How to fix bots

It was suggested in this thread Voigt-Kamff Test to use it for pod respawn for minimal disruption to game play.

In LS you have to be completely retarded to lose your pod in regular circumstances. Pipebombs are literally the only way. There’s no bubbles, and pods insta-warp.

It would be minimal disruption for players… but zero disruption for botters. They’ll warp out the very instant their ship is destroyed, 10 times out of 10, unless you’re hunting them in SB battleships.

Regarding the OP, even if you assume they’re screen-grabbing, the bot wouldn’t be limited in any way that a player would not (arguably, they’d be less effected than players).

Border detection works by identifying continuous lines - the exact colours are irrelevant (bots don’t even buy skins!). You can certainly change them to be not continuous, if you want your graphics to look like ■■■■, but even then, all they have to do is make the algo look for a less continuous line.

And if it gets too hard, all they need to do is extract the 3d models from the resource files, and look for those. If the US military could do it in the 70s with a tomahawk missile, you can bet that a programmer with a modern computer and a virtual environment could do it orders of magnitude better today.

Actually I believe the way bots work is that a Linux machine, separate from the client’s pc, is sniffing the data being sent from the server and reacting based on that. It’s impossible to detect the linux machine on ccp’s side, but the activities of the client should be analyzed further. I know of 10 apocalypse alpha clones that mine in high sec 23 hours a day. They’ve been there for a month now, just botting it up. CCP doesn’t seem to know, or perhaps they don’t care.

The biggest thing that allows botting here on such an incredible scale is the built in mass multiboxing support and extremely low reqs. Remove those and vast majority of the bots will be forced to stop botting, along with the mass multiboxers which are just as harmful to the game.

Sure there will be some bots left over, but no where near the current scale as the ROI on running entire PC farms won’t be anywhere near as good as it is now on running 20-30 game clients on toasters.

Must be some version of 10/10 that you were previously unaware of

report them, report them every day, every time you see them out doing there thing and botting away, i would say dec them and kill them but i’m guessing they are in an npc corp. In our thread about faction warfare bots we have achieved something, the bots are banned. we expect them to return once they have rebuilt the accounts but we will keep reporting them and keep making noise as we did this time to get rid of them.

To get rid of botters for good we need everyone to do the same, report them, make some noise, get them banned. every mining bot reduced the isk generation of legitimate miners, every ratting bot takes sites from players. keep fighting

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Amusingly, there’s no reason for them to bother warping out now. It is easier for them to get podded now, because they just get back to their stockpile of ships faster.

Add a captcha to spawning in a medical clone, and I promise you they’ll start warping out.

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Nice! Somebody want to fix bots instead EVE. :thinking:

Maybe, I think I did mention somewhere that this is a solution that would work for me but who knows the extent of the problem eve wide. In truth though are you so sure the reactions of the bots are that good they only ever normally get away when then see you coming from a million kilometers away.

You must be playing a different game from me. See… when I’m in LS, which isn’t often mind you, and I’m about to lose my ship there (less often), I’m already spamming warp.

I’m not sure why you think a bot can’t also do that.

Right now they don’t because it’s easier to get podded home than it is to fly home. Odds are if you don’t pod them they self destruct anyways. Make it more advantageous to fly home, and they will.

FW is set up to encourage botting. As long as lp can be acquired from sitting in fw pockets, there will be bots.

Ratting super bots are protected by relative safety from being run in nearly unassailable pockets of null sec. The solution to those is going to require changes to make it less safe. Local chat delays, more frequent wormholes, better force projection means into defended territory, etc.

High sec mining bots have been issued protected status by CCP. Giving them super barges with dedicated oreholds and native hull resists were all very bad moves. Aside from rolling those protections back, CCP could initiate a system to allow bots to be suspect flagged. It wouldn’t have to be much more than a very very barebones check like a notification that asks “Are you still there?” after being reported by, say, 20 players for botting. Click yes within 30 minutes and you’re not a bot. When 30 minutes are up, you’re flagged as suspect.
That may be easy to counter, but the point is that it’s something. I for one would not mind bagging a botting procurer, skiff, or orca. I don’t care if it’s actually CCP’s job to do the policing. I just love killing.

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CCP should permanently ban accounts of everyone who ever used RMT services and provided those. And for bots, CCP should disturb their activities by making things contestable more and more by human players.

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I was under the impression that bots were working as intended

depends on the bot, ive seen bots that alt tab and move the mouse to positions so you have everything in an exact place position.

a game i played in high school fixed their bot problem. Tibia.

they made a way to detect any 3rd parties that interface with the game, 10’s of thousands of bots gone on the first day. hunting grounds that were perma camped by bots from dt to dt and rune/arrmor makers gone. prices on runes and equipment went up, and gold in circulation crashed. it was great.

just put strongholds in every empire system, bot mining would be solved via destruction. because lets see a bot fleet adjust to the pirate fleets. there already tons of deaths related to those 5 little roaming frigates.

Maybe something on the gates? The client keeps track of how many gates you have passed through and gate number 20 (example) will have some sort of interaction only human can solve. idk but seems logical seeming as how bot explorers are gating the entire time.

Or you know we could look at industry that has no tolerance of botting such as the online banking industry which ended botting in the early 2000’s or other game developers that simply do not have botted games.

Step 1. Require registering a named account with email address (CCP does this).

Step 2. Require a debit card registered to account. (CCP does not do this as CCP does not care about botting). This allows other industry such as the piss poor Icelandic MMO industry to piggy back off of the superior banking industry security. When the bank recalls the card then you should probably freeze the players account too. Insurance, car rental, property rental, health care & many other well organised industry piggy back off your banks security.

Step 3. Have an active system scanning anti cheat software (CCP does not do this as CCP does not care about botting nor does also CCP have talented game developers capable of creating said extension).

Step 4. Have non bottable PVE activity (CCP does not do this as CCP does not care about botting and also CCP lacks talented game developers capable of creating said content.).

Step 5. Actually punish botters when blatantly caught. CCP currently bans botters for 3 days for first offence. Let that sink in 3 days, btw you don’t lose your SP income over those days either. (CCP does punish RMT’rs and labels them as botters, don’t be confused CCP does not give 2 shits about botting unless it is RMT connected).

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My own PERSONAL wacky conspiracy theory…
NPC mining fleets are basically server side bots that CCP itself utilizes to generate ISK for clandestine RMT. They come complete with instantaneous input broadcasting to mine as well as escape as a perfectly synchronized singular entity, protected by their own god-like response fleet that will even pod kill you.

Detecting input broadcasting when you have unfettered access to server logs is 5th grader simple, such as “all characters in this group sent client side action requests at precisely the same exact moment in time”.

Exit questions…
-What is the server load to operate the thousands of NPC bot mining fleets and could it cause server instability?
-Do subscribers have the ability to join any of the specific NPC corporations that run the NPC mining fleets that tirelessly strip every belt?
-After todays patch incursion operations failed to spawn, did NPC mining fleets fail to spawn as well?

No. Go away.

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“No go away” would be the message to the botters and they would as they’ve had to do so in other games. But hey up Nicolai bot freely in eve as CCP has no intrest in stopping non rmt related botting.

And so I have no interest in helping stop rmt :wink: