Broken Toys: The Failure of the ‘Fixed’ Logoffski Mechanic
A few weeks ago, my friend Qu1ckkkk, author of the blog Don’t Shoot! X (oddly, not to be confused with the equally good read dontshootx.blogspot.com, home of Aperture Harmonics) wrote a post about his recent adventures in Ninja-baiting and killing mission runners. The stories were amusing, if not standard, until I got to a particular one that made me double-take.
In it, Qu1ckkkk describes a run-in with an extra-shooty mission runner in a Tengu. After having some missiles flung his way in anger, and after swapping for his pew ship, Qu1ckkkk soon realized that he didn’t have the firepower necessary to break the Tengu’s most-likely faction shield boosting. Not taking any damage himself though, Qu1ckkkk maintained point and web on the Tengu and got into a nice orbit to await help that was bringing him bigger firepower to swap into.
At this point, the Tengu pilot logged off. Qu1ckkkk however, continued to fire off a shot every few minutes in order to make sure he kept the timer going while waiting for help. But here’s where things get totally and completely broken: 15 minutes after the Tengu pilot logged off, he was very abruptly no longer red to Qu1ckkkk, despite still being pointed by him.
A petition was filed and amazingly enough, a GM actually arrived on the scene within minutes to investigate. Qu1ckkkk opted to not post the GM chat-log on his blog (like a good little EULA-abiding citizen), but surmised it pretty nicely:
Long story short, there was nothing he could do about the problem. I had him pointed and webbed, but I am not able to shoot at him without getting concorded. It seems like they are unable to make someone red again to the other without logging into that person’s account (which they also can’t do). They also don’t have the “tools” to fix the aggro. Only people who are logged in are to have their aggro tampered with.
He stopped being red to me after 15min WHILE I have him aggressed. So much for the logoffski nerf. Lucky for the tengu pilot, the best thing he could have done was to NOT log back in.
Objectively, you could look this over pretty quickly and dismiss it as bad luck. And the truth is, yes, this time it was a tricked carebear in what was probably a standard mission fit Tengu; shit happens and you lose kills sometimes, and in the grand scheme of Eve, a griefer losing a highsec mission runner kill due to odd-ball bugs doesn’t make much of a ripple. But say the next time this particular glitch happens, its on a low-sec station, and suddenly an entire offensive fleet finds themselves without aggro on the logged-out SuperCap pilot they’ve got pointed; in that scenario, you can bet this will be a MUCH bigger issue. Have a whole fleet go GCC* near station or gate guns because of a logoffski SuperCap pilot, and mark my words, the torches and pitchforks will come out.
Again, despite my niche in Eve, I get that Qu1ckkkk not getting an easy kill on a foolish mission runner won’t keep many people up at night, but lets distill it down into something broader and see if it raises any eyebrows:
Post-Crucible, a pilot in Eve was able to avoid destruction of his aggressed ship by logging out of the game.
…sound broken yet?
o7,
-Aiden
*GamerChick24 actually wrote about something similar a little while ago involving Faction War and POCOs here, which was actually addressed by CCP.
Image via Instructables.com
Finders & Keepers 
…not really.
Not working as intended, obviously, but I’ve always felt that the crucible solution – an ‘until downtime’ timer implemented everywhere and for everything which is aggressed – is a little incredibly excessive for a problem which only affected supercaps.
vOv
This might not be a bug; if a player’s aggression timer is refreshed/started each time they shoot at a player, then the timer would run out for a logged-off player since they aren’t shooting at anything. It’s similar to the ~30-60 second restriction from docking after shooting; a ship that aggressed next to a station can stop shooting and wait a little while before docking up again.
The problem I see though is that this isn’t a case of coming in and out and refreshing aggro on a wreck or something; that method is always buggy. Its that he had the guy pointed and webbed, but suddenly couldn’t shoot him without being concorded; the web and point though stayed on with no problems. v0v
Ooh, that’s an interesting point. It looks like in that case the game doesn’t bother to periodically check the legality of constant effects like webbers and scramblers, but only each time they are activated. If nothing changes, you could conceivably get someone to aggress you and keep them tackled for as log as you care to stay logged in… though I wonder what would have happened if the victim remained logged in.
I do think that it should be changed so that those ongoing effects get canceled once the aggression timer is gone (the assumption being that the attacker, having been able to get the victim to aggress
er, legally aggress in the first place, probably wouldn’t want to throw his ship away to Concord).
Fat fingers + small phone screen = split comments. 8D
TBH, once the pilot logged off, he should have had no difficulties breaking the tank – the tengu’s defensive bonuses are all skill based – no pilot no skill. If his guns were autocycling like the point, it should not have mattered.
I’m not sure about the aggro timer, I don’t have enough experience ninja’ing mission runners to know for sure.
However, the fact that he decided to not try to kill the tengu after the pilot logged and/or had the wrong ship sounds to me like he simply failed to get the kill due to his own error.
The misunderstanding of what ship is “Right” and what is “Wrong” in terms of trapping and killing mission runners is sort of part of the trade. I won’t give away any tricks, but suffice to say, the ship he was in was the right ship for the job, had things worked out like they ought to. And as I mentioned, the point and web were autocycling, the guns were manually cycled every minute or so. Who knows if having them autocycled would have helped or resulted in an instant CONCORD response.