Sorry, you lost me here.
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I am confused. Or rather, maybe you are.
Are you suggesting that CCP itself runs the RMT site in the scenario I painted?
That is not what I mean. When I say ingame group, I am talking about any number of large alliances that have a large number of botters inside their group. That hypothetical group’s activities may or may not be known to CCP.
And sorry to burst your bubble, but yeah, Eve Online IS run by " a select group of players". All players are not equal in this game. You want more power. join a null sec cartel.
A “Punkbuster” type of tool could be defeated several ways:
Homebrew bots it hasn’t been taught to recognize yet.
Running the game in a VM and the bot outside, so there’s nothing in the memory space accessible to the tool. This could also possibly be used to eliminate the dependence on computing-resource-hungry OCR and defeat the tool they wrote to catch programs that tried to poke around the client’s Python code: the cheat would run the game in a VM, read things with a tool outside the VM, and push buttons on the game with an overlay on the VM’s window.
There are ways to recognize VMs. Examples:
Hardware combinations which shouldn’t be physically possible (the Intel 82443BX chipset under lspci and Core 2 Quad CPU under /proc/cpuinfo are electrically incompatible, so this system wasn’t physically possible). It also had several VM-specific hardware devices under lspci.
Benchmarking the hardware and getting anomalous results (said Core 2 Quad is missing a lot of modern CPU features, some of which the VM will simply take advantage of). Edit: Oh, right, this stands a really good chance of breaking Wine.
Instructions which evaluate differently on a VM from real hardware because errata
We don’t want to kill a bot in that we wish they weren’t there to be killed in the first place.
I am thinking a bayesian learning algorithm might help with this, much like spam filters.
I fight better with my words, than my ships.
Killing one botted ship at a time may win a small battle victory;
but I aim to exterminate ALL botters, to win the war, once and for all.
Sometimes the only way to know for sure is to blow it up.
Try it. Kill one bot.
Accept this mission.
Those who think this couldn’t be like this. Don’t!
Of course CCP is compicit in all this trash happening. They are fully responcible and they are a source of this problem.
Ill see what I can do.
But:
A) Botters typically run multiple accounts, for long hours afk, and have contingencies in place. Losing a single ship isnt going to hurt them much.
B) Reporting, as demonstrated by Mathra, has a very poor track record.
Salvos Rhoska
In the case of the spike preceding the carrier nerf, (which was not, afaik, telegraphed, it came as a surprise)
It was indeed known about - Super/Carrier ratting saw an all time high in the lead up to the changes - To cash in before they went live. (I funded my 2nd super in the 3 weeks prior to the nerfs and I wasn’t ratting anywhere near as much as some others I know of)
It was in fact during the lead up to the changes that the very rare 300 mil tick was made - and used as justification for the nerfs by a Dev.
As for the 3rd spike, wasn’t it around the time alpha changes went live? I imagine this would have seen a lot of isk generated.
I think the spikes in the graphs Devlin provided in his article have largely been reconciled in discussion in this thread on that topic, as arguably congruent with game changes.
I think its something to pay attention to in future though.
It would help if CCP was more open with how they collate data, in this case related to active isk delta which is a very important metric for many reasons.
Especially since the active isk delta is where we as a community can somewhat ascertain how much value has “disappeared” by either inactive or banned accounts, which is pertinent to how botters/RMT may be performing in any given period.
Losing a single ship may not hurt.
Having any pkayer who wants blow up as many ships as they can find though…
Ive no idea how anything can be achieved by sitting around talking about it.
If you believe that, go do it then.
Unfortunately, this is how it works, or at least the best way to make it work.
We cant fix the bot issue without CCP fixing it, and the only way to do that is by making noise as consumers.
Which they have pretty much clearly gleefully ignored for months.
And Ive said previously show me how and Ill blow up as many as I can find.
Its not easy or systematic like that.
For starters, Id recommend patrolling Ice fields in HS/LS.
Contact the miners, bump them, and see what happens.
If there is no response, its either afk at best, and a botter at worst.
Proceed then to explode them all.
NS is far harder to infiltrate for bot detection, but likely where most of it occurs.
Identifying them isnt the hard part.
Soloing the kill is the hard part for me.
Soloing isnt possible in HS for the real meat.
CONCORD/their and others fleet drones will wreck you before you finish them off.
You can however bump the hell out of them in a Mach or iirc a properly mass heavy/oversized AB/MWD fit Stabber/Vagabond.
CODE can probably help you with bump fits.
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Good idea. Hadnt thought of that. See, teamwork!
Im pretty sure you had read and responded to my posts in times past regarding interfering in ice miner operations, but yeah, bumping will work as a concrete way to disrupt Ice mining bots, solo.
Bump the biggest ships, as they are less likely to warp off, and where the rest of the fleet is receiving boosts from and dropping their ice off in.
Yeah the theory is sound Im just not very successful in practise.