i’m not even convinced CCP wants to get rid of bots… i mean they are so obvious they could make a bot that looks for and flags potential bots. but bots are subbed accounts and that means money. it seems more like CCP does what they can to cull bots so they don’t disrupt balance to much but they don’t want to get rid of them fully.
and tbh they do a good job of this and the bots also provide a bit of content on a slow night if you can’t find anything else.
one question i do have is how many people actually report a bot if they see it?
as for the idea in general it would mostly only serve to give ratters more time to get away in the best case and more likely would just add safety to bots as well
Bots are not necessarily subbed accounts (I would guess that most are in fact PLEX’d). In addition, most Bots are also tied in with RMT so that’s definitely not in CCP’s best interest.
Yes but botters would earn a lot less isk if they could only earn the isk from clearing a single page of anoms and not the ones that respawned, it makes it so that botting only works for an hour or two before an actual human needs to do something
tbh I didn’t even know exploration bots were a thing, but used in tandem with a ratting bot it would use up a significant amount of cpu and at least slow down botters a fair bit. This is by no means a solution, but at least botters will be earning by less isk
Just the other day, I encountered a fleet of 10 5 day old characters in covetors whom all shared the same name (numbered 1-10) mining out the asteroid fields in Hurtoken. This guy was very obviously botting as they all ignited their strip miners at the exact same moment, warped out immediately when I targeted them, and moved nearly in unison.
I encountered a very similar situation at the ice belt there with several other fleets of obvious bots none of which responded in local, private chats, or did anything at all when I shot at one of them. What is interesting is that even when the gank failed, no reply or gloat was given which I expected if there were a real person behind those keyboards.
Reports were made and video was sent to CCP which I have been doing for months now with no change.
Differences on difficulty the anomalies have must reflect difficulty of them to be scanned.
The key thing is that on-board scanner should be returned into game (as it was once - ship could perform a scan without probes, it was weaker, longer but it could give some results).
So the easiest anomalies could be scanned down by on-board scanner. But the hardiest should require probes to be used.
As has been pointed out above, there are already explo bots, so this wouldn’t do anything except make it a PITA for legit players by having to rely on scanning alts or giving up module slots on their ships for probe launchers. Either way its a double no good.
What would really help is change to nullsec and combat mechanics. NS shouldn’t be so static, if you kill off enough of the high prized bounties they should dry up in the area, forcing some movement. If the bots encroach too much on empire space (player empire) then they will be exterminated. If they move to hostile space … well then there is no problem at all is there ?
Likewise with mining, things should not be so static with guaranteed respawns in same areas.
That would be step 1.
Step 2 would be to make combat more engaging and visual, requiring human behind the screen for some counterplay, not just spread sheets in which you dont even need to run the graphics client, or run it on lowest possible settings. If combat info is obtained visually instead of spreadsheet, then that will greatly increase difficulty for bots. Not to mention make the game more fun for the rest of us as the combat will become more actual human skill based. It would be a win-win situation with no downsides.
What if we put a CAPTCHA in the scanning screen at the last part to revile the site so you can jump to it?
That way you don’t have to change the dificulty of scanning and the bots can not finish the scanning to get to the sites and everyone can be free from the CAPTCHA every 5 minuets and only have to worry about it to get to the sites?
Oh and if you fail the CAPTCHA you get stuck in location for a full minuet and you show up in overview as if you just popped a cyno
Combine the two ideas in a way that eliminates the bots, but does not put a huge burden on everyone.
When I used to play Tibia, the company released a program in 1 of their updates that detected 3rd party programs, including programs that moved the mouse for you and went to all the points you told it to. this lead to hundreds of thousands on the game banned.
well then there is no problem at all is there ?