Both the guy with 20 capitals and the humble alpha single account relay on local channel to warp to safety. If you remove it they wont have any easy way to know when to warp out.
You dont need to ban accounts. That is useless, since botters simply create others. You need to change mechanics. Remove local and players will sort the problem for you. They will even be happy about bots as they will be free kills!.
And as a bonus, you will get better performance at big battles.
Just remember when you those who profit from the botting, from RMT or from the taxes they generate are in the leadership of 0.0 entities, their opinion may be biased.
Bots don’t need to rely on local. What drives them is the need for greed and making ISKs and harvesting resources automatically.
All that happens when you remove local is that they switch to using d-scan. And even if there was no means to detect incoming ships would they simply continue to bot without it.
Report botters. If you think you have proof of botting maybe make a video of it, point out any unnormal behaviour, and create a support ticket.
You know, dscan its not perfect, cloak and combat recon dont show on dscan, some systems are big and dscan dosent cover them all.
Reporting botters dosent work since you need proof. And hard proof is a very serious thing and therefore hard to get. Plus, if i cant get in local without them warping out how can I put them in video?.
By relying on reports you are delusional, its a system more prone to abuse than to be effective. You need to change mechanics.
And if they continue to grind without local, great news. Industrialist will love to replace all those ships.
for someone who only came back to the game a month ago, you sure seem to be absolutely convinced that bots are a huge problem. if you have been running into them that often in just one month, then surely they must be so common that it would be easy to get at least some proof.
or… its just players, who warp off the second you show up, because no one owes you free kills. git gud.
Guess what , it’s the dummest idea ever. Use your brain for a moment. What will bot and script runners do without that medium?
They will automate further available features.
Here’s another fun bit of information. The smart ones, of whom there are far more on organised levels than individual bot activity, already stopped relying on local eons ago. They rely on multi-system realtime scanning data and in game channel (alliance, intel, corp, etc) monitoring.
Do you want to make the problems worse by incentivising an even faster and wider tech race of bot- and scriptrunners? Remove local.
Yep, thats the problem. I already noticed them. So glaringly obvious they are. And having played this game for 12 years, I know the game and their impact.
I also know that people who use bots are not only the big RMT crowd. The real problem its, in my opinion with the guys who use them to rat afk. After playing normaly, you may put a bot for an hour to rat a bit. These people are also the cancer.
Don’t be an idiot. Think. And think things through.
In 15+ years I’ve hunted bot and scriptrunners on just about every level in every corner of EVE, individual and organised activity.
If you discount the enormous factor of tech evolution and the stimuli related to this you’re at minimum not being constructive in any approach towards taking the problem on as a challenge.
Let me give you an example. There’s a guy in an alliance who has fun running a swarm of monitors (afk cloakies). He parks them in a target region, collates data collected through visual gate activity monitoring and autoscan (go figure), that’s nicely framed in target allocation and along come the Sins and the fun. Complete with the gratification of shutting down the gameplay of that target region.
If this were manual play, fair play. But he’s automated it - and perfected that automation - over the years. He’s not the only one. Far from. I can point you to a group of players who run automated jumpfreighter logistics around the lowsec highway network for pretty much every major block in null. These also do not rely on Local, but entirely different variables and mechanisms. In case you hadn’t noticed because you’re just fixated on a little gratification, the problem is evolving, expanding.
Sure, that falls outside the typical perspective on botting. But it is automation that violates the EULA. It already bypasses Local. It’s moved well beyond that.
And you want to incentivise other tech paths for bot and script runners to go through the same door. How smart is this, when CCP already has severe issues playing catchup with that tech evolution. Worse, it’ll reduce incentives for CCP to stay on the core issues because it’ll end up in distributed bot/script dynamics where number of accounts - omega - increases.
People who automate menial task are not a game killing problem. Its bad, but wont kill the game. The low hauling is already risk free by design. They have a little impact on the game.
The scout alter network problem has been there for more than a decade, that i can recall was already there when the BoB vs Dusk and Dawn war. It has not affected the game. And more importantly, CCP has not done anything about. They where there well before the ratting automation. And today you have wh to bypass them.
The tech incentive for botters is a stupid argument. It dosent matter that the bot its simple or complex. It matter that it exists, and server-side wise they look identical, so they are identical to fight against. Without local there will be many people who use low effort bots that can be killed.
Even if dosent work against the guy with 20 capitals, it dosent matter, it will work against 5000 guys with a Vexor that use a bot on their main character to rat while doing laundry.
As I said, banning toons its not a solution. You need to change mechanics. I would say generate NPC dynamically depending on what is on grid, advanced AI for them, and stuff like that, but its CCP. They struggled and failed do map for 15 years.
How many of your reported bots got banned?. I bet not even 1.
Those dynamic AI NPC are a bigger nuisance for players than for bots. Speaking from FOB experiences, at least. Either you can just tank them with your alts, or they bring something so overpowered that you cannot do anything with your alts for 30 minutes until they despawned.
Ah, so you want quick gratification with the holy grail of no local. But you claim that automation has little impact on the game. That is interesting. So effectively you are trying to use the existing challenge of automation as an argument to remove local even though you state that it has little impact.
How peculiar
On the side, if you memories haven’t kept up to date with the evolution (!) of matters, it may very well be an idea to first go out there, do some research, make some contacts, explore and map things out. Because the problem has evolved, diversified, integrated itself and gained much wider and deeper footprint than ever before.
Don’t ever forget the rule about unintended consequences. Particularly where it comes to EVE.
I’m not convinced on this. Truth be told, we see impact on both regular players, botrunners and scriptrunners.
The first dies in a surprised manner, because they tend to be afk when FOB patrols show up in a belt or an anomaly. But they learn. I’ve seen them organising stuff, move, adapt. I have also seen them whine or stay offline until the FOB is dead.
The second dies quite repeatedly. Then a day later they ignore the system where the FOB is present. A handful remains, but with different behaviour in regards to drones and warpout mechanisms. The Orcabots however plain disappear from the system where the FOB is present.
The third dies, but adapts. They don’t move, they remain but switch from scripted mode to manual when they get an alert. We’ve seen some who return after dying accompanied by a frigate/cruiser burner type escort of their own.
Overall, there is impact. Obviously since detection is a challenge for CCP they can’t really code something which only engages bot- or scriptrunners, to leave humans alone. And frankly, I don’t think human players should be left alone - FOB’s and their patrols do add something to the mix.
There’s a lot less afk orca’s. There’s a lot less covetors and retrievers. This in generaly. I’ve seen players team up and interact more, even if it is generally through local and not higher organisation. This morning I was watching a large ore anomaly near Amarr, where a young wannabee miner died but went back in a frigate, to die again, to team up with someone else, to clear the spawn. After which they mined together.
I wonder if they will end up making babies after that. You know, adrenaline and such. Anything’s possible with modern technology in New Eden.
So yeah, does it impact human players? Yes. Does it impact bot- and scriptrunners? Yes. I don’t think either’s a bad thing. On the contrary. Sure, there’s players who just want to idle on their own, and I can understand this. But it is something of a gameplay type which isn’t in line with design principles of EVE.
The automation of menial tasks means that the game has a severe design issue. The parts of the game that most people automate are not fun parts, they are boring. Games are not supposed to be boring.
