First off, I’m not against the concept of ganking. It’s a staple of eve and we can all just roll with it in its various forms. Thing is, I’ve been observing between 20-40 ships regularly spamming ganks on trade routes recently. So, I sat and watched them for a while to see if maybe they’d learned a new trick since the last time I’d paid attention, and … mostly I observed they all move too closely in unison to be anything other than alts of one player (for the most part).
So, my concern is in how CCP is choosing to interpret the rules these days when it comes to controlling that many ships from a combined/rearranged GUI through 3rd party utilities. Once upon a time, the bot detection system would trigger if you ordered too many ships to do something too quickly. Why does that no longer seem to be the case, and should something be done about this so as to keep one guy from being able to order 40 catalysts to F1 a target within a couple server ticks?
Am I missing something here? Is there some kind of workaround where 3rd party utilities are now sending commands through a variety of proxies to avoid detection or am I just paranoid on that point?
Also, the thing you’re talking about is called Input Broadcasting. It’s not allowed by the rules and there are usually punishments for people who engage in that kind of behavior.
Do you have proof that all of the ships are activating their modules at the exact same time (whether by this weird “proxy” thing or not)? If you do, congrats, you can send that into CCP with a support ticket, and the guy will get banned for Input Broadcasting.
If you don’t have proof, then who are you to claim that someone is Input Broadcasting? You’re just being paranoid and getting mad that someone was able to cycle through a couple of clients really quickly and shoot you.
This “no longer seems to be the case” because it turns out getting banned is not fun, so people have stopped using Input Broadcasting. And since they’re not Input Broadcasting, they’re not breaking any rules.
Moving together is done by using fleet warp. You can move hundreds of ships in near perfect unison by using a built-in feature of the game.
Modules can also be pre-activated, say under tether for a criminal fleet so they automatically work as soon as a target lock is acquired. This means all that needs to be done by a multi-boxer is to quickly cycle through their alts. They typically cascade their Eve clients and quickly cycle through each of them to make a target lock. Olmeca Gold, Kusion and others have many videos on Twitch and youtube demonstrating the technique. It’s not instantaneous, but they can get through maybe 4 clients a second which is pretty impressive. They don’t use third party tools at all, unless you count the basic behaviour of the OS bring a window to the front you click on.
I am skeptical there ever was a real “bot-detection” system at CCP, but certainly they can manually look at the server logs and identify input broadcasting. Occam’s Razor is that since these multiboxing gankers must be some of the most reported players in the game given their activities, CCP have done this, many times, and found no input broadcasting going on - just someone who has highly optimized activation of many game clients within the rules.
Report them again if you are concerned, but really, there is ample evidence out there they can do this under the current rules. Maybe the game needs tweaks, but these guys aren’t cheating.
Note one thing about the warp fleet. Sometimes the gankers get sloppy, I saw one infamous ganker fleet warp his 28+ catalysts 350km to the gate and all of them jumped at the same time. Is that doable by the rapid clicking technique of 4 to 5 a second, maybe, however It was highly suspicious.
I mentioned this in the AG chat channel of which I am supposedly a leader, not sure that that means. I then got a full on salt filled sob story on Minerbumping as a response and a scolding in a private channel by Knowledgeminer who did not understand what I actually had meant and refused to understand why it was suspicious. He needs to mine a bit more… and I should have mentioned that they were 350 km from the gate in the AG channel which was my error.
So keep watching them. One trick to note is them suicide pointing someone and hitting warp in the same second so they warp off after criminal aggression, that is against the rules and they can get a two week for that. Some people will of course tell me that is rubbish, but the GM’s don’t actually agree with that.
On the other side of the coin, I have the logs of a gank in Jita of an alliance mates JF and it looked like the guy was not using input broadcasting and just doing the well organised click fest. I have no idea of the capabilities of the input broadcasting tools, maybe they do videos showing this and then set hotkeys to apply different groups so they appear not to be using this. Who knows, but they are not exactly a group of people that believe in playing by the rules as numerous bans indicate.
You’re just paranoid. There are gankers who use 20, 30 accounts manually, and he streams his ganks. You actually get to see him cycle through each window and fire each ship.
This one is actually even easier to achieve. Once fleet warp has been initiated, if you click “jump” while in the warp tunnel your ship will jump the gate almost instantly. This is a technique used when moving capitals via gate in order to avoid the bump-pocalypse that would ensue otherwise.
So the guy warping his fleet has the entirety of the warp tunnel to casually cycle through and hit jump on each of his accts. With 28+ catalysts even if it’s only 2 per second (a rather casual pace of your set up right) that still means only 14-15 seconds to issue the commands to all of them. Most warp tunnels (from the second you start accelerating to the second you decellerate are longer than that) but will still result in all ships jumping the gate within 1-2 server ticks of each other (As traffic control allows)
Even a short 350km warp will usually take 5-10 seconds to complete. Which still means the ganker only needs around 3-4 accts per second to achieve near perfect jumping. Which if your windows are cascaded means a single click on each client in a straight and predictable line across your screen. Far easier than you seem to think.
But what if they were all aligned to the gate as he was -10 and FacPol and he warped instantly and all jumped through at the same time a couple of seconds in all, tell me doesn’t that get your warning bells going a bit?
Not really, because even pre-aligned there is a minimum acceleration and deceleration time on warp tunnels. (This is why super high warp-speed ships are generally a bit of a waste in all but the largest systems)
And pressing 1 button on each account over a 5-10 second period isn’t hard.
But it was not 10 seconds, 5 at most, he was also bumping on another account at the same time… For me highly suspicious. All of them jumped through at the same time, come on are you not a little bit suspicious over that?
If three or four had jumped a second later I would have felt it was OK, but all of them.
As I said. Jumping at the same time is joke easy to accomplish even with multiple accts simply by knowing how game mechanics work. So what even if it WAS 5 seconds that’s still only 5 clicks per second to get 25 accounts to jump simultaneously. Up to 30 accounts if we give a 1 tick margin of error. (So some ships may have jumped on the second tick rather than the first.)
Not remotely difficult for someone who is proficient at what they are doing. I regularly move fleets of 10-15 ships around, and they will all warp together, and jump together simply because it’s easier to move them that way then dealing with ships getting left behind etc. And I’m just some carebear scrub. So if I can manage fleet warping and fleet jumping 15 ish ships easily.
Then no I don’t find it at all suspicious that an expert at ganking could manage 25.
What you saw wasn’t laziness it was proficiency.
All of them jumped the same second. If there had been three of four that jumped afterwards I would not have doubted it.
Well when I checked out that JF kill mail another player got to 5 max per second using the same technique that Kusion used on his video, and a couple of times it was 4 per second from the logs I have. Now are you telling me with a straight face that the one I saw doing it perfectly on the gate jump I detailed is likely to be more efficient jumping through the gate then when another was ganking a JF.
There is a huge difference between clicking once per account during a 5+ second warp tunnel in order to sync a jump. And making multiple clicks per account during a gank.