We all know how bot mining works. The moment a new name appears on local they all warp to the station. There could be 100 miners, and every last one will be aligned and in warp exactly as soon as their barges align times allow.
Blackout probably helped with this, but it made everyone (rightly) mad to have Null become like worm hole space. Just wasn’t the game they wanted to be playing.
What if the game just randomly trolled local. What if names just randomly appeared from time to time in empty systems’s local chat?
No connection to anyone arriving or leaving. Just a random appearance.
Is there a way they could do that, where a human player would be able to tell it wasn’t really a person entering the system, but still fool botting setups?
Local shouldn’t lie. But bot hunting NPC’s whose purpose is to actually hunt down miners, accost them in the belts, and if they don’t “answer a few questions” recycle their ships and pods. They could announce themselves in local. “Surprise! Inspection time. We’re here to make sure robots aren’t taking hoooman jobs.”
What about if local acted like a captcha. For example, it could constantly be creating noise that looks like names, but real players would be able to tell the difference. I know programs are constantly getting better at breaking captchas (in fact, the arms race has gotten so bad that I have struggled to solve some captchas), but I bet you could do it, and that would make life harder on bots.
Of course, I’m sure real players would still complain because it would make it harder for them notice people coming into local, and make it harder for intel/alarm programs to read local.
I mean, I demand CCP do something to address botting, but not if it interferes with my ability to act like a bot aspirant.
The tracker detects your heart rate and builds a user profile over time using various health statistics and metrics
PvE produces resources/money and market order changes only work when the tracker is worn (i.e. detects a pulse)
Can tie multiple accounts to one tracker so multi-boxing still works normally
The tracker software performs routine cheating checks (so you don’t just like put it on your cat or something)
It will occasionally fake an attack against your ship, or fake a rare spawn (it could also perform these checks during the detection of legitimate attacks or rare spawns), or just flashes a picture of a cute anime girl across the screen or something
If your heart rate doesn’t spike during these special situations, it logs the event and then the system passes the data through an algorithm to determine if you’re actually present at the computer
Hands out automatic suspensions/bans based on a cumulative point system
What you described is just a regular fleet warp, which also has legit uses outside of multiboxing. If it happened immediately, how could you tell they were perfectly synced?
Also I agree that the “warp out if neut in local” gameplay is primitive and dumb.
This is a symptom of CCP’s second decade design methodology, wherein they’ve made it impossible for one player to kill another player unless they either explicitly consent to the death, or screw up. No amount of skill and game understanding otherwise allows a successful attack in any context, unless one of those two conditions is met. The system that we have is one entirely devoid of any unknown factors and entropy. The game is currently incapable of creating any environments or situations in which the outcome is unknown, and players have to compete for victory or survival during the encounter instead of before it.
The blackout experiment was the sole attempt to take things in the other direction in recent memory, and we all know how most players reacted to it. A consensus was established that players wanted safe farming and arena gameplay, and that’s what we got. We only have ourselves to blame.
Botting will find a way.
Example: Let your bot send a scary message to your phone each time the bot is under attack in order to get the corresponding heart rate spikes.
They should just make local captchas, the stars should form an Icelandic word or phrase in a way which is not easily readible by a bot trained to read words and phrases, and then you have 5 seconds to type the word or phrase into a pop up box or you are disconnected but your ship remains in space for 15 minutes.
