The longer this convo goes on, the worse this “mini-game” idea sounds. Bots don’t affect me at all and I’m not willing to be inconvenienced one iota to get rid of them.
Bots affect everyone, including CCP.
OK, I’ll clarify, bots don’t affect me in any way that I care about enough to put up with this mini-game idea.
I’m sure botters are very grateful for your sentiment.
Maybe they will send you a Christmas card next year.
I expect it would read:
“Thanks for the trillions, dumbass!”
Will probably have an image of their buttocks for you to kiss on the front.
I dont believe bots could reliably deal with a minigame that involves rotating 5 discs with RNG colors on their periphery, to align them on a random, unique Avatar or ship image.
If they fail it, they have to start again with a new image, and are delayed, again.
If they repeatedly fail it, the system can clue CCP to a potential botter.
You also have zero clue about AI, or software engineering in general. You’re comparable to someone that thinks he can build a space station without having the faintest clue of physics. Whatever you think is completely irrelevant, Mr. “There is no functional facial recognition software”
Your posts are a waste of time. Leave the thinking to those with actual knowledge.
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I read that article this morning and immediately thought about this thread.
–Mask of a Thousand Gadgets
As the person who started this thread and as someone who has lived and breathed bots and CCP’s response to them for the last 12 months let me clarify some points.
Firstly, CCP MAKES financially from Bots, not looses as some have stated here. Way back I did a post showing the workings and why this is so. TLDR - its to do with cost of plex verses subscriptions and what bought RMT’d isk is used for
Secondly, CCP’s done nothing for the last 14 months that I know of about them, other than coming in for a weekend on overtime and banning a tiny percentage on the back of some bad publicity, so why are you all expecting them to do something now?? - refers back to point 1 why they are dragging their heals.
I still see hundreds of blatant bot buy orders still up on a large number of market items, swarms of hauler bots going backwards and forth from the same stations 24/7. Explorer and FW bots doing the same rounds in low and null and still hundreds of PVE bots in 00. I also still see security tickets going unanswered for months and the ‘report bot function’ never being actioned
Seriously guys, can anyone actually point to anything that has changed in the last 14 months other than there are more now than ever and a couple of quick tweaks to the ‘if you are caught, which realistically doesn’t happen, then this will happen to you’
CCP are running this game into the ground and they are milking it for everything they can get from it financially.
If they cared they would have sorted it by now. They haven’t and they won’t be. All that comes out of them when pushed, is just some talk ‘it makes us mad, leave it with us’ followed by zero action and everyone says ‘ok, lets moan about something else’ - they must think us really dumb, and frankly, they are probably right.
They don’t need captcha’s, fancy spyware or anything like that. They just need to get off their arses and target the blatant botters with the tools they have.
I can find hundreds of bots within an hour and that’s just by examining what I can see gameside. Imagine what they can do their side with access to code etc
If anyone can evidence things are better and CCP are proactively targeting this, then please prove me wrong
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Dear CCP Falcon !
I would like to have an answer from you why is this guy still in game ?
Is botting now allowed ? Or just for the Pirat Leader ?
I think I can quote my previous post again:
What would you do when your boss tells you “The fact is that we don’t ■■■■■■■ care and your job is to tell them that fact in a way that doesn’t enrage them”? Can you do any better?
There’s the undertone in this thread that we don’t care about botting because it brings in revenue.
yes, thats more or less what i believe in too. It brings CCP more revenue when more ISK is produced, so that PLEX pricing raises. People who plexed before will tend to subscripe, people who never bought any plex for real money, tend to buy them now.
Botters dont require much skill, so they can use their skill-queue to porduce skill-injectors. Skillinjectors will fall in pricing, that helps beginners and anybody else who want to buy some skillpoints.
Fossisov requires good index-values. For these index-values you need ratters and miners. Bots help in this case. Same goes for low ship / mineral pricing. The 0.0 space is way too huge for the low amount of players we have - thats my opinion.
One easy way, to shrink the amount of bots would be to only allow two or three clients to use the same IP simultaneous. Of cause, a few people will cry about their alts they want to have active. But the question is, how many are they compared to the number of players that you try to safe? If one player has about 10 bots running in one VM, he would be forced to schrink down the bots per VM. In general these VMs need to be payed, and in the end the question is, is it worth to pay so many VMs to be able to play only a few bots in it. The more technical people will realize how to overcome this problem perhaps, but the typical Joe will not!
I wonder what the player count on TQ would be without bots?
Simple way to stop bots… assuming they’re usually always in-station… have a captcha pop up every 30 mins, lock down the GUI until it’s completed.
If there was a simple way to stop bots, then there would be no bots.
Just sayin’
Mr Epeen 
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Bots are like loose razor blades in your underpants. They sound like the greatest thrill, until your balls get cut off.
Sorry guys, I’m dropping in late to this thread.
Could anyone help me out and wrap-up the 1658 posts before this one?
Specifically, I’d like a simple answer to wether CCP is evil or not and the same for bots.
Thanks, much appreciated.
CCP Falcon made a reply in #435, take a look.
Form my POV I can remember that there are many many topics discussed, and just like Mr Epeen said, if there was a simple way to stop bots, then there would be no bots.
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Id think 10% of PCU at any given moment are bots, is a conservative “safe” estimate.
Bots are best when online as much as possible. They create a constant backdrop/hum in the stats.
Dude you don’t need to pay for a VM number one, and number two limiting accounts per ip would only hurt real players with alts. Bot users could just buy a VPN for each VM which a cheap one would be all that’s nesscary as Eve uses small amounts of data. Your solution is flawed and even if it wasn’t, no solution to botting should hurt legitimate players.
The tricks are:
A) Monitoring account activity for “inhuman” levels, as hours online actively sending commands, and the frequency/regularity of commands, to flag accounts for further investigation.
B) Mini-games that are dynamic and drawn randomly from a wide pool which test different aspects of human/bot interaction, and incorporate random elements in themselves which stump bots but not a human.