That’s not true in my country - only in a few exceptions.
–Gadget knows what you did last summer
They don’t want to ban anyone. Not really.
- Someone playing this game isn’t playing another game. The time sink is intended because if you are here you aren’t somewhere else.
- If you are here,there is a chance you will generate revenue. Even if you are a botter.
- The time taken to ban could be time used for other purposes.
The conflicts are intended in an attempt to not only keep the customer,but to appeal to the customer’s desire to win. There is nothing to win,just the presentation that there is. The player just doesn’t realize it in that moment created by conflict. Its intent is to get you to work it out and one of its means is to ante up to CCP.
The psychology behind it isn’t new. Its a knee jerk reaction in a moment of lapsed cognition for many,and that moment is conceptualized as a profit scheme.
Botters are implicitly wrong,in the conflict of good and bad that is innately espoused into people at a young age to know the difference. It is that opposition that is what some consider “content” and the botter is the focal point of equaled digression to balance in one’s mind the opposing factions contained within. Its a ploy mechanism to further the main and omnipresent goal. To convince you to spend your money.
Botters will persist until an outcry of measurable proportion is recognized. When the outcry subsists,its on back to business for the botter and the enabler.
I personally don’t have any opposition this.however it has moved well beyond the game into real lives. That part is also intentional and promoted. That’s what I mean when I voice dissent saying “Let a game be a game for the sake of being a game.” CCP won’t do that for one reason. $
Allowing players to personally profit in the real world promotes their goals directly and indirectly. So when someone shouts “KEEP IT IN GAME!” I’ll disregard that exclamation. For its ignorance or for its hidden truth.
Botters are here to stay and its intended (Even if its wrong,its the price of doing business) as long as they play by the unspoken rules.
Still waiting for the report promised.
Edit: Afterthought; What would Richard Garriott think? I’d like to know his insight.
That is why they would need a dedicated person to do only that stuff. Other purposes cant go in the way of important things.
I doubt the issue is complacency so much as realistic. While we can all admit comparatively to other gaming companies, CCP tends to strive more toward the best, you must also understand that at its core it is just that, a company. No gaming company has a 100% bot prevention program nor any method of policing said bots 24/67 aggressively. In the end they rely on the players to report said offenses. Of course this is only one step, they must also verify said offenses to ensure the player reporting them isn’t doing so to troll or other malicious method. “They don’t want to ban everyone, not really?” Seriously, have you talked personally with each CCP dev to determine your statement is true? Over the years CCP has been pretty aggressive toward botters/RMTers they did a great purge multiple times and in recent years changed the ban policy from 3 step to 2 step.
Ultimately though it comes down to time, time to investigate the botting claims. Honestly I think they do a pretty good job, although I would like to see a bit more staff added to the enforcement of policy. A lot of reports from players are based on true observation of botting activities and they can pick out bots very well, others report players they suspect who turn out to have nothing to do with botting, the reporting system actually creates an environment where shifting through the garbage to find the offenses takes longer than it should.
It was a general statement inspired by another post above it,which I chose not to link a reply to.
Your in line quote of what I said added a question mark included in the quote.
I clarify now.
See the inspiration and the clear difference you chose to interpret as?
Are bots a bad thing?
Yes.
Is CCP complicit in their use?
I certainly hope not.
Is CCP doing enough about bots?
No.
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In part I agree with your statement, namely more resources are desperately needed on the security team, which currently stands at just two guys.
As for CCP as a whole does a good job. Throughout this thread we have seen many examples of blatant 24/7 botting on an industrial scale which has gone on for many months, in some cases years, without being challenged.
Examples - The multiple supers brought down which had been botting for years, the 150 plus hauler bots running like a swarm of flys 24/7 from just one or two stations for 6 months despite being reported and the 100 plus market bots which I gathered evidence on and reported on over 9 months ago and which CCP has only recently banned on the back of bad media.
The markets are still full of them, null sec and highsec are still full of them, they are still rampant - we’re not talking about one guy running one or two bots, we’re talking about collectives running many dozens, if not hundreds at a time on an industrial scale for what to them is big money - CCP are totally reactive as opposed to being proactive, and then only when bad media gets to such a level they spend a weekend on overtime taking out the high profile bots.
I said it before, and I’ll say it again. Do you want to point to any evidence of these great purges that CCP has done on bots in recent years??? The last purge I remember was about 4 to 5 years ago when they targeted mining bots. After that, I’ve seen no blogs, evidence or proactive activity from them at all
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I don’t think there will be a real crackdown on bots because people above the CM’s don’t care about it.
To them a paying account is a paying account.
The CM’s job is to tell you everything is fine and to keep playing. If they said “yeah the guys up top don’t give a crap, leave the game” you think they’d have a job?
Null sec corps don’t care because, like the big wigs in CCP, rent is rent.
Everyone that’s in the position to do something about it don’t care, or are paid not to care.
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I can only come up with 1 possible solution to stop the rampant bott activity but people are not going to like it. 1 Alpha and Omega acc per IP and bank acc.
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Impossible.
Wrecking multibox accounts by rote, though they are not botting, from one IP/player will utterly destroy CCP income.
Its not that we wont like it, its that its utterly unfair to current players that run/pay for multiple accounts, but do not bot.
This is throwing the baby out with the dishwater.
Hmm, botting seems hard to solve, I have read the thread and people seem to think that testing for a “human” player is what its about. I disagree.
The only way to solve botting is if Evefile.exe somehow checks the validity of processes running on a pc that is running Eve, this check would be done on Eve startup and while the eve processes are running.
This Idea would take lots of collaboration from software designers, the way in which people create software for use on a pc does follow strict logic.
So, one would start up Eve then a quick software check would start and list the programs Eve does not want running while eve is running. Come on lets face it, A bot which is used to cheat on a game or on real life stock market trading is hardly going to be manufactured by a reputable company…
I think there needs to be an authority on botting which would be a real life company say “Internet Botting Authority” who all software creators would register with for a small fee. This company would do all the checks on behalf of CCP and keep databases of what botting software is out there.
I think this is the right path to go, i see it like this;
1, Eve is started and the botting check runs.
2, The botting check finds a suspect program and throws up a list of what software is suspected as botting software and refuses to start until process(s) for the suspect software are terminated.
3, Botting check stays running in the background and reacts by closing EVE if a suspect process is found.
Now I know many of you played Battlefield 2142 (a multiplayer war simulator first person perspective with a range of guns), this had something called “Punkbuster” which was a seperate program that battlefield 2142 communicated with to stop people using aiming bots to get lots of kills. this seemed to work for battlefield with botters suddenly getting “punkbusted” and kicked from the game.
Hmmm, I can’t find any flaws in this approach. what you guys think?
This is illegal.
CCP cant access that data.
It can only deal with data sent to its server by the client.
if what you’re saying is correct then how does the company i linked below operate?
I’ve cut and pasted a small part of what these guys do below;
How does PunkBuster work?
The PunkBuster anti-cheat system actively scans memory while players are connected to the server. The scanner is continously searching for cheats much like an anti-virus scanner searches for viruses. PunkBuster does not use subjective methods such as data hueristics or player performance metrics. PunkBuster’s memory scanner objectively detects the presence of cheats in memory and then kicks the player from the server.
They also only analyze data sent by the client.
Its absolutely illegal for a service provider, game, OS, or otherwise, to mine data on what other processes a client (either as a person, as the game client, or a customer) are running.
It’s not illegal. Arguably it might be in some jurisdictions if they didn’t tell you, but they will just do like Blizzard did and make use of the anti-cheat software part of the EULA you agree to or you can’t play.
CCP Peligro hinted that was a possibility on Twitter, but it is probably too expensive to ever become a thing.
“Wrecking multibox accounts by rote, though they are not botting, from one IP/player will utterly destroy CCP income.”
It’s multiboxing accounts that are wrecking CCP how do you think botting works. Maybe CCP could increase the amount of characters you can have online at once and have more characters per acc. Just a few suggestions to offset the pain it will cause.
No, actually, they scan the computers memory for suspect routines…
Similar to the way Anti-virus and anti-malware software scan your computer, botting software seems to work in a very typical way which can be identified.
This is utterly ■■■■■■■■.
You totally dont understand how this works.
No external body, aside from law enforcement with a warrant, is legally allowed to investigate what processes your PC is running.
These systems work entirely based on analalyzing what data the client sends to the service provider.
No TOS/EULA clause supersedes that, or allows any service provider to access your PC to discern what processes you are running, except to say that running such processes which are against TOS/EULA are a breach of contract.
Well, a “Punkbuster” sort of approach seems to be the answer IMO. and yes as you say we would all have to agree with it in the CCP EULA.
Are we going to have a problem with your poor research skills Salvos?
“Punkbuster” has been running for 15 years, many of us know of it because we have played games that feature it. The games that feature it never seem to have a problem with botters.
Do research so you know what you’re talking about before you agree or disagree. @Salvos_Rhoska
Eve are specialists at making games, they are not specialists in online botting countermeasures, Punkbusters are specialists.