I have heard for long now about market bots but i don’t understand how they do it.
I’m hoping to understand the process of botting and hopefully be able to spot them.
Is it a program that performs commands in the Eve client?
Cant the eve client see if the command are from a mouse and keyboard? or are they making it so that it appear that someone is using keyboard and mouse to perform the commands?
if it is a program then it has to be a way for CCP to detect it.
Or it is not a program, how then are they able to perform commands in the client?
Maybe it is a myth that programs are used to do stuff automatically in EvE.
Edit:
WOW, just wow. “botengine” this forum is dedicated to writing bots and people are openly sharing ideas on how to do it. this is insane.
Is this possible on all pc games or is it unique to eve? Is it even possible to stop this? Why cant CCP change the code so that this is not possible?
Best way to stop bot’s is extreme punishment for those using it, to the point where they wont risk it. EG getting sued in real life for damage’s, not sure if that is even possible but w.e its an example.
Are ccp able to see the duration between the inputs from mouse and keyboard? Are they able to see where someone clicks even if the person is not clicking on a button?
If they can see exactly where people click, for example just next to a button, i can suggest many ways that ccp can detect botting. Especially market bots.
Simple, repetitive activity that generates income attracts bots and, while a violation of CCP’s license agreement, botting and RMT are generally not violation of real world laws.
Bots work best if activities are linear and predictable. You can complicate things by making the activity non-linear and unpredictable, where the ability to recognize patterns is important to a successful outcome. This also complicates life for developers and real players - is it a worthwhile tradeoff?
IP bans aren’t as useful as you might think, they are easily circumvented by competent cheaters and they often catch innocent players in the crossfire. Many a university dorm has fallen afoul of IP bans in the past.
Market bots do exist and do have an impact on the market. In the past, when CCP has done a ban wave the impact on the market was clearly visible both in game and on the QER graphs.
However, I feel that much of the complaining players do about market bots is actually just the result of them encountering a player who is investing more time and effort into their trading than the aggrieved player is willing to invest themselves.
In the past I have been accused of being a bot, but the reality is that I’m very much human and I just took things further than most people are willing to… throwing alts, thousands of orders and an unhealthy amount of time at the task such that a more casual player would be unable to compete.
In market PvP, as with ship PvP, victory is often achieved by breaking the morale of your opponent. When they give up, you win, they go off to the forums and cry about bots and you hold the field.
TLDR: Bots do exist, but much of what you hear about them on the forums is just noise.
I can name 45 plus market bots operating in Jita 24/7, and that’s without looking hard. Each has been reported by me and others for months now and each still operates 24/7 with what appears to be impunity. And, yes, they are definitely bots, if you need proof then see my other posts.
Having played daily for 10 years, I’ve now quit as a direct result of the impact bots have had on my game style and the lack of response of CCP to manage them. I know you’ve been around the block Bad Bobby, but there is no way you’ve played the market in the last 10 months across a wide spread of items or you wouldn’t be saying what you said.
As I said, bots do exist and they do have an impact. I’m not disagreeing that you have encountered them and identified their behavior. I’m also not saying that all of the comments on the forums are just people crying about being outplayed. However, in the nearly 15 years I’ve been a part of EVE online I have read a lot of forum posts and chat about bots and much of what I’ve seen has been as I described, just noise. My point being that players should not automatically attribute to bots what can equally be explained by no-lifers (like I used to be) squeezing the market until it breaks.
I’m sorry to hear that. It is truly sad when a beautiful part of the game that engages you gets wrecked, either by exploits, bots or the actions or inactions of CCP. I feel you.
Fair comment.
I have been on hiatus for some time due to CCP neglecting or devaluing almost all of the parts of the game that interested me, the marketplace included. In my absence it would appear they have gone on to neglect or screw up the remainder. The only part of the game that still has any attraction to me now is ship PvP and with no Alliance Tournament (which has been the main focus for me for some years before I went on hiatus) there is really nothing left for me here but the people… and I can interact with those people just as well (if not better) outside of EVE.
Botting is somewhat of a ‘cold war’ situation. You add X to the code, they add anti-X. You add Y to beat the anti-X, they add ‘hide from Y’. Anything that can be programmed can be counterprogrammed, it’s only data moving around. If there is money to be made (and there is LOTS of money to be made, in the tens and hundreds of thousands), people will find a way.
The other issue is this: Past anti-botting efforts and sweeps have shown that at any given time, roughly 15% of all accounts on-line are either bots, or multi-boxing AFKers that are one step away from bots. It is possible the percentage is higher.
These bots and multibox AFKers fund the massively addicted players, they fund the nullsec alliances, they fund the huge trading corps. They pay for supers and titans and keepstars and sov wars. If CCP could snap their fingers and eliminate every bot and every multibox-AFK-next-best-thing to bots, the devastation to and pushback from the most fanatic elements of the game would be enormous.
So CCP has to be very careful who they are fingering and eliminating with their bans, and who they are leaving alone. It’s why they research the bans so carefully rather than put in automated systems. It also tells you why CCP makes news about “We’re turning off Level 4 access because of the Alpha botting problem” (which is a drop in the bucket), but leaves constantly-reported market bots running 23/7.
I think your post is half truth. I don’t think CCP has ever green lighted certain entities bots but they do have a tremendous tollerance for non R.M.T related botting. Non RMT related botting requires some serious fire from the community to be dealt with, ie fw bots got purged after a back lash.
They also have had to suffer long down times from DDOS attacks some related to bot bans and others related to other in game changes or single battles. I think its fair to presume that they’ve delayed in game enforcement to coincide with more helpful times for expected DDOS push backs.
Botting has seriously reduced long term active account numbers but for a long time CCP was only interested in 1/4 profits. Hunting bots cost $ and reduces 1/4 account numbers which devalued eve as an advertised product. Only time will tell if PA values CCP for account numbers or IP and logetivity.
If you want to see a bot banned in your alliance or if you have a spy in alliance, simply report the char stating you were offered ISK via paypal on alliance coms. They’ll nuke the bot quickly and the botter will immediately find their accounts banned and guilty unless they prove themselves innocent.
I dont play the market in the sense that i am competent with my competitors (those that trade), instead i try finding new markets i can get into.Ii also do well on the market and i have not been able to detect a bot or even find a suspect bot but if there are bots i would like to be able to detect them.
It seems unfair if bots do what i do automatically and much faster. If you can share your way of detecting them hopefully i can help cleaning up the market from bots.
Check this post (and similar ones in the past): Market Bots
From our end, it is less ‘detecting them’ and more ‘guessing from a pattern of behaviour’. A busy human updating his orders to sell as fast as he can update quite a lot of orders, and seem bottish. But if you start making a list of ‘order of size X listed Y for time period Z’, and notice that it gets updated every 5 minutes on the dot, for hours, and that there are 50 other orders doing the same … well, if it walks like a bot, talks like a bot, and quacks like a bot…