Everyone needs to take a step back, and just relax. We’ve all missed something huge in all of this.
None of these changes go live until the March Release. And there is no March Release! Or any other release! WE HAVE FOUND EVE’S FINAL FORM!!
(note: obviously, this is snark. Nobody freakin’ panic.)
Out of curiosity how do bot’s see? How do they figure out where an npc is and where to warp to and so on, maybe there is a way to reverse engineer how they gather data and scramble it in some way, without humans picking it up.
After investigating further, the decision has been made to place all level 4 and 5 missions behind the requirement to have Omega status, to assist the fight against RMT and botting.
While I appreciate that botting is a serious issue that requires great measures to stop, I think Omega-walling lvl 4 missions will affect too many legitimate alpha players. I have many Alpha corpies who are running lvl 4s, or well on their way to. And grinding up for Omega every month on missions alone will take a LOT of time, and thats only after you unlock Omega (GOOD LUCK grinding it on lvl 3s…). This step alone may make a lot of Alpha-mains leave the game (not everyone is interested in low/null).
Fight the fight, the better bots are smashed, the better for the community at large. But torpedoing members of the community in the process may not be worth the benefit.
You know the botting thing was one of the things we warned about with this alpha concept.
Yet they didn’t listen.
Anything to slow down and reverse the proliferation of botting in EVE probably would get my approval. Yeah, the mission botting is bad, but it bothers me less than the swarms of botting Gilas,VNI, and Machs that roam through regions around my home system, doing anomolies/sites. Those guys directly impact what opportunities are even available for me to try, as well as deminish the resale value of any deadspace/faction modules recovered. That some people are able to reduce the enjoyment and opportunities for paying customers at no cost to them doesn’t seem to make much business sense. I welcome people freely trying the game; just don’t reduce my gameplay at the same time. The narrower the perceived gap of opportunity between Omega and Alpha accounts is, the far more likely that CCP will lose more money as people convert down to Alpha status.
Disgusting. No one is forced to RMT.
When you don’t stop bots they multiply. What we’ll be left with the same amount of people trying to game the system and less resources available to them to do so.
The nuclear button to kill bots it’s a different thing. It’s called memory scrapping and consists of the game running a little piece of code that reads what’s in your computer memory looking for patterns known to belong to bot code. If those telltale code bits are loaded in your system’s memory, you’re FUBAR. A notorious memory scrapper is the application called Punkbuster.
Thing is, since they’re reading ALL your memory, it’s a highly controversial topic about what could the scrapper be doing other than look for bot code. Thus is not a popular solution, but as anti-bot weaponry goes, memory scrapping it’s the ultimate weapon. You load the bot, the scrapper finds out, and you’re concordokken.
As for how bots “see”, they track pixel color in certain areas of the overview. When those pixels change to, say, red, the bot tells the computer that mouse sent a click on those coordinates and to the client it’s as if somone had clicked the red guy. Then the bot waits for a specified amount of time or maybe an audio cue being played back (by checking the sound source) and sends another order like “keyobard pressed F1” and there you go, your bot just learned to detect reds, lock them and shoot them.
Theoretically, CCP could slightly shift the color to confuse bots, but then bots would just set a generous range of values for the relevant pixels. Same would happen if CCP somewhat tinkered with the overview, although that could very easily confuse players too.
The cost of PLEX has always been on the rise for a very long time… people who bot and RMT are part of this reason. a drop in the price of each PLEX would help since people who bot and RMT are part of this PLEX market. If the cost of PLEX would drop a bit there would be more OMEGA accounts then ALPHA accounts… Lets face it if a an ALPHA earn enough enough to get OMEGA and stay there there would be more PLEX used… and spent. Not to mention the player base would increase.
Well. I guess this is my first comment on the official forums. If I made any back in my subscriber days, I can’t recall doing so. Sadly, it’ll probably also be my last comment on the official forums.
I subbed for a few years, waaaaaay back in the old days (not at launch, but starting maybe a year or two later). I eventually “won” EVE because of time commitments, particularly long hours at work, that failed to justify the monthly fee (same reason I gave up on WoW and UO). I followed EVE casually in the news, but I never played again–until alphas came along.
I’m probably in a niche of a niche, but I enjoy the sort-of blue-collar feel of moderate progression, improving over time, figuring out how to accomplish modest goals within the spirit of the rules. Yes, I’m de facto handicapping myself, and I’m o.k. with that. I’m also an economics and history buff, and EVE has the best sandbox on the planet for that sort of thing. In short, I never accomplished anything that any player would consider newsworthy, but I had fun.
My whole long-term plan was built around playing intermittently, when I had the time and energy. It was built around highsec PvE, and it was built around alpha progression leading up to “earning” Omega. I figured that playing long hours so that I could “pay” another player to pay CCP for me would still make me a “productive citizen” within the EVE economy. And most importantly, it was built around missions (mostly SOE, because I didn’t want to mess around with empire reputations or the slightly sketchy methods of restoring them).
I was this close to reaching my first endgame goals. In about a week, I’ll have the skills to fit a halfway-decent low-bling Rattlesnake, and I already have the money saved up for one with a fair bit to spare. That all came from running SOE L4s solo, BTW. My next objective was going to be the long grind for Omega, for the sentries, MJD, and uncapped skills. I figured that getting and maintaining Omega statys would keep me busy for the rest of the year, while I tried to decide whether to train for caps and assume the lowsec risk that comes with them, or just bling out the Rattler.
And then today, I just happened to notice this headline on the launcher, and decided to check it out. And it’s gone. All gone. Everything that I had hoped to accomplish in this game, gone in a single, sweeping decision.
I don’t have a backup plan. I don’t have the time commitment for alliance wars, or the interest in gank fleets. If CCP goes through with this, I can only see one real option–to, once again, “win” at EVE.
Like I said at the beginning, I’m not representative (AFAIK) of a huge number of alphas who consider it “fun” to earn their way to Omega in-game. But, there are some of us out there, and this change will probably be the end of us. I guess I could go back to working on my Steam/GoG backlog. Maybe do a few runs to Hutton Orbital for mugs and grins. It does feel a bit like a waste, though, to put all the time that I have into EVE, only to be told at almost the last second that because the devs can’t figure out how to catch cheaters, I will no longer be allowed to have my particular kind of fun.
Welp. I guess that’s just the way it goes, sometimes.
I hate to see good things taken away from us just because of a bunch of dirty peasants, but I understand. I plan to buy Omega soon now that my wages have increased, so it’s not a big deal to me.
I was overjoyed when I got my first player kill, only to find out that it was probably a bot 
it feels like being kicked in the nuts by the Terminator.
Sorry, but what the heck is RMT? If you write articles about short cuts, maybe it should be explained? Thx.
If you read an mmo security dev blog maybe you should have the education needed to understand it? Rather than complaining they didn’t explain a super common and old term.
RMT is real money transaction. People selling their in game assets for real cash.
Sorry, but what the heck is RMT? If you write articles about short cuts, maybe it should be explained? Thx.
Real money transfer, selling ISK to someone for actual cash.
Very interesting, what if ccp exploited the fact that human’s can only see a certain frames per second while bot’s see more, they could add frame’s that are there only to confuse bot’s but human’s them selves will not even notice the difference.
Fighting the bots are old and simple game, all other mmo’s done that years ago, CCP could easely target and remove all boots from the game technically it’s a piece of cake today. But that would jeopardize the RMT revenues of different groups and it is obvious that the CCP does not dare to do it …
If that was true so many bot’s would not have already been banned? 1000’s of them are already banned, and beside’s bot’s generate ingame currency which goes to buying plex with isk not real money so they can perma run those bot accounts with ingame money, not only that but if a player that want’s in game time want’s to buy plex with real money and they go to the bot shop’s for plex then that player now wont go to CCP’s website to buy plex so CCP is loosing money by having bot’s, they have all the incentive in the world to removing all bot’s from existance!
CCP yes
people no
CCP is legal construct … people are real and doing real thing and taking real money… ccp dies and no one is loyal to him
You have no idea what your talking about, xD not everything works like it does in Russia with bribery as the main form of progress.
People are the same, everywhere, I’m afraid you will learn it the hard way.