Do not try to detect bots, make an anti-bot environment

Communications Center General Discussion
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First of all, bot detection is like the anti-virus development. Always one step behind the programmers. It consumes a lot of resources, time plus money, and even with your best efforts, it can be false positive.

So let’s be one step before the bots. please change the environments, where the bots operate.

CCP, you have developed two underestimated, but very effective tools to do this. The new AI fleets, and the mined ore counter.

Use your new developed AI fleets. After a count of NPC kills in a system, starts spawn these AI fleets in the anomalies. Scale these fleets to the players’ ships, until they could kill even any ratting supercapitals. Make this threshold random, and it will be hard to predict. Do not make these fleets selectable in the overview, and the bot programs cannot filter them. Leave the AI ships in the anomalies, the players have to kill them to continue ratting, and spawn new anoms.

Do it with mining also. You have a mined ore counter. After hitting a random threshold, spawn AI fleets in the belt, which can kill even rorqs and their drones.

And please, do not add bounty on these fleets (no more ISK from the thin air into the game), but give them juicy loots, so it can motivate players to hunt them down, after they attacked ratters and miners.

This will make harder to get ISK. But it will be harder mainly for bots, and not for organised active, not afk players.

I have to stress, this is not against ratting or mining. And this won’t make bots out of the game. But they will be less effective.

2 Likes
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Which kind of number do you think should trigger that? Either way, thank you for screwing over actual players with this. Very much appreciated.

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I think when CCP finds a botter they should release their physical address on the forum so we can stop by and stand on their neck for a few hours…

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You’re trying to tell CCP how to detect bots when they’ve been doing it for years and players can report botting activities any time they see them. Well, that’s very nice of you.

Using botting as a reason to change the game-play is fundamentally bad. Game-play always needs to meet the players.

So judging your suggestion, which by the way should have been posted in Features & Ideas, only by it’s game-play merit, I’d say it isn’t the worst change, only this seems out right silly:

How do you expect players to lock them? With the radial menu? I hate using the radial menu to select moving targets in space and I always use the overview for this instead. So that’s a terrible suggestion.

I bet in fact a bot could target moving objects better than a human can. So once your change is in effect will it take one update by the botters and they’d rule over these anomalies, while normal players will start avoiding them. Thus it becomes a botter haven.

I don’t mind the idea of more randomness and the occasional “death squad” or “ganker” spawn, but making targets unselectable on the overview is a horrible idea.

2 Likes
5

What would be funny for bot detection is to record every player’s mouse movements and clicks. Then to turn these into images and audio files and create a project similar to “Project Discovery”. Players would then get to look and listen for patterns in images and sounds and get rewarded for detecting possible bots. :rofl:

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I say add randomness so there isn’t 1 fit that can do them all
Edit: stupid auto correct

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You’re such a good keyboard warrior

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Getting rid of plex and alpha accounts could make a dent too. There’s not a lot of incentive to spend $800/yr botting 7 accounts.

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Setting aside privacy and key logging issues, I LOVE this idea!

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Much easier to let players do it. Change each nullsec region to include one NPC sov constellation and provide a generous set of NPC stations there. Would probably a good idea to make these NPC stations Astrahus sized. Have NPC station owners automatically engage & destroy any anchored bubbles after two hours.

Chances of it happening: 0%.

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Well, if its happening in-game, ccp already has the logs.

1 Like
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The market appears to be heavily saturated with bots. You can trick them into bidding strangely repeatedly over and over. Normally a person would undercut by .01 but when you change that up sometimes it automatically lowers its prices by that amount, even when you do not.

The bots are automatically bidding .01 lower on sell orders, and I tricked a few into bidding that way over and over and over and I had not bid less than that I was bidding .02 or .05 and the bot would still automatically lower the price .01 only undercutting itself and yet not having the lowest bid.

i thought it strange to see it happen so many times in a row across the board with so many products. I reported it to CCP but I imagine they have more important things to do.

Market bots are going to suck up the economy like an army of soulless rogue drones. In the rogue drone country most other people do not have souls and behave this way,

Game needs a region lock ASAP to keep the rogue drones out.

Squatting Serpentis are 10X better than the soulless rogue drones. BR BR BR Blood raiders are nothing like this.

The soulless rogue drones are horrible. I want nothing to do with them if I can avoid them but they are not region locked and destroy games like a plague of locusts.

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Why do you think that bots could not be adapted to account for randomness?

I mean they adapted even to players like me. It is pretty common that whole fleets autodock when I enter a system, even in regions I never visited before.

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Try not to flatter yourself too much. They dock when any neutral enters local.

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I’m speaking about highsec. No they don’t dock when a neutral enters local.

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Ah, in that case I’d be willing to bet it’s still just standings based. For example, CODE and associates get marked -10 and when -10 enters local, they dock up.

Just the same, it does lend support to your original statement. If the bots are all packing up, you’re doing a service to us all.

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