In many current FPS type games, there is a feature they use called "Death Cam" which essentially allows you to see the 10-20 seconds leading to your death from the point of view of the person who killed you. Now I'm not suggesting that we need a death cam in Pantheon, but the concept that the game could basically replay for you activity that recently occurred might be useful as a GM tool to combat issues of harassment and griefing.
Since the game is almost all calculated on the server side of things (to avoid cheaters) it seems to me that the game should be able to save data when requested of the past so many minutes or seconds. So if a player griefs you by say Training a bunch of mobs on top of you, you could type "/report Meanplayer" and the server would save the last 2 minutes from that Meanplayers point of view and append it to the Report sent to the GM for review. The GM client could then allow the reviewing GM to literally watch what that player actually did in those 2 minutes before he got /report 'ed in order to make a decision on if it was legit griefing or just accidental training. Since the GM is seeing things exactly how that griefer saw it in those 2 minutes, it should be very clear if he/she was doing something intentional to grief or just bad luck.
Of course it would require you to actually /report within a 2 minute window of when the offending action took place, but it should still work out in most cases.
Anyway, just a thought.
That would only work in a PVP situation as players cannot kill you in a PVE system. But then in a PVP whatever you do to kill someone else should be kept hidden imo and griefing pretty much comes with the territory.
If on the other hand you're referring to training and you got purposely killed by someone, then there could be some merit but I'm not sure how that would work as there's no specific point from the griefer's perspective since there was no kill. Where is that 20 second cut of? for you to realize you were trained, make a report and for it to remember the last (which?) 20 seconds, at least 20+ seconds have elapsed.
Sato said: I feel like that would put a lot of strain on the servers, because they would technically be constantly recording every player's point of view to have it available for review. I think sifting through raw data would suffice. They should be able to see the person in questions location coordinates change as they move, hopefully timestamped to detect warping. Also I would imagine it records mob aggro and also whether they used a skill to lose aggro or left the zone. As cool of a concept as it is in FPSs, I don't think its worth its resources in an MMO.
But this is exactly my point. The Client is just the tool that takes that Raw data and displays it in a visual form for us. Location data, agro data, all of that. The system already Logs all of this. Instead of a GM needing to poor over the "Log file" of data to try and figure out what the player did. He should be able to load up the Raw data into his own client and get it to display it the same way the player did in his client while it was happening. Since we know for GM issues the server keeps logs of everything, this /report tool would just tell the server to specifically save the past 2 minutes of the log file and append it to the GM ticket that gets created when a player issues the report. It should even be able to be specific to only the data that pertains to that player, so it's not a total log dump of everything happening in that zone. Then a GM could use a command in his client to load up that 2 minutes of raw data and visually see what happened as if it was happening live.
So this wouldn't require the server to actually record video. Just save log data. The Client then reads the raw data to display it to you as a video.
Now that I think about it... if they did this it could be taken a step farther to actually create 'Replays' of action. It could even be done on the Client side, not even needing the server to resend any data. The client could have a 'Record' UI element that tells it to start saving the data it gets as it displays it to you. The client could then have a Replays UI that lets you reload that data and watch what happend over again. Letting you relive your glory of killing that Dragon. Players could even share their Replay log data so others could use their own client to watch the footage. And since it's all just text it wouldn't be very large, and could even be massively compressed so it wouldn't even use up much space. They could even let you set limits so it doesn't get too large.
Note, this is not chatlog or combat log data I'm referring to. This is the data that gets streamed to your client for it to display the game for you and the data that your client sends back to the server to let it know what actions you are preforming.
Also... since somebody might question if this would allow data farmers to sift through the data to glean info that lets them cheat. This wouldn't be data that wouldn't already be coming to your client when you actually were playing. VR has already said that they are coding things so that the Client is as 'dumb' (their words) as possible so it just receives the data streamed to it and displays it. This would just let people save a copy of that streamed data.
Durp said: That would only work in a PVP situation as players cannot kill you in a PVE system. But then in a PVP whatever you do to kill someone else should be kept hidden imo and griefing pretty much comes with the territory.If on the other hand you're referring to training and you got purposely killed by someone, then there could be some merit but I'm not sure how that would work as there's no specific point from the griefer's perspective since there was no kill. Where is that 20 second cut of? for you to realize you were trained, make a report and for it to remember the last (which?) 20 seconds, at least 20+ seconds have elapsed.
I did say 2 minutes not 20 seconds. The Dev's could set this to however much time they think they would need to see. If they wanted 5 minutes they could do 5 minutes. The player doesn't even need to know how much time it saves for the GM.
As for perspective. If this player deliberately trained a group, and you were able to rewatch the gameplay from his point of view (the way he saw it as he did it), you would be able to see him specifically round up the group of NPC's and run directly to the group. It would be as if the GM was standing in the room with the griefer watching him play. You would actually be able to see him scouting the group out and watching for his moment before he does it.
As Goofy says, they have managed to 'record' whole rounds of 64 player FPS games in the past. I don't know how the heck they can do it without major performance impact, but they did.
In many ways an FPS is much more complex, but in some ways more simple. Only the devs will know how possible it is.
It would be awesome, though, to be able to play back what was local to you. Raid leaders to be able to play back, pause, rewind, fast-forward a raid would be amazing.
And, yes, it would be invaluable to GMs.
I *imagine* though, it would be prohibitively demanding.
disposalist said:As Goofy says, they have managed to 'record' whole rounds of 64 player FPS games in the past. I don't know how the heck they can do it without major performance impact, but they did.
In many ways an FPS is much more complex, but in some ways more simple. Only the devs will know how possible it is.
It would be awesome, though, to be able to play back what was local to you. Raid leaders to be able to play back, pause, rewind, fast-forward a raid would be amazing.
And, yes, it would be invaluable to GMs.
I *imagine* though, it would be prohibitively demanding.
Good raid leaders already run programs and logs and in most cases record the video as well. It doesnt really need to be included in the game.
As far as for use as a GM tool. It's not a bad idea. But I'm sure the logs that gms have access to already display most of the information they need.
Porygon said:disposalist said:As Goofy says, they have managed to 'record' whole rounds of 64 player FPS games in the past. I don't know how the heck they can do it without major performance impact, but they did.
In many ways an FPS is much more complex, but in some ways more simple. Only the devs will know how possible it is.
It would be awesome, though, to be able to play back what was local to you. Raid leaders to be able to play back, pause, rewind, fast-forward a raid would be amazing.
And, yes, it would be invaluable to GMs.
I *imagine* though, it would be prohibitively demanding.
Good raid leaders already run programs and logs and in most cases record the video as well. It doesnt really need to be included in the game.
As far as for use as a GM tool. It's not a bad idea. But I'm sure the logs that gms have access to already display most of the information they need.
There's a big difference between logs and replaying the game (in addition to the logs). Also it's better than video because you can usually watch from any viewpoint.
The one thing I did think about later is the fact that replays done this way using the client mean those replays are dependent on the version of the client. In other games that save replays, the game will often not be able to view older replays that were created before a patch. Since the client will be calculating things differently that it did when the data was first sent and recorded. So after a patch all your old Replays would become unviewable. So this might not be as viable an idea. But I do think it would still work as a GM tool, since they will be reviewing the footage within the day of the /report (at least I'm hoping that they have enough GM's to keep up with things on a daily basis).
disposalist said:Porygon said:disposalist said:As Goofy says, they have managed to 'record' whole rounds of 64 player FPS games in the past. I don't know how the heck they can do it without major performance impact, but they did.
In many ways an FPS is much more complex, but in some ways more simple. Only the devs will know how possible it is.
It would be awesome, though, to be able to play back what was local to you. Raid leaders to be able to play back, pause, rewind, fast-forward a raid would be amazing.
And, yes, it would be invaluable to GMs.
I *imagine* though, it would be prohibitively demanding.
Good raid leaders already run programs and logs and in most cases record the video as well. It doesnt really need to be included in the game.
As far as for use as a GM tool. It's not a bad idea. But I'm sure the logs that gms have access to already display most of the information they need.
There's a big difference between logs and replaying the game (in addition to the logs). Also it's better than video because you can usually watch from any viewpoint.
I'm actually against this. If you are just able to view it from any angle. It really trivializes things when you think about it. Part of the challenge of fighting a boss is coordination and placement. If I can view all different angles I dont even really need to pay attention.
I think re watching from your perspective would be fine. But again. Most good raid leaders already record themselves.
Porygon said:disposalist said:Porygon said:disposalist said:As Goofy says, they have managed to 'record' whole rounds of 64 player FPS games in the past. I don't know how the heck they can do it without major performance impact, but they did.
In many ways an FPS is much more complex, but in some ways more simple. Only the devs will know how possible it is.
It would be awesome, though, to be able to play back what was local to you. Raid leaders to be able to play back, pause, rewind, fast-forward a raid would be amazing.
And, yes, it would be invaluable to GMs.
I *imagine* though, it would be prohibitively demanding.
Good raid leaders already run programs and logs and in most cases record the video as well. It doesnt really need to be included in the game.
As far as for use as a GM tool. It's not a bad idea. But I'm sure the logs that gms have access to already display most of the information they need.
There's a big difference between logs and replaying the game (in addition to the logs). Also it's better than video because you can usually watch from any viewpoint.
I'm actually against this. If you are just able to view it from any angle. It really trivializes things when you think about it. Part of the challenge of fighting a boss is coordination and placement. If I can view all different angles I dont even really need to pay attention.
I think re watching from your perspective would be fine. But again. Most good raid leaders already record themselves.
But you cant watch it until afterward in a seperate client often. Even if it were technically possible they could add a delaye making it so it can't really be exploited. There is a spectator mode on Battlefield 1, for example. They quite quickly introduce a 30 second delay so people couldn't use it as a radar and pass info to their buddies.