Cloaky campers make it impossible to earn 100 million ISK per hour grinding belts/anomalies/whatever
Solutions
A. Dock at station and never come out while watching local for changes, for an income of 0 ISK per hour; complain to CCP and threaten to unsub because of entitlement to make 100 million ISK per hour from PvE activities at all times
B. Pay a friend/corp member 25 million per hour to sit in a standby high-DPS combat ship or a long-range ECM jamming boat to bail you out and potentially kill the camper if you get attacked; still get to make 75 million ISK per hour ratting, while your friend makes 25 million watching Netflix, and keeping an ear out on Discord for that inevitable Wilhelm scream
/me looks at option A, then option B, then option A again, then option B again, then option A again, grabs option A, kicks option B (toppling it to the ground), and still clutching option A tightly, heads to the payment register
/me after paying for option A and ravenously consuming it on the spot, comes back to where option B is still laying on the ground, unzips and pulls down pants, defecates all over it, then leaves without even wiping
I have unsubbedd 3 accs because I cant play my game in high sec. Trig forces are eves way of getting rid of botsā¦problem is itll get rid of everyone else starting out as well as us oldiesā¦stupid.
If you have 3 mining ships, 2 Skiffs and 1 Orca. Youāll laugh at the trigs. You can local tank Skiffs, Orcaās & Procs, you can have remote shield reps on the Orca (or Porpoise for a budget option). And your DPS is more than enough to overcome their tank.
Nowadays, lots of games that are serious in fighting bots, even simple mobile game like Rise of Kingdoms, they implement Picture Authentication that must be acted by human players every like 1 hour.
If someone has like 200 mining bots, then feel free to authenticate by clicking a bunch of pictures every hour for that 200 bots character.
I feel the general idea of pattern recognition works as per executed by other games, but yeah, the Devil is in the Detail, need much more adaptation and tweak for each different games.
Obviously the bots are being used to grind ISK where the ISK is then distributed in small but consistent amounts to player accounts through donations or very high corporate taxes.
Junk Bots would purchase junk from the market where the Junk Bot is fed ISK to from a Grinder Bot. The Grinder Bot is owned by the Player who collects worthless stuff across the game and then sells to the Junk Bot at high prices using the typical bait contracts that we see in Jita.
Those selling items 1,000 times more than the market value could also be part of the bot network.
We have all seen those extremely over priced items on the market in Jita. A person claiming to have poor eye sight purchases the over priced item. The funds are transferred to the Junk Bots account, the person whines about it in local, people laugh at the scam and go about their business. The Junk Bot then slowly distributes the ISK to other Junk/Grinder bots accounts.
One method to uncover bots would be for CCP to initiate server based dialogue with each active account.
How the operation would work is fairly simple. CCP establishes a syntax that initiates a conversation with an account at random times. The player wonāt know if the dialogue is actually a CCP Dev or an automated program, but the player would know that the dialogue is being generated by CCP. Basically the operation would be no different than someone opening a random chat with someone in local space.
Normally a person will respond to an open dialogue from someone asking what they want or how can they help the person.
A bot account however will usually block all attempts to create a chat between the bot account and an actual person.
The second hack into the bot account would be for CCP to send in game e-mails to the account once an established number of chat dialogues between CCP and the account have failed due to the targeted account blocking all chat requests.
Most active players will block e-mails from other players that they wish no further conversation with or they will politely respond to the e-mail. Without the bot account being able to block all e-mails across the environment, the owner of the bot account will have to respond to the in-game e-mails sent by CCP. Without the ability of the bot to generate an artificial response as a result of not being able to read and translate the e-mail message sent by CCP, the more e-mails sent by sent that went unanswered would make the account more suspect and would give reason for the account to be investigated.
Bot accounts would also have less friends and enemies as well as the bot account would not actively be engaging other players across the environment for such status to be rendered by the bot account.
One method the bot account could use to cover its tracks would be for the for the owner of the bot account to travel into High Sec and simply start adding players to their friends and enemies list. Although on the surface and from a quick glance the account might seem to be actively engaged with a lot of other players, a search of the e-mail and chat interactions between the friends and enemies on the bot accounts list however should show almost zero interaction at all.
Interactions that would then be able to be correlated with activity on ZKillBoard where the active account would show up in fleet kills with the friends on the accounts friends list as well as showing up in fleet or solo kills involving enemies from the accounts enemy list.
Implement Eve gameplay that must be acted on by human players. Like Triglavians, blackout, threat from other players. The problem is easy, safe, farmable content. The problem is players who unsubscribe when CCP takes away easy, safe, farmable content.
