sector is the absolute arbiter of "game reality", and it constantly makes decisions about whether everything appears to be "good" or not. This is a VERY longstanding and old system, which prevents cheating: it is not a new thing.
For instance, when you get the "beep" response on shooting another player, that is because the server (sector) has done a number of calculations on timing and location and determined that your "hit" was good.
If, however, the sector does not determine your hit was good, the hit may simply not be allowed to do any damage. This happens every day to a small minority of shots, because of player ping times and occasional packet loss (we actively monitor hit ratios).
Thus it is entirely possible to see remote shots from another player go "through" someone if the sector never claims they hit anything. The player who fired those shots will see them hit locally on their client (without a beep), but other "remote" players may not see them collide.
"Player X shot me, and then I got a message about 'high latency detected'!"
This is a system called Prediction Monitoring behaving as-expected, triggered by your network connection problems. The system was relased in July of 2020 after extensive requests on Suggestions.
Essentially, this prevents players from grossly manipulating their own ping times to cause their ship to jump around and be difficult to hit, which was a problem.
Instead, the server monitors your "predicted" versus "reported" path, and if the disparity is too great, the server will seize your ship and re-position it to where it thought you should have been (meaning: you won't "jump around").
This positional reset can be disorienting, so to minimize impact on PvE for high-latency players (botting, mining, etc), the system only enables if you're near an adversary who has fired a shot within 3000 meters of you. Essentially, it only enables on PvP combat.
This is a purely server-side mechanism, it is not influenced by anything other than the unique trajectories of individual players, which is impacted by their network latency (ping) and chosen movements.
Generally speaking, the system is tuned to not be a problem for anyone under about a 500ms ping, so most of the time it should be fine. But, the internet being what it is.. packet loss can happen to anyone: It doesn't matter how fancy your personal "fiber" is, the internet is a long wire, and it may traverse a lot of busy routers between you and our server.
At any rate, this system does not mean anyone is "cheating", nor does it forcing a position-reset on someone mean that they were "trying to cheat". It prevents an old, bad behaviour, with occasional negative ramifications for some people on really high pings.
"Player X is impossibly fast! He caught up to me in my Greyhound at full Turbo."
There seem to be several issues contributing to these misconceptions:
1) Vectoring: Unless a player is absolutely "dead-astern" of you (directly behind) when you hit Turbo, there's a very good chance they can make use of vectoring to catch you, by predicting your movements, and utilizing any small advantage of mass, rotation and acceleration curves (more on that later).
To put this simply, your adversary can "head you off at the pass" if they successfully guess where you're headed, and have an angle that gives them a small head-start on moving in that direction.
Predictive-analysis of an adversary is basically the most important combat skill in Vendetta Online, so if you're facing anyone of PvP capability, they're going to be pretty good at that.
Notably, a lot of players also seem to be pretty poor at judging when someone is "directly behind" them. We've had people submit all kinds of cases where they claimed this was true, and it quickly became apparent that they (the reporter/observer) were just wrong: their adversary was actually off to one side and flying a shorter distance to an interception point (the definition of vectoring).
For more information, here's a lengthy post from 2013 explicitly describing how advanced vectoring works, with some ship comparisons. Obviously, that post is over a decade old, this is not a "new thing".
2) Additionally, your adversary may have already hit Turbo before you did, and their ship's drag curve may be different from yours, and the network packet showing you that they're gaining may not have reached you yet.
If you consider that two players may easily be separated by 200ms (say both have 100ms ping times, and all packets transit the server), it's entirely feasible for a skilled PvP be making gains almost 1/4 second before you even realize it.
3) If you've launched from a station recently, there can be an additional challenge, as the station-launch animation prevents you from initiating turbo for two seconds. On the other hand, your adversary may have become aware of your launch almost immediately, and had 1.8 seconds to pick their vectoring goal (your likely jump-out destination) and be on their turbo first.
4) Beyond this, there is also more variation between ships than people may realize. Distribution of mass is a factor, and that means that in ships with equal mass and spin-torque, the one with a lower polar moment of inertia will still turn more effectively.
This is important if two players are zig-zagging (vectoring) through an asteroid field, and the pursuer is able to turn more quickly. After a few course-changes, the pursuer may have gained due to fractions of a second in turn speed.
If you compare a relatively long-thin ship against one that is a rounded flat model, the latter more evenly distributes mass across a disc. That means, given equal length and spin torque, the long-thin ship has to overcome more inertia at the outer ends when maneuvering, versus the disc-shaped vessel.
This likely contributes to statements, like those in the 2013 thread linked above, where TRS explicitly states "The greyhound is not a nationalist solution and has problems because it can't vector very well."
"Player X keeps discovering my hidden capship too quickly! Plugin cheats!"
We've had this asserted a bunch of times against a variety of players, and thus far, we've found nothing to support any actual cheating.
I think it's more likely that complaining players fail to realize the vulnerability of their own psychology. People are terrible at generating random numbers. They're similarly terrible at picking "random" locations.
Of all the empty sectors in a system, there are some that people tend to choose more often than others. People may not want to jump across an asteroid line, and be relatively close to a wormhole, etc.
Additionally, transiting empty sectors to search them doesn't take very long: the sectors load quickly, and it's easy to assess if they're empty and move on to another one.
From the sector-search patterns we've seen from players, they are not using exhaustive plugins or scripts to automate this, as that would probably be slower and less effective than their "good guessing" based on their personal experience.
The game itself allows multi-jump navigation, so simply shift-clicking on a bunch of likely sectors and checking them one-by-one is already pretty easy.
We are always open to on-going game tweaks and adjustment.
If some particular situation is overpowered and needs to be re-balanced in some way, we have a Suggestions Forum for that.
Of course, any change would need to be framed rationally, we aren't going to nerf X ship because "(specific person) keeps killing me with that".
Similarly, framing everything as "cheating" is unhelpful, and burns up huge amounts of developer time in essentially chasing "ghosts" which stem from human bias.
Vendetta Online is a skill based game.
That is the point. We should celebrate that, it's always been a core part of what we offer that is different from many other titles, particularly in MMORPG genre.
You will inevitably encounter people who have greater skill than you. That's okay! It can be a reminder to dust the rust off, or learn something new, or spend some time in "pews" with an adversary.
Public accusations of cheating is considered Toxicity and will result in administrative action.
We made the following statement back in March of 2023, which is becoming codified into an updated Terms of Service:
"Public accusations of cheating, on game chat, Discord or the Forums, are considered toxicity, and can result in the loss of chat privileges. If people have reason to seriously suspect an exploit or genuine cheating scenario, then opening a ticket to report the date/time/individual is the only logical course of action. Publicly accusing other people randomly, in a game that runs over a highly-variable and sometimes broken Internet, is always unhelpful (and usually incorrect)."
Again, as is obvious by our careful and technically-intensive analysis and response over the past half-year: we take accusations of cheating very seriously.
But, particularly when it comes to PvP combat, they are usually a big waste of everyone's time (especially developer time). Cheating, when it does happen, tends to emerge more in the economy, mining, and related areas, not PvP.
The accusations stoke misplaced "outrage" in the community, make the game less fun to be around, and drives away newbies and veterans alike.
So, moving forward, let's maybe just have fun shooting space-lasers at the other virtual ships, and worry a bit less about phantom issues like this?
Thank you for the exhaustive analysis and detailed statement on this topic.
Even in private discussions, groups of unhappy players may form "echo-chambers" where they support each other's misconceptions and become angrier and more frustrated over time.
This is absolutely one of the most negative issues the game is facing at the moment, far beyond the realm of cheating accusations. I have watched new players go from impartial outsiders on 100 to completely convinced that someone or other is cheating (or a liar, or just a dick); because they've inevitably been swept up by one of a few social groups that naturally form around guild/political lines. Very little cross-talk goes on between these groups, and once it does, it's usually because each group has, independently, riled itself up about some issue they've discussed in isolation. So by the time they're talking to each other, they're expressing anger that widely surpasses both the perceived and actual issue. And then, because the expression is so wildly out of proportion, the accused individual/group responds in an equally hostile nature. They then go back to their isolated chats and use the encounter as evidence of how unreasonable and toxic the other group is. Run this feedback loop for a few months and some of the worst attitudes I've ever seen in the game are fomented and stick around to influence others.
I'm not contesting that we've reached lows that other players have reached (I was not around from 2016-2020, which is when most people agree the absolute worst stuff was going on), but I do think as a whole the community has gotten exceptionally more hostile and unwilling to put aside the group biases. Some of this, of course, is natural. I've long said that getting involved in guild or even small group politics in VO is voluntarily joining up for gang violence (i.e. "My side is good, their side is bad, I don't care what my guys did, they're my guys and I'll back them up"). Some of that attitude is necessary to keep the spirit in guild politics. If everyone is sitting around smoking peace pipes all the time, you don't have much of a Vendetta (Online). But even in 2021 when I started playing again, it was put aside much more often, and I was able to have regular cordial and even friendly conversations with my "enemies". Now those interactions are rare.
I'm also not saying I'm blameless or some kind of enlightened outsider. I've absolutely taken part in the shit-flinging and tribalism to a fault. It doesn't mean I can't point it out, either.
As far as why this is happening, I think there's a sort of stagnation/crystallization, particularly with guild politics, that means there aren't enough faces to keep things from getting too personal. When I'm fighting with some guild enemy or another, it feels less that I'm fighting "that guild" and more like I'm fighting "that player". And if "that player" is getting frustrating to me, then my frustration applies to that whole guild because he's a significant portion of its activity. And let me be clear, I'm not talking about any specific player - I'm speaking generally here. I have been both accused of being another player's alt, and had others' alts (or even unique other players) accused of being me, because they did something an enemy of my guild thought was frustrating in a way that they found similar to me. My guildmates have seen the same. Our enemies have dealt with the same. More than ever, it feels less like we're less fighting sides and more fighting specific people. And each side has its boogeyman who is the focus for all the complaints.
I don't know the solution. Well, in the simplest form I do: an influx of more players, be they new or returning. But that's like saying "just do better lol". Incarnate has long discussed why he hasn't started pushing the game again, citing wanting a sort of "2.0" (UI/feature/graphical additions and overhauls) feeling to the game before getting behind such a thing. I can respect that, and I will admit I have no overall understanding of how game development, advertising, popularity, and longevity work. But I don't see any other real solutions either. What are you going to do, ban the existing guilds? Ban usage of outside chats like Discord? None of that seems feasible.
This has to be a shitty position to be in. You could just go to zero-tolerance and give out week long bans on anyone making public and hostile statements, be they cheating or of character; but I think that would have bad follow-on effects as well. Asking us to be a bit nicer is probably the best thing you can do at this exact point in time. But just giving my personal perspective as one player: The way guild and group interactions have gone are in a very bad way, and I really think only a significant amount of new blood can smooth it out.
I want to end this by noting that I do love this game, and it offers a unique set of gameplay and interaction that no other game does quite the same. I truly want it to continue to succeed and be around for a long time. To Inc: Sorry that we as a playerbase put you through this. Hopefully the future will be a bit brighter.
This is absolutely one of the most negative issues the game is facing at the moment, far beyond the realm of cheating accusations. I have watched new players go from impartial outsiders on 100 to completely convinced that someone or other is cheating (or a liar, or just a dick); because they've inevitably been swept up by one of a few social groups that naturally form around guild/political lines. Very little cross-talk goes on between these groups, and once it does, it's usually because each group has, independently, riled itself up about some issue they've discussed in isolation. So by the time they're talking to each other, they're expressing anger that widely surpasses both the perceived and actual issue. And then, because the expression is so wildly out of proportion, the accused individual/group responds in an equally hostile nature. They then go back to their isolated chats and use the encounter as evidence of how unreasonable and toxic the other group is. Run this feedback loop for a few months and some of the worst attitudes I've ever seen in the game are fomented and stick around to influence others.
I'm not contesting that we've reached lows that other players have reached (I was not around from 2016-2020, which is when most people agree the absolute worst stuff was going on), but I do think as a whole the community has gotten exceptionally more hostile and unwilling to put aside the group biases. Some of this, of course, is natural. I've long said that getting involved in guild or even small group politics in VO is voluntarily joining up for gang violence (i.e. "My side is good, their side is bad, I don't care what my guys did, they're my guys and I'll back them up"). Some of that attitude is necessary to keep the spirit in guild politics. If everyone is sitting around smoking peace pipes all the time, you don't have much of a Vendetta (Online). But even in 2021 when I started playing again, it was put aside much more often, and I was able to have regular cordial and even friendly conversations with my "enemies". Now those interactions are rare.
I'm also not saying I'm blameless or some kind of enlightened outsider. I've absolutely taken part in the shit-flinging and tribalism to a fault. It doesn't mean I can't point it out, either.
As far as why this is happening, I think there's a sort of stagnation/crystallization, particularly with guild politics, that means there aren't enough faces to keep things from getting too personal. When I'm fighting with some guild enemy or another, it feels less that I'm fighting "that guild" and more like I'm fighting "that player". And if "that player" is getting frustrating to me, then my frustration applies to that whole guild because he's a significant portion of its activity. And let me be clear, I'm not talking about any specific player - I'm speaking generally here. I have been both accused of being another player's alt, and had others' alts (or even unique other players) accused of being me, because they did something an enemy of my guild thought was frustrating in a way that they found similar to me. My guildmates have seen the same. Our enemies have dealt with the same. More than ever, it feels less like we're less fighting sides and more fighting specific people. And each side has its boogeyman who is the focus for all the complaints.
I don't know the solution. Well, in the simplest form I do: an influx of more players, be they new or returning. But that's like saying "just do better lol". Incarnate has long discussed why he hasn't started pushing the game again, citing wanting a sort of "2.0" (UI/feature/graphical additions and overhauls) feeling to the game before getting behind such a thing. I can respect that, and I will admit I have no overall understanding of how game development, advertising, popularity, and longevity work. But I don't see any other real solutions either. What are you going to do, ban the existing guilds? Ban usage of outside chats like Discord? None of that seems feasible.
This has to be a shitty position to be in. You could just go to zero-tolerance and give out week long bans on anyone making public and hostile statements, be they cheating or of character; but I think that would have bad follow-on effects as well. Asking us to be a bit nicer is probably the best thing you can do at this exact point in time. But just giving my personal perspective as one player: The way guild and group interactions have gone are in a very bad way, and I really think only a significant amount of new blood can smooth it out.
I want to end this by noting that I do love this game, and it offers a unique set of gameplay and interaction that no other game does quite the same. I truly want it to continue to succeed and be around for a long time. To Inc: Sorry that we as a playerbase put you through this. Hopefully the future will be a bit brighter.
Incarnate has long discussed why he hasn't started pushing the game again, citing wanting a sort of "2.0"
For the record, it hasn't just been about my.. desired set of "features" or "polish" or making a "good impression". Some real barriers to increased scale have become apparent over time, and we've been dealing with them, which brought about the first few points on the Development Direction sticky.
For instance, it always sounds great to have "lots more players", but that also means "lots more in-game bad behaviour" and "lots more support requests" and we don't have a system to scale that effectively yet. I have pages and pages of design for what it needs to be, but we keep getting delayed by.. well.. "non-existent cheating" and other issues.
Asking us to be a bit nicer is probably the best thing you can do at this exact point in time.
I'm not sure what else to do either. It also isn't just the game itself. The entire character of online communication, across the internet, has declined since around 2016, and people have become more brittle and more normalized to suspicion and self-righteous indignation. Conspiracy theories aren't "just" a problem for VO.
It would be great if we could bring about a better sense of "competitive goodwill" between guilds. Like, individual pilots can PvP and lose and still say "gf". I'm not sure why there's such a need for such acerbic politics between the guilds. Pirates and traders can play their respective roles without all the angst and recrimination.
But, I have no idea how to "engineer" that as a designer, not in an inherently competitive game, and not without removing the soul of Vendetta Online (and turning it into a communication-limited PvE-only title, like Toon Town). Our players tend to be very myopic about their own play-style, and only the way they play is "right", which is a big challenge in elevating empathy across a competitive community.
To Inc: Sorry that we as a playerbase put you through this. Hopefully the future will be a bit brighter.
I appreciate that. I'm hoping this will put the PvP-cheating-suspicion to rest, at least.
In the meantime, it does seem like the /report system has improved common game interaction, relative to the challenges of 2015-2020 (which had placed extreme administrative time-pressures on me). We have plans to really expand and improve on that system, so it's both easier for players to understand, and also easier to administer, but it's a big project.
So, hopefully that will take us to a better place, in due course, where we're able to start pulling in a larger audience with less concern over developer burnout.
People often like to (somewhat bitterly) poke at the slow progress of our "game-play" evolution; but honestly, a huge amount of our last few years has been spent on tools (/report system), analysis (no-one-is-cheating), and related systems.. which have all stemmed from serious problems that developed in the community. Problems that, honestly, we didn't have for at least the first decade of the game's existence.
Managing an MMORPG community has always been an infamous challenge (so much so that it shows up in sitcoms), but honestly it has gotten more difficult in the last few years. So, anyway, I hope we're able to turn a corner and move past a lot of these issues (like the one in this thread) and get back to expanding and improving the actual game. That is, after all, what we developers want as well.
For the record, it hasn't just been about my.. desired set of "features" or "polish" or making a "good impression". Some real barriers to increased scale have become apparent over time, and we've been dealing with them, which brought about the first few points on the Development Direction sticky.
For instance, it always sounds great to have "lots more players", but that also means "lots more in-game bad behaviour" and "lots more support requests" and we don't have a system to scale that effectively yet. I have pages and pages of design for what it needs to be, but we keep getting delayed by.. well.. "non-existent cheating" and other issues.
Asking us to be a bit nicer is probably the best thing you can do at this exact point in time.
I'm not sure what else to do either. It also isn't just the game itself. The entire character of online communication, across the internet, has declined since around 2016, and people have become more brittle and more normalized to suspicion and self-righteous indignation. Conspiracy theories aren't "just" a problem for VO.
It would be great if we could bring about a better sense of "competitive goodwill" between guilds. Like, individual pilots can PvP and lose and still say "gf". I'm not sure why there's such a need for such acerbic politics between the guilds. Pirates and traders can play their respective roles without all the angst and recrimination.
But, I have no idea how to "engineer" that as a designer, not in an inherently competitive game, and not without removing the soul of Vendetta Online (and turning it into a communication-limited PvE-only title, like Toon Town). Our players tend to be very myopic about their own play-style, and only the way they play is "right", which is a big challenge in elevating empathy across a competitive community.
To Inc: Sorry that we as a playerbase put you through this. Hopefully the future will be a bit brighter.
I appreciate that. I'm hoping this will put the PvP-cheating-suspicion to rest, at least.
In the meantime, it does seem like the /report system has improved common game interaction, relative to the challenges of 2015-2020 (which had placed extreme administrative time-pressures on me). We have plans to really expand and improve on that system, so it's both easier for players to understand, and also easier to administer, but it's a big project.
So, hopefully that will take us to a better place, in due course, where we're able to start pulling in a larger audience with less concern over developer burnout.
People often like to (somewhat bitterly) poke at the slow progress of our "game-play" evolution; but honestly, a huge amount of our last few years has been spent on tools (/report system), analysis (no-one-is-cheating), and related systems.. which have all stemmed from serious problems that developed in the community. Problems that, honestly, we didn't have for at least the first decade of the game's existence.
Managing an MMORPG community has always been an infamous challenge (so much so that it shows up in sitcoms), but honestly it has gotten more difficult in the last few years. So, anyway, I hope we're able to turn a corner and move past a lot of these issues (like the one in this thread) and get back to expanding and improving the actual game. That is, after all, what we developers want as well.
On one hand I feel like shit for alienating one of vo's greatest pirates but this whole ordeal has been carthatic; hopefully for the better.
Lord~Spidey... VO's greatest pirate is safe and sound and prospering in VO in your absence. I've heard about these accusations, but assumed they were not true.
Ah you must be Hawkfeather then!
The greatest pirates in vo get paid without having to fire a shot. :p
(Cleaned up some posts getting a bit unproductive and inappropriate. People are not cheating, that's the point here, we don't need to go off onto "if people were..", that's all covered in the initial post).
Interesting insights, thanks inc.