I know enough about bots, to say that no conventional bot will be able to solve the 5 minigames I posted pics of above.
They especially wont be able to solve them if they have to detect which specific minigame happens to popup and the colors/shapes/position/figures change everytime, and even better if they involve motion in the minigame itself.
None of these minigames are as simple as captcha to just enter the figures shown.
All of them involve moving elements in the minigame, and recognising what goes where among random variables.
Really? I could automate all of those in a matter of a few hours at most.
You’re just making it harder for the morons CCP is targeting these days, which isn’t a bad thing, but it’s not going to have the showstopper effect on bots that you think it will have.
Sounds like comparable to a mid-level AI assignment that students get.
I don’t like the idea of mining mini-games because it adds a new layer of tedium to an already tedious and boring task for those of us that do it legitimately. In my mind, I feel like it punishes legitimate players for the sake of trying to foil fairly sophisticated software what will eventually find a way around it anyhow.
Furthermore, it seems like implementing a mini-game puts the burden on the players when it is really CCPs responsibility to implement their own counter-measures behind the scenes while also reducing the level of impact to the customer.
Mining is already boring enough, let’s not make it worse. If there were some sort of program that allowed players to review data and help detect bots, I’d happily donate some of my Eve time to help make the game a better place for everyone. However, I realize that is probably not a great idea for a number of reasons
You are ridiculous. It was you that came up with the whole minigame stuff and me that said it’s not going to matter, as I can easily build a bot that will break your minigame. I never claimed it to be a “conventional” bot.
And it’s dead easy to come up with a minigame that no bot can ever overcome. The problem just is that no human will be able to either, because the thing will be literally unsolvable. Anything less can be automated.
Salvos, you’re not a programmer and you have very limited knowledge about the subject at hand. Why don’t you just leave it at that and move on?
A mixed bag of distinct minigame popups, each including random/moving elements, will stump bots.
CCP can update them however often they need to, so as to invalidate solutions botters have developed to solve them.
For example:
In the minigame above, CCP can randomize the colors/characters of the characters to be aligned and their starting location, make each ring a random non-mono color or an image (such as using the existing avatar backgrounds), and randomize the orientation of the brackets within which the figures/discs need to be moved to align.
Once you are satisfied with alignment of the figures in the brackets, you must submit the result. If you failed, a new distinct separate minigame will popup, which again has several inbuilt random variables specific to that minigame.
I have no dog in this fight (and generally I’d be more likely to side with a smart enough minigame winning against AI) but this example - as you’ve described it - would be painfully easy to defeat.
Another option would be to remove the characters, and instead to rotate the discs so they align as a complete image.
This would be one of many possible minigames drawn as random from the pool as a popup. Even if one bot can defeat one, they will be faced with a distinct and different minigame, with very different characteristics to solve, the next time the popup occurs.
In your example, the bot would only need to find the lines (easy) and then find the position of the digits by looking for changes in the colour (easy) and then calculate the rotation to align them all (also easy). Which part of the example is supposed to be difficult for a bot to solve?
Out of interest, do you know any programming at all? Or how colours are represented digitally? Do you have any first hand experience of this kind of thing?
This is a step closer towards a sensible solution.