Personally I can’t be bothered to deal with “role play”, it’s just a (very) thin excuse for griefing / trolling but I tend to just block the individuals & keep local open.
I’ve never seen a real “role player” in this game only trolls using it as cover, would think it drives a lot of new players out before they’ve had a chance to find out how good the game can be & loses CCP subs, so I’ve always been a little surprised CCP appear to tolerate it as much as they do.
it’s just a (very) thin excuse for griefing / trolling
As I’ve witnessed it so far in this game, other MMO’s I’ve played have had legit role-players but they just don’t seem to exist in EVE for some reason.
Would think that’s more likely to confirm an AFK zombie than a bot? surely even a pretty basic bot program will have routines to take itself back to where it “should” be?
Nothing of any value is said in local. 99.99% of it is just ■■■■ talking and trolling. Since I don’t generally participate or care I keep my window hidden.
as for the RP, there is a considerable amount of it, just very little actually takes place in local. which makes sense for the setting if you think about it, your not likely to overhear the conversations between two pilots since they will be on private channels.
the game lore is also designed in such a way as to allow very subtle RP to happen, for many people in the rp community their character will dictate the kind of ships they fly, or even the mods they tend to fit. For example, as an angel cartel RPer I have a preference for angel ships, and will bring one at any opportunity. I also will favor fitting domination’s mods over other faction mods when available. its even dictated my choice in what area of space to live in, because I RP angel loyalist I won’t ever live in an area of space that has angel rats. because that completely shuts down ratting as an option for income since it would tank my standings.
Individually they are just small little things, but combined they add up to a substantial impact on the way that I play the game. and I am hardly a unique case, there are a lot of RPers who joined faction warfare to support their empire rather than for the money. I know of low-sec pirates who make it a point to run the guristas arc every 3 months for the standings. eve is a game about little things, and so its the little things that mark out the more dedicated RPers, more than how often they scream out “amarr victor” in local.
Even code, while you might argue that they are just a thin mask for griefing, even THAT mask is part of their RP. yes, its an excuse, and there is nothing wrong with having IG excuses to justify IG actions.
IMO, RP is alive and well in eve, its just not always as visible as in other games. because in this universe, you don’t need to go out of your way in order to engage in it.
Couldn’t agree more but when out of game factors are such a large part of the “role play” language I see being used most often in locale that argument falls over (more than) a bit.
Citing the target real world players play-style as motivation for your “roleplay” imediately puts the lie to the “but we’re role-playing not trolling” lie for a start, as does referencing game mechanics, game rules & real world “tears harvested”.
I’ve done enough cold calling telesales in my time to recognize the style for what it is, most of the regularly spiel I see directed at people in locale by the trolls “role-players” that use local is clearly designed specifically to elicit emotional responses (anger, rage, frustration) from real people.
That’s not role playing it’s very deliberate trolling & griefing of the real person behind the character.
But I guess I’m preaching to the choir with you on that one
I’ve done enough cold calling telesales in my time to recognize the style
By which I mean (it seems to me) most of the griefing I’ve seen in local chat could almost have been written by a telesales “expert”, it uses the same psyche skill set & many of their tricks & triggers… but targeted at a different outcome
Glad to hear it is alive & kicking in EVE, makes sense I suppose that I wouldn’t see it in locale
About multiboxing. Input multiplexing (giving the same command to more than one client) is explicitely marked as a bannable offense as well, so even if you’re sure there’s a flesh-and-blood player at the keyboard, if you see a whole fleet of ships performing the same maneuvers without any delay inbetween (save aligning for fleet warp), you can be sure there’s input multiplexing involved.
Second, it wouldn’t be too far out to assume that bots have some chatbot engine embedded as well, to react on commonplace things like “Hi” or “o7”, and on the other hand, many players (like me) don’t even react on chat invites from unknown people. (I even don’t accept nor reject them - I simply move the window out of the way and leave the other one hanging)
Even this isn’t a foolproof way to identify bots because of the way server ticks work.
I can flip through all of my miners and activate my lasers in the span of about 2 seconds. By the time those commands bounce to the server and back and then to your client an back. It would look like all the ships activated at the same time even though on my end it was done in sequence.
I would think that one reasonable way to determine if something is a bot is watching the same ship/player do the same activity for 23.75 hours/day, 7 days a week. Either they are account sharing or botting, since no human could maintain such a schedule over any significant time period. Both are EULA violations.
It’s been quite obvious that CCP’s effort to combat bots has been reduced or become not effective. What I am not sure about is whether this is a conscious decision on their part in the name of profit or merely that the botters have won the arms race in programming. Could CCP please release a statement about this problem? It has been years since you had regular updates on this particular problem .
But I imagine there’s really only two main ways for a developer to check for bots (correct me if I’m wrong someone, but do it after you read what I think those two ways are).
Simply being on 24/7 isn’t enough because they could just be afk & besides it’s far too obvious (I’d think any decent bot already has enough downtime written in to avoid being labeled a bot for that?).
the speed of key strokes or instructions received from the “player”
repetitive or unvaried activity (always doing the same thing in response to the same stimuli)
I presume there are plenty of good tools / techniques out there for bots to get around both of those tells so I imagine it’s a bit hard for a developer to find ways to spot them.
Well, someone or something is operating on a 23.74/7 schedule and it is happening in numerous systems and in all aspects of EVE gameplay. Obvious? Sure is. Provable? I don’t know, but there is no way a single human being could run that ACTIVE schedule (afk doesn’t come into the question). Whether it mining,mission/site running, or market trading, it has gotten out of hand. The botters don’t seem to care if you suspect what they are doing, since they have been doing it for some time without being stopped. Combined with RMT activity like contracts in Jita where 100 AM ammo is sold for 10 billion isk with the contract being created and accepted in under 2 minutes and you have the Tranquility server leaping off the same cliff that the China server dove off earlier. Just trying to play by the same rules as CCP states them…
A separate (if perhaps not unconnected) issue to bots.
But for that one I would think there are many easy ways for a developer to watch for RMT using bots & algorithms of their own, your own example above would be easy to code alerts for, once would be a potential buyer cock up, twice suspicious, more RMT confirmed?
Even with watchlists being a thing of the past, there is a legit reason to be online 23h30m a day, and that is to devalue all intel gleaned from online times, like timezone, time of activity, and so on and so forth. And to blueball those actively hunting for someone with having them watching oneself sitting in a station with not so much as a peep.
But yes, if you see someone mining, especially in a fleet, day in, day out, whenever you look at him, it must be either someone with a high boredom threshold or a bot.
Simple. Those people I know are in the same channels as I am. And if someone else tries to contact me, it’s either a scam, someone trolling, delivering a ransom note (if he managed to snatch up a mission item - never happened, though), an attempt at blackmailing/a protection racket or an invitation into a channel with language I don’t speak.
None of these are a reason for me to accept the invite, and in many cases I’m content in letting the scammer/blackmailer wait for my response which never comes before he moves on to the next mark.
thought so, have to admit I’ve occasionally done the same but I usually give a first contact the benefit of the doubt unless I’ve reason to be sure, unless I’m just feeling cantankerous of course
I have been reporting two market bots for about 4 months now. I understand their trade scripts well enough to have taken close to 40 billion from them in that time. One even shows some contracts that would suggest RMT behavior. Yet still active. I believe there are likely to be 100s like them in markets harder to manipulate. Making these types of trades scripts extremely difficult to compete against over the long term.
Below are screenshots I posted in another forum thread about market bots. What is funny is that the bots set their order size based on either monthly or weekly sales volume, so the harder I exploited them, the larger their order became. No human would do such a thing.
I’m sorry … but those screen shots show diddly squat as far as I can tell (so all I’m hearing from you is bollocks) … but maybe it’s like a picture you can’t see until you stop trying to see it … so perhaps you can just explain what I’m supposed to see here & save me from my terminal denseness?
So… it looks like the same client (name beginning with E and ending with r) is buying and selling to the poster’s orders. Buying at a higher number (the 5,500,000 per unit in the first shot) and selling for much less (2,499,999 per unit).
We’re assuming it’s the same product (that’s blocked out but I have no reason to think the poster is lying).
I’ll be honest… I can’t think of a reasonable reason why a player would do this. The timing is a little odd for a bot (4:30-5:10, then 14:25 to 20:35, then back to 5:00 - 5:30)… that sounds a bit more like a real play time for a player not a bot left to run all hours. But otherwise I can’t see a reason why someone would buy and sell a product repeatedly 15-30 minutes apart to lose 3 million per unit each time they run the transaction.
Thanks for that, posters post makes more sense now, I appear to have had a little blind spot / senior type moment attempting to comprehend the post
I can see one possible reason a real player “might” … attempting to corner the market / buy up all other sell orders so his own are the only ones out there (having perhaps previously acquired a bulk load for less than he’s selling at) by someone not too bright who hasn’t twigged the new sell orders are probably being filled with his previous sales … seems just as silly for a bot to keep on banging away like this as it would for a real person to be honest.
EDIT:
There is another possible (non-bot) explanation … spais … a real player doing a few RMT type market contracts (but for much less ISK than you might expect from a real RMT) to put a little ISK in a spy alts pocket that won’t show up so clearly on an API, which would mean the poster has been intercepting ISK meant for someones spy alt possible, but probably not the most likely scenario?
To pump and dump trading scripts requires that I expose myself to my own trap to any reasonably intelligent trader. That is why I mask out the item name. At peak I was earning between 600 mil to 1.2 billion a day.
The bots will outbid and stay top of the pile and wait to be filled. They will then relist below best offer and arbitrage the difference.
What I do is drive up the best bid to 5.5million and wait to be outbid by the script. I then fill their order and wait for them to relist. Once the bot relists, I can undercut them to 2.5 million and buy the items back.
The bots names are Eugen Hunter and Nik Gremlin. The item in question is Dread Guristas Bronze Tags.
Eugen no longer trades against me because I could take everything in their wallet down to a few million isk each day. With no isk, other trades this bot manages would cancel. They still login for several hours each at at set times.
Nik Gremlin has introduced tight overbidding controls and continues to operate. Instead of flipping tags in 20 minutes it takes a few days. The bots use trade volume to set position size so instead of order size of 7 as shown in the previous screenshot, Nik Gremlin expanded to 990 as trade volumes over the last month have grown quickly once I understood their scripts updating mechanics (market graph will show extremely levels of foolery).
Currently, I know the bot does not have enough isk to handle their 990 order being completely filled so I drop small amounts until their order cancels.
Below is a the most recent trade data without any filters. If you look at Nik Gremlins contract history it shows some very off priced contracts that I doubt were done by mistake. While it would be impossible to confirm RMT, market trading using an automated script is without a doubt as never have I came across a human that could be pump and dumped more than once on the same item.
Thanks for the clean un-redacted print, it’s a lot clearer what you’re seeing now, it is hard to see that as anything other than a screwed up market-bot script, why on earth the botter wouldn’t tie the sell order value to his buy order value with some additional algorithms to avoid that beats me though
thought so, have to admit I’ve occasionally done the same but I usually give a first contact the benefit of the doubt unless I’ve reason to be sure, unless I’m just feeling cantankerous of course 
