Bot fixing

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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Currently, the main way of removing botters is to simply ban their accounts in waves. This is good, and I understand the reasoning behind it(it’s easy to do and allows for flagging of related accounts), but it still allows botters to “learn” to avoid the ways CCP detects input automation, and it doesn’t really stop them from just repopulating and doing it all over again with a better, sneakier bot.

I suggest that in addition to that, they add another type of ban, similar in scope to a “shadowban” or comment ghosting system, Rather than outright killing the bots.

Similar to the way that a shadowbanned user is unaware that they are banned, instead of simply deleting the account, this instead gimps them in a way that isn’t immediately obvious, but is effective at minimizing the impact of individual bot.

The pros of this may not be immediately apparent, but are immense in effect. By not providing a hard piece of evidence that a botter is in fact botting, the programmers of botting scripts and systems no longer have a “fail condition” that is obvious and easy to see. They may notice a drop in isk/hour, but it’ll be harder to say what exactly tipped CCP off.

As for how this could be implemented, there are a great number of ways. Loot tables could ratchet drops and spawns lower for the botter to directly lower profit in a less tangible way, decrease odds of hitting and or DPS to allow rats better survival, silent disabling or weakening of certain mods(warp stabs for example, as many fw plexbots rely on those), or buffing of rats on grid with a known botter.

No matter how it works, as long as it isn’t immediately obvious when an account has been flagged, it’ll be effective to prevent bots from improving or making significant dents on the economy of eve. In addition, if the users of these programs are not aware they have been flagged, they are more likely to engage in overt actions that will help to catch the people who support these botters, and help remove them from the game as well.

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Oh, yes, please do that. Nothing better than to hurt actual players in the process of banning bots. Unless CCP found a surefire way to identify bots on the fly, I cannot imagine what could possibly go wrong with this. (In case the irony is not obvious: Instead of investigating, CCP rather blanket bans anyone remotely connected to an RMT account, even unrelated people who just bought a contract from them).

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Is CCP doing not enough or too much? Seems most people would argue CCP is being too gentle with handling bots rather than too harsh.

Considering that every post on the subject seems to boil down to “CCP do something” rather than “CCP be more careful about the things you are doing.”

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In my opinion, they are too inconsistent. The last ban wave for bots was well over a year ago, the one before maybe half a year.

My problem with the entire approach is that CCP has no reliable way to figure out what is a bot and what is not. If you take banning of RMTers and in any form (un)related people as indication, you can be a bot for just being a bit too consistent with your ratting times or your ticks, or how you move around. And as a result they refuse for weeks or months to talk to you and reverse their ban.

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I believe ICD just mentioned one recently.

My problem with the entire approach is that CCP has no reliable way to figure out what is a bot and what is not.If you take banning of RMTers and in any form (un)related people as indication, you can be a bot for just being a bit too consistent with your ratting times or your ticks, or how you move around.

Yes. I forgot about the people who sleep multibox multiple supers for 23 hours a day. my bad. Clearly a human there. There’s plenty of indicators of bothood to the point that players can conclusively point at certain characters and without question go “That’s clearly a bot” so I’m really skeptical of any claim that there’s not any way to tell if it’s a bot or a player, since it is flagrantly false.

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I am not talking about the certain cases.

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I have a better idea.

Fix the algos that they use to detect bots, and then ban them faster. Follow the money trail, ban anything that looks like it benefited from the botters. Obviously investigate to avoid abuse (ie creating a bot, and then funneling isk to your enemy in order to get them banned) but if there’s any form of conclusive proof, start banning “players” instead of “accounts”.

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I have a better idea…make the GM’s do their damn job…

I have heard of other games where Gm’s roam about invisible to the playerbase and when they catch bots or other blatant breaking of the rules red handed…BAM! bot gone, or dungeon reset, or temp ban forcing player to write a ticket and respond to them…

Idk, but the courier bot thing recently i’m told was pretty easy to identify.

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Ironically, in the case of ratting bots, that would make it HARDER to catch the bots.

For a ratting bot, the dead give-away from an in-space perspective is the behaviour of the bot when someone neutral enters system. A bot will always immediately warp to a safe place (pos, station, citadel) and wait for the neutral to leave. Then 0-X number of minutes later, the bot will go back out and start doing content again.

A GM being able to immediately land on-grid from another system, observe the dock-up, then leave system and monitor how long it takes them to undock would be essential to identifying a bot. Other than that you’re using out-of-game metrics like amount of time logged in, etc.

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I’d be happy id CCP would ban the mining bots that were introduced by CCP.

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