Idea for fixing botting

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
21

What is needed is a dedicated group of GM’s, that do nothing but put in their 8 hour shifts, running around the game with their special cloak…

These GM’s would do the same thing many of us in the playerbase do, observe, investigate, poke, prod, and attempt to communicate…what these GM’s can do the general public can not, is ID the characters with said accounts and send an email to the controlling player…

But instead of just banning them…these GM’s would identify the bots, and place a permanent Suspect Flag on them, associate every email/player that controls them so they can just point and shoot Suspect Flags on repeat offenders on new bots.

there, now we would have a system in place where the players can police them easily in highsec.

22

Answer: 11

23

I say it’s 23 hours a day because I wake up at odd hours (problems with sleeping) and I pass through the system often. I know I’m not watching them all the time, but I feel it’s a pretty safe assumption that no one is at the keyboard. I’ve visited the belts with them as well, and they do act pretty stupid; leaving cargo containers with ore for more than an hour and bouncing off of rocks and stuff.

But it’s been 6 weeks now. I don’t think they’ll get banned. We shall see =)

24

This does nothing to null/lowsec/market bots.
They need to start disbanding and zeroing out alliance wallets. This will force people to either only recruit legit players or wish they did.

25

You have no idea what you are talking about. The fw bots were back after then next downtime, the only thing they changed was the ip.

They completely broke fw in less time than that, open amar fw and see for your self

1 Like
26

Thats exactly what I said. the bots came back immediately, they just changed where they operated out of (since people seemed to think that it worked till they found them again) which took a couple weeks.

and the pope wears a funny hat. that has about as much to do with what I was saying. no ones arguing that bots aren’t a problem, no ones saying that they didn’t break faction warfare.
all i’m saying, is that ccp caving to public opinion and banning that one botting group sooner instead of dealing with them during a regular banning wave like they normally do, accomplished absolutely nothing other than wasting ccp’s time.

27

No, we found them in the same plexes, nothing has changed

28

The captcha would give them information that they’re flagged, unless you were to have that happen to everyone at the same intervals.

After that, it’s simple trial and error to figure out what you’re doing right and wrong. The more frequently you get notice that you’re flagged, or have been banned, the more quickly you can discern what’s working, and not working.

In terms of software development, sometimes that’s all you have to work with, in trying to narrow down where a problem is coming from.

I suppose having them adapt at a rate of 1 correction per week, instead of 1 correction per day is an improvement…

You haven’t provided any reasoning for that. Some of this is very fundamental to rudimentary problem solving. You know… “trial and error”?

Again, in software development, small, incremental changes are advised between tests, so you don’t lose track of where a problem might have originated, if an issue arises. We don’t want to give botters small, incremental changes to work with.

29

your splitting hairs, it doesn’t ■■■■■■■ matter where they where found. point is, the bans did nothing, the bots came back the very next day. all that happened was ccp wasted time banning them because the players demanded it. and… apparently to everyones surprise, doing exactly what the players demanded, didn’t do jack ■■■■.

30

I understand what you are saying and there may be some truth in that but the reality is that those bots have been around for months and they did a lot of damage, and at some point you have to decide how much damage is enough.

Even if you dont understand it you have to prevent damage from it.

Btw you are talking about a hypothetical situation and im talking about a thing that happened not long ago

31

yes, and i’m talking about the same thing. yes they where around for months, yes they did a lot of damage. normally CCP does banning waves a couple times per year. however due to public outrage they caved, and banned these specific bots ahead of schedule. which means they had to take time away from other bot hunting efforts. and… it did absolutely nothing to stop the damage being done, in fact quite the opposite. because now the bot developers have one more datapoint to work with on how their bots are getting caught, and can develop them to avoid detection better in future.

32

The reason botting is becoming more apparent is because CCP is letting it slide to boost player and sub numbers to net sales bonus from Pearl Abyss sell out.

Also take note on how there has not been a local removal and also note that there has not been a DDOS attack against the client in a long time.

33

This needs to be a priority.

This shouldnt have been allowed to happen

34

Then do something about if.

35

I did

I shoot them for a while, that was inefective so i started reporting them, that was also inefective so i loged on the new forums

What did you do beside telling us to stfu?

36

You sir have no idea what you are talking about, you are either running bots and defensive of their use or you have never reported bots. Your logic is totally flawed. You give both the bot operators and CCP a lot more credit than they deserve

37

Interesting discussion, here we witness the start of robot take over off human race in a video game…

38

And then the meta evolves to infiltrating some accounts into an alliance and then doing botting with them, funding the alliance for a few weeks and then report them from outside the alliance. Now you destroyed an enemy alliance by getting ccp to do it for you, congratulations.

39

I’m sorry, but while your logic might not be wrong from a computer science perspective, it is completely flawed in terms of having a solid defense against botters. It’s not like other MMO’s haven’t suceeded in creating content which is (more or less) impossible to automate and it’s not like theres no reason behind the countless sites offering 1-click-setup bots for EVE online.

My idea for fixing the issue would give bot-developers next to NO useful data. All they would experience is a - seemingly random - captcha being presented at a seemingly random time. Just like they do now with the ban waves.

IF a bot-developer could test their macros by “forcing” a flag or a captcha within a few minutes, hours or even days, then yes, you would be right in that they could easily adapt their bot, but with a system in place which would cost them weeks or even months to test just 1 use case, with the countermeasures most likely being changed within that same period of time, they wouldn’t benefit at all from it.

But whether or not my system is utilized or not, the fact that something has to be done and done fast should be blatantly obvious. In fountain where i’m roaming a bit right now, every 2-3 systems has the POS/Ishtar botting-setup, running 24/7.

Just 1 of these setups would generate in the vicinity of 100 billion ISK per month. 3 of the setups i fly by now and then, work for the same corp, which means that this corp alone generate 300 billion ISK/month. I don’t care if they use those ISK for selling, for founding wars or for personal pleasure - injecting that much passive ISK into the game is not only completely unfair to anyone playing an honest game, it is also game/market breaking.

Now what’s even worse is that i’ve reported these accounts on countless occasions, with absolutely no result. And this is with the most blatant text-book bot setup, from accounts which INSTANT-warp to their POS on every single neut in system, whether i check in on them early morning before i go to work or in the middle of the day if i get home early. It would take a GM just a few hours to test whether there are actually humans playing. But they don’t.

But it gets even worse, cause even if/when these guys are caught botting, they consequences are so vague that they are almost laughable. A 3 day temporary ban with no announced confiscation of assets already farmed or tracing of the money stream is just hilarious.

IF CCP were serious about this problem, they would dedicate manpower to it, they would setup a 0-tolerance ruleset and they would follow up on threads like these, in which they pretty much always are absent.

40

I am curious, what are these MMO’s you are claiming don’t have bots. Because all the normal MMO’s I know have bots.

You mean like the perma bans involved in all the FW Bots mentioned in the blog… Which almost certainly involved confiscation of assets and tracing of the money stream, based on previous known CCP behaviour. Just because they don’t tell us every time they trace assets doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
The 3 day ban is at their discretion, they are not required to hit obvious full time bots with it then only perma ban on the second offence, they can perma ban on the first. Just hitting a real player who just used a macro for a bit might only get a 3 day ban as a teaching tool.

You are by no means the first person to ever suggest captcha as a bot fighting tool, and as from the beginning it’s always been a terrible idea based on flawed belief of what CCP do & don’t do, and on how bots & players work.
Bots will just keep dealing with it (A lot of bots are out there now that can solve them as well as real people, real people fail to solve them sometimes), Players will quit over having to deal with captcha just because another player flagged them as it will be used as a tool for warfare and griefing, and if you know for sure it’s a bot, there is no point throwing captcha at it, you either ban it or observe it in it’s natural state to find matching bots and trace the isk.