Ok, so some circumstances, which cannot be openly argued upon by forum rules, gave me some time to think on the problem without having to answer to each person on the internet who dares to say that I'm wrong.
On in-game autopilot. Screw captcha for now. Let's play with constraining usage time.
Its use could be limited to 2 hours per day, sort of energy bar. Can't imagine myself using it more during weekdays, and can't imagine myself using it at all during weekends.
So it should be limited to 10 hours a week, and no more than 2 hours a day.
(And sorry for using myself as a point of reference so much, I don't have any other atm).
So in order to cause an effect of one bot doing its thing (nowadays) for 24 hours, you would need 12 accounts. After five days their resource will become depleted. So you would reach 71% of week efficiency of a
single today's bot. All of that for
only 360 quid. In order to apply effect of 5 bot/weeks, you would need (500/71)*12=
84 accounts, or
2520 quid. Instead of today's number accounts needed as one and five respectively. Also, those numbers are a bit lower than they are, as it takes some time to reload the client. Don't know the average efficiency of currently available external autopilots, but I think it is about same as mentioned before 50%.
Don't really like it in terms of immersion though.
But this would make this game truly pay-to-bot one.
Not to mention such amount of ap users doing the same stuff in one place will create huge spikes in the mentioned in the OP data tables which would be visible even on the CG background. And those spikes would be rare, considering... well let's agree that even one dude spending 2.5 grand on messing up things in a game is kinda bogus.
Don't know though, if anything can be achieved in a multiplicative focused two-hour burst of influencing on BGS. Though, his should certainly could be the case for PP if done on a Thursday night. But again, this certainly would create such obvious "spikes" of influencing. It would be fairly easy for devs to consider whether or not this influence should be allowed to stay for the next week.
Even if devs won't have time to do that much(considering that poor bot user paid them 2520 pounds), it would be easy for concerned player groups to calculate and pre-compensate for such bursts. I will return to those concerned players in a moment.
Add in some of those low-chance surprises for autopilot mentioned earlier. Stability is an important factor for a bot, let alone that it is crucial to be sold to anyone.
Usage for honking and/or trading is effectively abolished. Nuff said.
I do understand that fighting automation is a
losing battle.
But increasing level of investments required is a sound way of stalling. As decreasing demand is.
Sadly, controllability thing goes out of the window, as now I honestly cannot imagine how any bot maker will use in-game autopilot for anything, given the fact that external alternatives are already present.
Even being a mediocre programmer myself, I belive I can automate every aspect of this game, some of them even without reading the game screen at all. Given how simple this game is.
Having autopilot under control would help me to defeat, or at least stall myself in this chess game. As the best way to combat this is unpredictability and creativity in creating tests. And having control after some parts is required in order not to distort picture for everybody.
Any obstacle I can come up affects everyone, not just me.
Removing distances to objects from the screen? Will make it unpilotable. Making said numbers loading for some time? What might help is leaving them on screen only, and removing them from that distance/speed panel until you are close enough to begin thinking about dropping from SC. I feel like most bots use exactly that part of the screen to get data. Won't stop me yet would stall me.
Most heavy yet acceptable one for that regard is to remove any indication that your destination is obstructed. Even FSD warnings, so it would simply do nothing (this would require adding some sort of lag before reacting to jump button). This would either make any external AP to check if FSD began to spool every second, increasing time to determine whether or not route is obstructed significantly, or would force me to make AP work so it won't require any visual data at all, calculating entry points, positions of stellar bodies and stations, increasing time to develop one.
And I cannot stress enough that such obstacles should be done AFTER legal AP is in game. If I would give up on asking for AP, I will simply make one. Am I only one able to do so? No. If AP gets shared, all limitations would be pointless. And this is not my original notion.
And it is pointless anyways. After all, I do belive that we would be ruled by chairman Unit01 in about 30-50 years.
Honestly, the best way is to simply add bots to the game lol. NPC's which will use your ships to do stuff for you. So everyone would be armed to defend his interests against bots. Kinda logical, innit? I imagine how epic could be "battles" for Soholia, done by "defected" PP players to fortify this system so it won't hurt their faction
.
For a discussion of the "legal bots" part, please go
here
