That is truth.
Even when they did not want to give alphas a lot of industrial and production options, it is still damaging. I think CCP could discover bots automatically, its so automatized that I think its hard not to see they are botting. Maybe just compare boters logs with non bot users logs and apply a script that would report on the similarity when run from time to time on the server. If CCP dont have computer brains and machine learning for comparing the data, they could use human brains to write algorithm. CCP would just have to see what is the indicating factor in those botting logs.
Why?
Do you think that anyone representing the null cartels or lowsec pirates are going to worry about highsec?
That was disproven when they got the mineral contents of asteroids changed because they cried about having to buy it from hs miners because it caused a bottleneck in their capital production.
Bots were there before alpha clones and 99% of bots are plexed. Thus this botting issue has nothing to do with F2P.
Why wouldn’t you plex them? Plexed bot will be able to make much bigger profit than alpha bot would. Even those market bots might be running omega, there is no way to tell.
“Over the course of the weekend, CCP Peligro and CCP Grimmi have been doing Bob’s work, and have taken out just under a thousand accounts that were complicit in botting. They’ll continue to kick the ■■■■ out of as many more as they can going forward.”
While this is welcome news @CCP_Falcon, @CCP_Peligro, like others here, I tend to take the view that this is all a bit lacklustre.
If you knew about the thousand accounts before the weekend please tell us why they weren’t acted upon before this. Was it a lack of monitoring or just a level of disinterest from CCP?
Maybe, on the other hand, they were all set up on Friday night and you were super efficient in dealing with them?
It’s one of the other, you really can’t have it both ways.
From where did you get that data? Would not alpha accounts dont need any PLEX that is now expensive, and they could just RMT the ISK?
I know that CCP made it so you cant run multiple alphas on the same windows account, but virtual machines? If these are cheaters, who is to stop them? Only CCP.
Anyway, alpha or omega, bot is bot, we should rather focus on that.
This twice you stated this. It could be true but not a necessary truth. You yourself encroached on a possible reason for why its not a necessary truth. Albeit taken out of your context nonetheless a plausible truth.
I don’t think I’m grabbing at straws pointing that out. The convenience is that they are free and disposable. Sometimes cost outweighs efficiency. The potential for profit is going to be there regardless.
IP bans don’t have to be a singular event. I know of another MMO that placed a regional IP ban on a particular city. The player banned more or less confirmed it in their rants on a public forum. They had to travel some 30 miles to file a ticket with the MMO to object to their ban. Ha Ha
That player blatantly botted and spammed their game with rmt sites. In open chat laughed at the game company’s GM and outright challenged them that they could do nothing as he felt he was impervious.
As far as I know that player never returned to bot.
Proxies? I use free proxy servers every day in work to post on this forum.
That used to be the case, but not now, not with all the different bots available and increased alpha skills. Good ratting bots 100% yes but why plex hauler, FW and market bots when you can run them for nothing - yes, you could increase the number of buy / sell orders on a market bot but your putting all your eggs in one basket, run several alphas and if one gets taken out its business as usual. And u gain nothing by plexing a hauler or a FW bot, alphas have the skills needed to do what they do - its no coincidence that hundreds of hauler / FW and market bots have now appeared with the toons generation dates being all being post alpha.
They could even hire the guys they recently made redundant so as to save the company money and then name them ‘team security’… think about it - that said CCP Falcon did say something that I thought was interesting, namely
So the entire security team for Eve consists of two people?
Someone asked about if the Jita market bots are still operating.
On a positive, it looks like they’ve hit the 51 names finally that I put forward 12 weeks ago.
On a negative, I see as least 30 known other bots operating in local as I type (these are ones either others have confirmed and reported and I’ve validated, or others I found post my original ticket and reported by way of the bot report function) plus the items they were ‘botting’ on are still saturated with bot buy orders, so whilst they’ve hit some names I’ve given, they’ve done zero investigatory work on the items I listed so as to identify the remainder.
Bottom line is Jita markets still saturated with them - they’ve just scratched the surface, they are fire fighting back tickets / reports rather than investigating and taking down the cartels as a whole
I did say in one of my posts to CCP don’t think you can leave it months, let it reach epidemic levels , then hit a wave and expect a pat on your back (and this wasn’t a wave but a ripple) -
Sorry, but too little too late - my accounts remain un-subbed for the foreseeable future until theirs some real positive action
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Bottom line, CCP management is far too incompetent to handle this crisis.
One can say they simply don’t care about bots, or they don’t have the manpower to handle them, or they need the cash from the accounts, or they simply don’t have the skills/tools to deal with them.
Any or all of those possibilities exist, but they all boil down to years of decisions made my management that have led to this place.
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@CCP_Falcon
So this is some majorly rough spitballing, but what about crowd-sourcing the bot hunting.
I’m not certain what metrics you keep, but they could surely be anonymized. Algos already exist for detecting potential bot activity, as it’s pretty easy to detect PVE content bots.
Every pilot’s ANONYMOUS metrics over the week get provided out via “the next Project Discovery” in graph form.
-
Hours played per dayHour-by-hour chart, 1 when they’re logged on, 0 when they’re logged off - Isk earned per hour/tick
- Rats killed per hour/tick
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The times that players non-aligned (different corp/alliance) entered system (to correlate with declines in 2 and 3)Edit: This doesn’t really mean much because nobody rats with neuts in local.
It’s certainly easy for a bot to artificially affect those numbers (warping to sites less often, staying logged out for longer, etc) but it would definitely be a good start.
When a player sees metrics that would indicate a potential botter, they flag. When enough players flag, a GM looks it over and investigates the player. Some pre-education on what kind of metrics to look for, and we’re set.
In order to prevent abuse, your reward would be based on delayed results. So if you are 100% accurate, your reward is 100% of “whatever”. If you just flag everyone, and lets say you reviewed 100 and 1 of them ends up actually being a bot, you get 1% of the reward.
I’m certain market bots could be targeted using similar analytics.
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A nuclear solution, would be some sort of limited “captcha” system.
Now you’ve done it. Now you are tainted as a NS propagandist in Dinsdale’s eyes. Confronting him with facts is pointless. Said facts merely underscore CCP’s complicity in all of this.
Arguing with a conspiracy cult member gets you precisely nowhere.
Considering how off the rails algorithms can go…I’m inclined to say, “No!” Especially when coupled with how ingenious EVE players can be at turning something to their advantage.
See, the problem with making this kind of thing public is you could spark what amounts to an arms race. Arms races are rarely a good thing.
F*ck no. I hate captcha, they have to be the worst. This is where the arms race idea comes in, soon you are looking at captcha that are illegible to even humans…who are amazing at spotting patterns.
I mean a simplified captcha.
Something simple like connect two similarly colored dots in a grid. (Randomly Green/Red/Blue per captcha) (Would have to account for color-blindness)
Ideally something that only takes like 2-3 clicks.
Yes, would be an annoyance for everyone else, but could potentially wipe out most botting.
Im not worried about an arms-race, as from what I know about botting, even a simple captcha like I recommend above would stump all but the most involved/advanced bots. Bots that can detect on-screen elements and react to them like that are very rare and may involve proprietary technology/software.
Scripts alone cant handle that.
With less of the more rudimentary bots operating therafter, CCP can then focus their resources on investigating the remainder of the more advanced ones.
My point being, CCP CAN kill the activities of most bots via very simple and doable means.
Question then becomes are we as players prepared to deal with some added inconvenience for that to happen.
On my part, Id say yes, I am.
Ill take that hit for the team, to rid all of us from most of the bot plague.
Think of it just as an added mini-game.
It doesnt need to pop-up everytime either, just often enough to stump bots running 24/7 unattended.
Hell, it could even be implemented with a small isk/token reward as “thanks for being a human and helping us fight bots”.
Maybe tokens you can collect so you can buy a “I’m a Human” SKIN for various ships from NES.
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Think you will find CCP has the tools to detect, but not the resources to deal with the situation.
Their policing is reactive, as opposed to proactive and has been for ages
If their are only two guys in team security, which it appears to be the case, then my heart bleeds for them as they are fighting a loosing battle which was recently fuelled with the introduction of alphas and their skill base increase.
This problem sits firmly with CCP management. Someone didn’t think this through properly, has cut too many corners, has let it grown to epidemic proportions across all areas of Eve and ignored the player base in the process
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With a simple captcha, detection would largely not be necessary except for the remainder of advanced bots.
Thus allowing CCP to focus their resources on those.
Its more efficient to prevent botting in the first place, than police it afterwards.
Salvos said something that isn’t stupid and actually makes some sense, we as the forum community should reward this with positive feedback.
This is not a bad idea, hell even Runescape was able to make this work years ago. (The only problem RS had with it, was that death didn’t mean as much as it does in EvE, but it did get the bots killed.)
First, this would not be a general captcha that pops up for everyone all the time, but something that only effects bots and people playing like bots. It could even have some sort of a chime that sounds so a semi-AFK player would know they need to look at the screen. It should never popup in PvP (combat) activity, because the player input would never look like a bot. In other botting activity it could even be set so the pop-up will happen at the safest time, with death then coming next. As there is no death risk for market bots, I will not include them in the timing of the captcha, but also it doesn’t matter as “what the hell you popped that up in the middle of my fight?!” doesn’t apply to them.
In each case there could be a player driven punishment, an NPC driven punishment, or both, I am not endorsing one over the other but will mention options for both. The main botting problems outside of stations are:
- Ratting: the captcha comes between waves.
- Mining: the captcha comes when there are no hostiles.
- Courier: the captcha comes mid-warp, in a warp long enough to reasonably solve the captcha
The player punishment response would be something like failing the captcha will make you go flashy so then player can dish out your punishment. An NPC punishment response could be something like your weapons and propulsion is disabled until you solve a captcha (which is now not limited to the “safe time”) and you are left to the mercy of the next wave of rats or any player who happens along.
This is a fair point, get the low hanging fruit, and then the two guys on the security team can deal with the 100 bots personally instead of having to worry about thousands of bots. It would have to be clear (at least in internal CCP policy) that a captcha system is a filter for the weak bots, not a solution that should escalate to try to deal with all bots.
And we are back to Salvos being Salvos. 
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I made it up based on a few players I met in past who were botting and told me how it works. These players no longer play and they weren’t botting for RMT just for ISK to access better content faster.
For example, a rumor is that if you sub your accounts by paying $$$ directly to the CCP they will never ban you. This might or might not be true however it is what my friend been told to from those who sold him the bot.
Beside this. There is no reason why would you bot with alpha. Sure, lvl 4 distro missions in highsec or station trading wouldn’t need omega. And it is no denial that players are using bots for both activitities. But the only reason I can think of for using bot to do distro missions is to stay low profile - mining bots are extremely easy to spot, pve bots even easier, and lately players found out how to track trading bots too. So maybe this was someones’ attempt to bot and not be detected - which failed already.
And except the distro bot all the activities gets more profitable with omega. Trading bot will be able to put more orders, mining bot will be able to mine more, explo bot will be able to do it all faster/safer and pve bots are harly alpha even if they would fly VNI I just don’t believe that.
The setup to make multiple alpha bots is needlessy complex and CPU/RAM expensive too. Why would you run 3 alpha bots via VM when you can have 6 omega bots which makes you much more profit?
Sure some players are certainly botting on alpha but that will be minority of them. And even if they do I would expect them to do so only till they gather enough money to plex that account as that will allow them to increase their ISK/hour ratio almost for all the botting activities.
I see no harm in a “I am Human” SKIN set, as thanks for not botting.
Wont upset any economy.
Its always good to include a carrot, especially since the captcha would inconvenience all non-botters. Sweetens the deal a bit.
I cant speak to value created by bots, but I think a captcha may remove as much as 80% of bot volume, depending on to what/how it is applied.
My assumption is that the overwhelming amount of bots run very simple setups, with very simple automation systems.
As botters, they are largely inherently lazy, except for a fringe that really understand bot tech and know how to apply it to overcome something like a simple captcha. They rarely’ share that knowledge/data/software to bot “noobs”, for obvious self-interest reasons.
The remaining 20% (ie: the true hardcore botters who know what they are doing) unfortunately, likely will be the ones earning far more than that removed 80%, either based on running truly cutting-edge bot systems, or because the captcha cant be applied to their particular form of botting activity.
As was evidenced by the Nyx incident, the value even a small bot setup can generate if uninterrupted, is seriously game breaking.
Still, if 80% of botting volume can be prevented with a simple captcha version, it leaves CCP with resources to deal with the more complicated remaining 20% far more efficiently.
Why on earth is anyone even contemplating or suggesting a scenario where the players do CCP’s job for them?
If it’s got to that stage then I’d gladly “like” the next eve is dying thread…
Seems like an easy flag would be any account routinely logged in over 20 hours a day while engaging in some sort of activity…be it markets, mining, or missions. Either they are botting or account sharing. Either way, they’re breaking the EULA.
I logged my trader/hauler alt this morning in Amarr about 10 minutes after downtime ended, and there were already 195 people in local. I wonder what percentage of them were market bots…
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