Eve Bots - are they a bad thing, is CCP complicit in their use?

[Teckos_Pech]

@Salvos_Rhoska

-2 I would consider changing their uptimes, depending on whether I think CCP detected them based on that, or player reports. Probably not though. My current hypothesis is that CCP does not track activity/uptime of bots, to any significant degree.

3- I would arrange new IPs for each, and probably change their associated email addresses, if I keep them running. This gives me plausible deniability to claiming the account was haxxored etc. Infact Id probably do this even before being suspended, on an irregular basis.

This really validates my point: that you’ll react–i.e. try to adapt–to what CCP is doing.

@Salvos_Rhoska

If CCP does not adapt to bot changes, they will become ever increasingly difficult to detect with their outdated means, and more numerous as botters realize they can get away with it.

Again, this is part of my point all along. That this process is one where both sides are reacting to each other…heck the botters are probably even reacting to the players as players will hunt them down too and impose additional costs on them. It is one where no single strategy will work. And even when a strategy does work it won’t work indefinitely. And when that happens then we’ll likely see a surge in botting until CCP adapts. And it is even possible that simple could re-emerge for a time being.

@Salvos_Rhoska

That a “simple solution” may not be possible, does not mean solutions are not possible, either as complex or multiple complimentary ones. Some solutions may be more effective vs some bots, than others.

Stop that FFS. There is literally nothing in anything I have written in any post in this thread that suggests “do nothing.” Absolutely nothing. You cannot point to a single post to support this assertion. I am merely pointing out that this is a complex process and as a result we’ll likely see botting go “up and down” in terms of prevalence as strategies change and adapt over time.

Further, if anyone is expecting more information form CCP that is probably not going to happen. CCP would want to keep much of what they do under-wraps to keep the botters from gaining useful information for adapting their botting programs.

Here, let me give a IRL example.

Back a few years before the Great Recession, the financial rating agencys like Moody’s, Standard & Poors used models to rate financial instruments. These agencies, in the name of transparency, they released their rating models to financial firms. The financial firms in turn used that information to tweak their instruments to get higher ratings without actually reducing the risk inherent in instruments. Basicaly, they learned how to game the rating agency’s models so that they could sell lower quality bonds as higher quality bonds. It is part of what fed into what caused the financial crisis. See the work of Gretchen Morgenson.

The Wall Street firms learned how to massage these models, change one or two little inputs and then get a better rating as a result. They learned how to game the rating agency’s models so that they could put lesser quality bonds in these portfolios, still get a high rating, and then sell the junk that they might not otherwise have been able to sell.–Morgenson, Gretchen, (New York Times reporter), “Examining Goldman Sachs,” NPR
interview in Fresh Air, May 4, 2010.