Ah ah, but there’s tons and tons of examples of people who demonstrate otherwise. In Mitsolen there’s a player, let’s call him Xavier. Xavier mines ice, every day, every 4 hours, he goes from one system to the next, roaming from belt to belt. He has done this for years. And Xavier is human, he has to eat, sleep, ■■■■ and other stuff like that. He plays for 23 hours a day, in cycles of 4 hours, day in, day out. And he is still alive. Xavier states to have no life, and to sleep between ice cycles,
One might say that he is relying on scripted local monitoring for alerts and UI scraping for ice anomaly detection and a host of other things, but until CCP figure it out Xavier is a human who is quite capable of playing for 23 hours a day and still be “human”.
There is no way around inhuman levels/durations of activity, except by botting, or account sharing. Botters can rotate characters/accounts, but the same applies to each. Remote operation of the characters/accounts can be used while away from the client, but the same human maximum activity restraints apply.
First tier of differentiation, is a human requires 6-8hrs of sleep per day (averaged over a week).
Second tier of differentiation is most people are occupied 6-8hrs per day in work/studies/mundane.
Third tier of differentiation, is the regularity of specific repeated commands sent to CCP servers by the client(s).
If any character/account is sending commands for inhuman durations over a protracted period, and/or in repetitive commands, I would hope CCP has an algorithm to identify those from data, and flagged for staff review.
Of course you want them gone, but that doesn’t mean you can’t change the game to make it harder for them, because if it becomes too hard, you will force some of them to leave. Working this with detection, seems better than throwing your hands up.
For example, lets say when you warp into a site, the commander issues you a challenge. Until you answer the challenge, the NPC’s are frozen and you cannot target them (you can warp off though). Two wrong answers and the site de-spawns - no isk. Much like websites ask the ‘Prove you’re not a bot challenge’, people would easily answer this, bots would have to be programmed to recognize the challenge and give the correct response. Not too hard with 10 possible answers, now make it 10 thousand or 10 million (by using a random number generator), sooner or later some botters will realize it’s no longer worth the coding effort. Remember we are using this to work hand-in-hand with reporting and detection. When the botters start losing sites (or ships), they must begin to factor this into their profits.
Now imagine, much like the abyss, there is a 1 in 1000 chance of a ‘killer spawn’ - or sometimes NPC’s kite the fighters/drones. Add in the occasional capital escalation, there are many tweaks you can do, all to add randomness into the equation, something people can deal with, but bots can only handle if they were pre-programmed. Those are the changes I was thinking of.
Bots can be programmed to identify a static popup like that, and click it automatically.
In that thread I proposed a list of random/interactive/dynamic popups which would require expanding a bots programming quadratically, so as to solve a randomly generated/interactive/dynamic mini-game, instead of a static predictable pop-up.
The minigame popups can be designed to include dynamic, random colors, morphing, motion, and other random dynamic parameters. They will be trivial for a human to solve, but a bot program would have to be very complex to be able to solve any of these, as randomly generated, with random elements, in each instance.
Restrictions on the rate/conditions of the minigame pop-up can be set so that they do not endanger/interfere with a present player, but will incapacitate a bot till it solves them.
CCP can cycle in new minigame popups periodically, thus forcing bot programmers to adapt with effort/time, until the next set of new minigame popups.
The problem is that it’s a never-ending fight against the bots. Each time you would implement a featured targeted against botting will they find a way to get around it after a while. What you then end up is a game with lots of mechanics against bots, must of them ineffective, but still a challenge to normal players and while you could have focused your energy on making the game better for the players.
It’s a problem, because CCP only has got so many developers. Every developer used in fighting bots is one less they can use to develop the game further.
You end up with a game that is no longer EVE, but an endless serious of CAPTCHA challenges. Who is going to play such a game? Bots are then still able to beat these challenges, but the botters would be gone by then, because there are no more normal players left to play the game.
Its not a wish, its pragmatically possible.
Such that the minigame popups only occur after extended activity, at the end of or during warps/sessions changes, and when no PvP flag is operating.
PS: Your self-proclaimed testimony to being a botter in another game, raises very serious questions as to your motives in this game, and this thread.
I’ll link it again for you. OpenAI vs. Humans. Watch it, if only for 5-10 minutes. The bot is better than some of the best players. It handles movements, attack and defence, and teamwork. You wish you can beat this.
Afaik, no bot can work through the hack minigame with anywhere near a reasonable chance of success. That the bot could click adjacent fields to their previous choice and starting point is doable, but the obstacles found their will totally fk the bot, and it wont know/be able to apply the perks it finds to them.
This is secondary to the fact that bots also cant handle the Sig probing process, to even find and warp/enter to the site, navigate to the cans, with all its interface complexities.
So no, Relic/Data Sig finding, or hacking, cannot be feasibly botted, without a very advanced and developed bot, which dont exist in EVE atm.
I hacked through the mini-game during the Liberation event within seconds. I even had my own algorithm in mind. It’s doable. But I don’t care if anyone has done it yet nor do I see the point in answering a question on the existence of certain bot types as this is basically the same as asking for their availability.
Me myself in person. The method is easy once you’ve hacked it a thousand times. You’ll recognize the pattern. I.e. do you just need to have a high skill and a bonused ship, then go along the outside and 90% of the time will you find the exit there. The remaining time was it in a second row, like 9%. Only a very few times did I fail. I often even skipped hacking cards and repair tools.
Then it has nothing to do with bots, and is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
You personally completing minigames is irrelevant.
We are talking about bots, not players present.
This is getting ridiculous how hard it seems to be for you to stick to topic and differentiate on what is being said/asked, and what you imagine is being said/asked.
I’m saying an algorithm is doable. The fact that I think in algorithms is what you’re not capable of. That’s a way of thinking you’ll pick up when you’ve programmed computers for long enough. Every methodical solution to a problem can be expressed as an algorithm.
I’m happy to even discuss the method as this will help anyone who wants to get good at the hacking mini-game.
I respectfully disagree with you in the part of making harder to catch the people running the sites (point 2). If you make sites only accessible by probes you limit the attacker options regarding the ships suitable for roams and it hinders the attackers “time to target”, and probes appear on scanner, making it impossible to land on the target before revealing yourself to a bot or human. In Wh space its a bit different, because you may have pre-scanned the chain and you dont do 40 jumps roams. This said, since i live and love wormhole, i wouldn’t mind if CCP made null like you said.
I like a lot your idea of making ratters roam systems going after anoms (point 3). I recall that the original design of 0.0 space involved having specialised stations in different systems to force people travel around a few systems. It was great because if a gang roamed your space you where forced to present a battle to kill some of the roamers even if you loose the engage, instead of “krabing” like now, because you needed clean space to do stuff.
Regarding bot programming and their actual code, I consider more efficient to make bots an easy kill and let players do the job of removing them, you can do this by altering the game mechanics in favour of the roaming player. A bot that can make you coffee is useless if he cannot rat for an hour before getting killed. You may disagree in the way to achieve this, but it will work.
btw, Whitehound and Zachri are trolls, dont feed them.
