Hey everyone, this is not supposed to be yet another “meh botting” thread, because I suppose we are having a couple of them already.
Instead, I’d like to discuss a possible enabler of the issue. As the title suggests, it is still (or again?) possible to login several Alpha accounts at the same time, from the same computer, same Launcher, same IP and so on, by simply snip. We all know this has been reported in the past, including by myself, publically discussed ad nauseam and I had expected this to be a thing of the past. Yet it isn’t.
The way I see it, this makes it horribly easy for botters to use Alpha accounts for their crap, be it for mining fleets or anything that can be done on Alphas with Alpha skills. What makes this specifically problematic is the ease to create a couple of new Alpha accounts, train them a few skills (for mining this is not even necessary, it works right out of the box) and get going. No PLEX needed, no Injectors necessary, just risk-free f*cking up our game.
What do you think? Could CCP finally fix this freaking login exploit and if so, would it have a positive effect in terms of less 1 day old bots reappearing?
p.s. as for a possible fix, how about having a 2nd check for illegal condition (another char already logged in) just before the station or environment loads?
Removed how to circumvent the alpha login restriction. -Buldath
No. If someone is so retarded to play 10 accounts making 50 milions per hour instead of doing 100 milions per hour with one omega account - it is his choice. 0 fun for me to micromanage swarm of alpha account.
If this “choice” includes him botting, then his “choice” should get him banned. Anyhow, to me it seems like this exploit not being fixed leaves a nice big open door with a welcome sign for botters. Other, non-botting, exploit of multiple Alpha logins is bad as well, but that’s not really the topic.
I would not say genius, probably just certain software user with a strong enough cluster of computers who uses a simple exploitable and well known issue. And no, for the purpose of this thread, I want to hear if people agree that the unfixed multiple Alpha login is an enabler of botting and, were it fixed, would that help in having less bots reappear quickly.
To be clear: any exploit of multiple Alpha logins is an issue. If there were really people logging in 100+ at the same time, they’d be anyway botting or using illegal input automation to make that even possible.
your forgetting of doing alpha logons with a isboxer which is also bannable, can make a fortune just jumping people with ganking
ive submitted tickets for the multi alpha problem multiple times, including people that have bragged about using it and isboxer. those people are still flying. even if ccp did do something about it it would only put the banned behind a couple of weeks depending on what they are doing
Anything to keep those daily population numbers high enough to earn that day’s PA buyout bonus; probably not the main incentive driver, but surely is included in part of the buy out deal.
RMT, bots, CCP is the first entity that should react anyway, its their business. If the management would be incompetent, for example making unusual and astonishingly bad decisions about price of monocles, what can you do?
The problem is one of the playerbase too, though. We’ve seen or heard about all kinds of different botting and in some cases these botting operations seem to have the precondition of investing PLEX and SP to grow the respective chars for their activity. There is a certain hurdle or entry-barrier to that. Then there is of course the possibility of VM clusters for Alpha chars, but I always wondered how lucrative that really is, considering the limited outcome and relatively high cost of computing ressources compared to that.
I’m bringing this specific scenario up, because it seems to me that there are exactly zero preconditions here. No input of previously acquired in-game ressources is necessary, not even higher computing cost or further tech knowledge. This is what leads me to thinking that this exploit really needs fixing, as this could already be or become a strong enabler of the botting issue.
The FW botting problem could be fixed with a captcha on pod respawn but botting is a bit more widespread and I imagine mining bots tend to have a life expectancy of over 15 minutes. Multi alpha gank problems I have not yet had problems with. It could easily be the same people running the bots and ganking their competitors.
VPN & VM on the same computer would allow input broadcasting. Assuming they even bother hiding their machine identity and don’t use other work arounds.
We had huge threads talking about possible solutions and how the ban hammer isn’t going to work very well and then people started posting everything is ok CCP hammer has fixed it you can all go back to sleep now.
