Voigt-Kampff test for Factional Warfare Bots

[Venom_Anarchy]

@Kerono_Thalmor

Bots can use entosis links; and therein lies the trap. Once they start using them, they’re stuck there.

Right so it is a bit like a siege module ?

[Venom_Anarchy]

@Kerono_Thalmor

Okay, yeah I guess you make a fair point there. It doesn’t happen very often. That said, I still don’t like the idea of having to solve one every time I get podded. And anyway, I don’t think it would help, since I don’t often see bots getting podded.

I pod them every time which is about 350 times in the last 7 days.

Something like this maybe

Captcha

[Shai_Hulud]

The detection of computer generated fakes (deep fakes) is soon to be a problem in all digital media. MMOs are not immune to this… bots are only going to get worse.

Unfortunately, adversarial training has been proven very effective. Any test to determine whether a player is human or machine will just make bots better at avoiding detection, in the long run.

I think the best CCP can do is the occasional purge and examine the impact of certain game features (like alpha accounts, game activity rewards, etc).

[CiXiang_Reytzenstein]

You’re thinking these are complex, well made bots. They’re not. They’re just numerous.

[Kerono_Thalmor]

@CiXiang_Reytzenstein

You’re thinking these are complex, well made bots. They’re not. They’re just numerous.

Exactly. No one is going to sit there with a neural net and train it for weeks and weeks just to make a bot in a spaceship game. These bots are easy to kill, they just need to be pinned down.

[Sophie_Natnde]

yeh, we can kill them, if you prepare then it is super doable but they are in 600k ships, plexing novices at t3 so 17,500 lp per site, at an exchange rate of 1500 isk per lp they can buy 43 atrons for every plex they clear, no way we can be everywhere so they are going to make isk whatever we do. unsure if they are using omega account or not, if they are thats an added cost but if they are botting i’m guessing they will be using alpha accounts to once again maximise there isk gen.

only method we know works is the ban hammer, unfortunately that does nothing to fix the damage they have already done to the war zone

[zluq_zabaa]

@Agent_5B

The fact is that minimum requirement to run the site costs so little and the rewards exponentially more that it is pretty much impossible to kill them fast enough.

That’s the core reason why “hunting bots” is really just a more difficult form of PVE.

The only somewhat efficient way to hunt any (non-market) bot, is to use bots yourself and let your bots hunt their bots. Actual playtime spent on hunting bots is not only less fun than fighting real people, but also can’t diminiush the botting profits enough to be successful in the end.

[Venom_Anarchy]

@zluq_zabaa

The only somewhat efficient way to hunt any (non-market) bot, is to use bots yourself and let your bots hunt their bots. Actual playtime spent on hunting bots is not only less fun than fighting real people, but also can’t diminiush the botting profits enough to be successful in the end.

Making bots to hunt bots would be against the user agreement, battle not with bots lest ye become a bot. We have no choice but to kill them they deplete the hub upgrades they make our systems vulnerable they give the enemy an easy time not having to do anything but fly around in a pimped ship never having to run a timer. the pressure of 20 bots on the war zone control is huge.

[CiXiang_Reytzenstein]

Though we suspect there might be more than 20. There is this document that’s floating around on how faction warfare could theoretically be gamed. It estimates, based on Victory Points earned, that at any time, there are no more than 19 people actively plexing across either size of the warzone on average. Now add 30 odd bots constantly plexing to that.

In a game activity that requires you to match enemy effort 1 to 1 to progress, adding more active bots than players completely fucks things up.

[Venom_Anarchy]

@CiXiang_Reytzenstein

In a game activity that requires you to match enemy effort 1 to 1 to progress, adding more active bots than players completely fucks things up.

Which does remind me of certain players that stated openly that they want to fuckx things up to force CCP to do something.

[Bloodclart_Raider]

It balances out somewhat because as soon as the Amarr have a few systems all their home territories are full of Gallente bots

[Shai_Hulud]

@Kerono_Thalmor

@CiXiang_Reytzenstein

You’re thinking these are complex, well made bots. They’re not. They’re just numerous.

Exactly. No one is going to sit there with a neural net and train it for weeks and weeks just to make a bot in a spaceship game. These bots are easy to kill, they just need to be pinned down.

I didn’t mean to imply that they are using neural nets now. They have no reason to. But that level of sophistication is available, so the ceiling for bot’s ability to mimic human behavior is quite high.

The topic of the thread suggests an at least partially automated process to detect bot behavior. The limitation with this approach is that it creates adversarial training feedback to bots and/or their creators. Each wave of improved detection ability simply results in a new generation of adapted bots that are better equipped to avoid detection. Examples of this are not hard to find in general.

CCP’s best option to battle bots is to also leverage game design against them. Some game mechanics and features (alpha accounts, skill extractors, factional warfare from what I gather here, etc.) dictate which activities are most easily done by bots and how much it hurts to get caught.

[Pol_Macsliebh]

Just implement a Voigt-Kampff test as OP request

How many bot explorers are there??? never seen one or heard of one…

So

1. In FW plexes put a simple Hack object(no mod required)
2. Hack object is needed to start timer.
3. if plex is vacated a new hack is required to start it again
4. No more FW bots

[Venom_Anarchy]

@Pol_Macsliebh

1. In FW plexes put a simple Hack object(no mod required)
2. Hack object is needed to start timer.
3. if plex is vacated a new hack is required to start it again
4. No more FW bots

I noticed that they did include that in the free the slaves event perhaps as a test run

@Shai_Hulud

The topic of the thread suggests an at least partially automated process to detect bot behavior. The limitation with this approach is that it creates adversarial training feedback to bots and/or their creators. Each wave of improved detection ability simply results in a new generation of adapted bots that are better equipped to avoid detection. Examples of this are not hard to find in general.

This is true and they have been more sophisticated in the past but I have always found a way to beat them the limitation of beating them is the fact they require an active player to catch them and we don’t want to waste hundreds of hours of player time chasing someone’s stupid exploit.

[CiXiang_Reytzenstein]

Yes, even if various automated filters can be bypassed with enough effort, the better the filter is, the harder it is to bypass. That limits the amount of people capable of writing the kind of automation that can pass that kind of filter, which means that there is fewer tools to do it with. In which case CCP can tailor their response to those tools specifically.

[Venom_Anarchy]

@CiXiang_Reytzenstein

Yes, even if various automated filters can be bypassed with enough effort, the better the filter is, the harder it is to bypass

I don’t think they can, I think the bots have huge limitations made obvious by the fact they do nothing once pointed, they really only exist because it has not been made difficult for them.

[CiXiang_Reytzenstein]

Well, bot authors are natuarlly lazy. If they can get by with the bare minimum, they will. Same for any other criminals really, if you leave the door unlocked, they won’t try the windows, because they don’t have to.

[Venom_Anarchy]

That and the fact it is not an especially good way of programming to read all the data from screen, the bot needs to know what every possible event it is going to react to looks like. Which I guess raises the question how are they doing it ?

[Bloodclart_Raider]

I’ve not really looked into developer access, obviously Eve is friendly to 3rd party apps accessing data, maybe bots are exploiting that.

[Venom_Anarchy]

Well there seems to have been some action in the form of banning the Atrons. The Tristans and the Stratios business as usual. This thread seems to have cloned into 4 separate threads about the same thing though for the record we were first… lol . The Atrons have hibernated until the heat subsides probably, not sure if that is a win or more of the same, a loss that they are prepared and can afford to take.