In a post over on the Elite Dangerous subreddit, concerned commanders have aired their grievances about the growing practice of “combat logging”, which is the act of forcing the game to quit via internet disconnect or ending the program task in order to avoid combat encounters with other players. Unlike rage quitting or willful disconnects in other games, players claim that developer Frontier is doing nothing to stop the wave of combat loggers, despite multiple reports. To verify these suspicions, players recorded videos of staged combat logging instances with alt accounts to see if Frontier would take action. According to the players in question, Frontier didn’t deal with these combat loggers. Since the post has gained traction, Frontier have responded to this issue, saying they are committed to cracking down on combat loggers.
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The initial reddit post, created by user Jonticles, states the negative impacts of combat logging when playing Elite Dangerous, with it “stifl[ing] the rare emergent experiences that make the game more than a sterile grind”. In most cases, combat logging is used to avoid PvP encounters and due to the logging party receiving no penalty for quitting out, it ruins much of the potential player interaction that can occur while playing. Furthermore, the post asserts that while Frontier claims to respond to support tickets about combat loggers and those attempting to circumvent player interaction, this is actually not the case.
Jonticles and his fellow suspicious space pirates detailed cases of combat logging, complete with video evidence and sent support tickets to Frontier to test if any action was taken. On top of that, alt accounts controlled by Jonticles and his fellow detectives were set to combat log each other, with the group also recording these instances and sending them to Frontier to see if any punitive action was taken. The results of these tests claim that not only did Frontier fail to view any of the videos showing instances of combat logging, but the company simply closed down the support tickets involving the test alt accounts, rather than punishing them for their misconduct.
In response to the evidence against them, Elite Dangerous community manager Zac Antonaci has since replied to the initial post to assure players that the studio is indeed monitoring combat logging instances. He did concede that Frontier failed to follow up on the tickets and incidents put forward by Jonticles and other concerned pilots, apologising for the error and saying that this investigation will help improve their support process. While many of the following reddit comments have expressed extreme suspicion at Zac’s answer, let’s hope the combat logging issue is fixed in the future and Elite Dangerous players can return to a fulfilling life of interstellar piracy.