I need to find the post again, but one redditor was speculating that the bubbles screwed with some screenscraping tool designed to monitor the local chat window. Where these bots would normally start warping to some safe point or structure when a neutral enters local, they instead went about there merry way. The repetitive behavior monitored by one corp allowed them to set up disruption traps and destroy like 8 Nyx that were just warping into the bubbles, stopping all movement, and just sitting there while being destroyed.
edit: Quite a lot of speculation about it in this thread. Ctrl+F for “scraping” to find the posts I was talking about.
I think bots are generally programmed to deal with known parameters, and screen-sensitive information positioning is one of those. Adding an unknown popup or window, moving the position of a confirmation box or button, or any other unknown variable would likely cause issues for a number of scripted bots.
We have disabled some rudimentary mission bots by opening chats or trade windows, for example. Some adapt to this, others ‘learn’ to dock when they see us in local.
The rest we just try and destroy. And file reports to CCP for all of them.
Am I doing anything successful, or just helping make smarter bots…? Dunno.
And when the changes were great, they got good feedback. When terrible (like now), they get terrible.
Stop trying to diminish the way we feel about it. We’re ■■■■■■■ pissed off.
And ■■■■ you, because the issue isn’t the chat boxes, it’s the removal of the Agent Finder tool and the stupid buggy Agency they’re trying to push on us. ■■■■■■■ troll.
The three threads I reference are specifically about chat bubbles and excessive reactions to them. I don’t bring up the agent finder because I know nothing about it and also people who do say its badly broken. I’m not trolling, for reals dude.
I’m not sure I’d call any of those “excessive reactions”. But I guess “excessive” is a subjective term. Two of those threads are not specifically about the chat bubbles. They are statements of discontent and (in one case) a reality check/call to action in which the chat bubble is the “straw that broke the camel’s back”, one among several recent changes/design decisions by CCP perceived as poorly conceived/implemented (one post mentions both botting and F2P as additional sources of discontent).
In the last few “outrage movements” on the forums and subreddit (the last one being around the time of the fighter/rorqual nerfs), you’d have somewhat uninformed individuals thinking the exact change in question was sparking all the outrage. It’d be easy in such cases to dismiss the hurfblurfing as the impotent rage of an outspoken few. But these events are simply a venting of upswelling dissatisfaction, like the steam piping out of a teapot. There’s usually some deep, underlying dissatisfaction with the way CCP has been doing things that has burnt out the patience of some of the players. Like the much-anticipated “Citadel 2.0” change which players thought would address some of the major problems Citadels introduce in sov warfare is starting to look like it’s only going to end up exacerbating the problems. It’s a succession of odd design choices that seem to shirk great player feedback, and its frustrating. The fact that CCP let go of most of the big names in their Community Team only adds to the discouragement. The only thing they don’t seem to have any issues with competently developing lately are the microtransactions and SKINs.
Basically, it’s almost never just about the ______.
I don’t envy the few people left on the Community Team. It really has to suck lately.
I honestly found The Agency to be an improvement over the Agent Finder because it consolidated much of the tools into one source. I felt the Agent Finder was just becoming redundant over time and I found the old interface on the finder to be less intuitive than what The Agency has.
I’ve no problem with them rolling the Agent Finder into The Agency. The idea is great, frankly. I do have a problem with much of its functionality being removed in the process. For a tool to be redundant there has to be a tool with something approximating functional parity existing when the old tool gets removed. And that’s simply not the case here.
That’s not how I understood his post at all. As far as we know, there are several teams of developers at CCP each with their own role in developing the game. One team for graphics, another for modeling, another for the UI, another for audio, etc, etc, etc.
It’s not wasteful resources or too many devs. It’s giving each dev a specific role in development. If my only job is the mop the floors of an entire building as a Janitor, I’m not going to be used to fix the building whenever it has leaky pipes. That’s the job of a Plumber.
Perhaps redundant was not the right choice of words. Still, I don’t think I will miss the Agent Finder in its original form. I’m just not too bugged about what was changed.
Oh is THAT what people were going crazy over? When someone said chat bubbles I assumed a comic book chat bubble popped out of someones ship everytime they said something. Which would get pretty annoying I think.
People are mad about an icon thats 20x20 pixels? Wow, that’s amazing. I wish they were this mad about actual important gameplay stuff.
Are we playing the same game? Do you PVP? I’ve already accidentally convod a target when all I wanted to do is double-click their name and look them up. Spam-chatting is also a bannable offence during combat, so I don’t why CCP decided to make this easier to do, even by accident.
And on a sidenote, it’s better to for players to be outraged than to quietly quit. Those who are vocal, are signaling that they still have hope. Those who silently quit, are the ones who aren’t coming back.
