Powerplay Action against bots and cheats

[Agony_Aunt]

Like I said before lots of times, in an open situation the hauler would be the most valuable asset in play, as without them powers (especially large ones) would turmoil almost straight away. This is an ideal brake on expansion, as currently the galaxy is full due to easy dependable hauling. You also assume all haulers are T-9s bumbling along. In an open context you'll find players adapting to survive- my guess is you'll see faster ships with better internals and less cargo. You forget Sandros mega undermining idea too, where its a race between UM and fortifying. In these cases the defending power would have to fortify fast and protect everything they could.

The short of it is, Open Powerplay is about challenge. Unlike any other part of ED it would place an emphasis on real time skills in a combined week long campaign.

Well said. I must admit, i don't quite remember the details of Sandro's undermining proposal. All those other suggestions Sandro made tend to get lost among the noise of people banging the "open only" drum.

I do not assume that all haulers are in T9s bumbling along. I assume anyone who thinks they can play PP that way under an open only situation would quickly either quit or learn. We can guess that a lot do that now, and those sorts of players are providing a lot of the CC for most of the powers.... which of course will disappear if it went open only. Even if PP became more popular under open only, they aren't going to be making the same loads of deliveries in that situation, so even optimistically, powers are going to go through some contractions for the first few weeks. As i said, if the combat PvPers join in swarms, that effect could be much more pronounced.

When thinking about what ship i would fly if i was doing PP in Open, it would probably be an Orca or Clipper. Big enough to make a decent haul, fast enough to get away from most things. Definitely fast enough to keep ahead of grom bombs. I suppose the biggest risk comes from long range engineered weapons and rails. Alternately, something smaller but faster. I wonder how fast you could make Courier or Viper move with 10t of cargo on board??? Also probably fairly easy to avoid interdictions in such.

But yes, fort/prep/expansion is going to take a hit for those powers that use hauling for those mechanics, a massive hit.

Anyway, have to bow out of the discussions for the afternoon, just got a call from a client, they have a super mega urgent job for me which they need done in 3 hours.... no chance, but they want.

Enjoy the thread

 

[Goose4291]

Well said. I must admit, i don't quite remember the details of Sandro's undermining proposal. All those other suggestions Sandro made tend to get lost among the noise of people banging the "open only" drum.

I do not assume that all haulers are in T9s bumbling along. I assume anyone who thinks they can play PP that way under an open only situation would quickly either quit or learn. We can guess that a lot do that now, and those sorts of players are providing a lot of the CC for most of the powers.... which of course will disappear if it went open only. Even if PP became more popular under open only, they aren't going to be making the same loads of deliveries in that situation, so even optimistically, powers are going to go through some contractions for the first few weeks. As i said, if the combat PvPers join in swarms, that effect could be much more pronounced.

When thinking about what ship i would fly if i was doing PP in Open, it would probably be an Orca or Clipper. Big enough to make a decent haul, fast enough to get away from most things. Definitely fast enough to keep ahead of grom bombs. I suppose the biggest risk comes from long range engineered weapons and rails. Alternately, something smaller but faster. I wonder how fast you could make Courier or Viper move with 10t of cargo on board??? Also probably fairly easy to avoid interdictions in such.

But yes, fort/prep/expansion is going to take a hit for those powers that use hauling for those mechanics, a massive hit.

Anyway, have to bow out of the discussions for the afternoon, just got a call from a client, they have a super mega urgent job for me which they need done in 3 hours.... no chance, but they want.

Enjoy the thread

I'd imagine we'd see a return to the uparmoured T-9 and Pythons (for smaller outpost only systems) from the glory days of PP, with Cutters for those who have the rank with either FDL top cover or iEagle chain interdictors as support.

You can probably get a good speed with 10t in a courier. My adder is 700+ with cargo.

 

[Bard Voronwe]

On topic, will open only stop bots?

No, i don't think so, at least not directly. Bots will continue to do their stuff, and people diverting their attention to the bots will provide gaps for the player haulers. The bots will respawn and continue, and bots can work 24/7. If the bot epedemic is as bad as people think, then there is no way players can compete or take them down enough to matter.

What it would help with is identifying bots. It will take some time, and there would be false positives, so ulimately it rely on reporting to FD.

At this point it depends on your belief in FD to handle such reports. If, like Rinzler, you believe FD are unwilling or incapable of taking action against such accounts, then open only is not a solution to the problem, as nothing will happen to those accounts anyway. At worst they get a slap and a few days ban, and hey, they can always pick up a few more accounts in a sale to run the bots on.

If you believe FD do and will take action against such accounts, then open only will be a possible solution to botting.

That will for sure give the anti-bot & cheats team something more to work with. Honestly I think it would be a great improvement just to monitor the systems I listed in my first post, but it's imperative to perma-ban the accounts found guilty of botting.

 

[Trinity A. Craft]

In the current instancing system, it would easy for bot runners to get around open only. Players wouldn't be able to see these bots, so we'd have to rely on FDev giving a damn.

While I do like the vision of a true ideal open only, my cynicism makes me worry about how the 5C bots will continue to ail us after we're thrown into a more challenging way of doing powerplay, which would spoil any fun/excitement that could have been gained. And if the botters are malicious and smell an opportunity? Any power's 5C problem may suddenly get worse in reaction. It wouldn't be randos; it would be a determined bot force with a specific goal in mind.

 

[Bard Voronwe]

In the current instancing system, it would easy for bot runners to get around open only. Players wouldn't be able to see these bots, so we'd have to rely on FDev giving a damn.

While I do like the vision of a true ideal open only, my cynicism makes me worry about how the 5C bots will continue to ail us after we're thrown into a more challenging way of doing powerplay, which would spoil any fun/excitement that could have been gained. And if the botters are malicious and smell an opportunity? Any power's 5C problem may suddenly get worse in reaction. It wouldn't be randos; it would be a determined bot force with a specific goal in mind.

As I already said, it would give the Devs a new tool to spot bots: an account never encountering other players would be suspicious, I'm confident that after a fast invastigation they could be spotted easily.

But yeah, FDev should give a damn about that. Anyway Open Only should be one of the foundings of a renewed Powerplay, as I said in other threads, for other reasons than just spotting bots/5Cers.

Bots should be get spotted by the developers, and we can only point them to th best systems they could find those.
5C should be countered by better rules and game mechanics (I wrote about that too in the past).

 

[Leadfoot]

I think I had suggested (regarding this whole "open only" issue) that since not that many people use the CQC server, switch THAT to Power Play Only server (open only) and there you go. Carrying stuff? It's in open. Switch to Solo server? Not doing power play there. Same for the regular Open server.

The whole idea was that PLAYERS were supposed to affect things in PP (that's the way I understood it). I'm not fully comfortable in an Open situation carrying lots of valuable stuff if there's another human there I don't know about, BUT I'd still play in Open doing PP as long as players of other factions are marked in RED so everyone knows who's a friend and who's not. I know it's a tad simplistic but this way everyone knows what's going on.

Players need to determine outcomes, either with helping your faction, or stopping a rival faction from gaining ground. Just can't do that in Solo. NPC's just don't matter.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Yes, i can imagine they would. I wonder who will actually do the hauling with wings of gankmobiles ready to serial interdict anyone entering the system....

Players like me who play outside their local prime time, but don’t mind the potential threat of interdiction, of course.

Personally, I can’t stand repetitious ABA cargo hauling, but I’m sure there’s a few players out there with the requisite tolerances towards both being the fox being chased by hounds and doing the same thing very and over and over again.

 

[Trinity A. Craft]

Well, FDev is going to make life easier for bots.

ANNOUNCEMENT - April Update - Coming 23 April 2019

Greetings Commanders, We’re very pleased to announce that the next update for Elite Dangerous, the April Update, will release on... Tuesday 23 April 2019! As mentioned in the beginning of March, this year's initial updates will focus on introducing quality of life improvements and improving...

forums.frontier.co.uk

 

[Darkfyre99]

Well, FDev is going to make life easier for bots.

ANNOUNCEMENT - April Update - Coming 23 April 2019

Greetings Commanders, We’re very pleased to announce that the next update for Elite Dangerous, the April Update, will release on... Tuesday 23 April 2019! As mentioned in the beginning of March, this year's initial updates will focus on introducing quality of life improvements and improving...

forums.frontier.co.uk

Main reason why I was against any form of Supercruise autopilot for years.

sigh

That and I feel it's weird to play any form of flight sim on autopilot, unless you want to simulate a trans-Atlantic flight or something...

 

[Bard Voronwe]

Honestly I don't care about these kind of modules. I only care about how they will make bots far less spottable. Rubbernuke proposed to at least deactivate them if pledged. Makes sense, but I don't see that coming.

 

[Interstellar Overdrive]

Make botting mandatory for powerplay instead. Humans should not concern themselves with menial tasks.

 

[outsidefactor]

How to solve the bots? Open only? Doesn't really solve the issue, the bots combat log anyway. And even if combat logging was somehow stopped in a way that doesn't punish people with unreliable internet it's only kicking the can down the road a bit. The bots can run in off-peak times. I can fly for days in open and never see another human player because I play when there are very few people online. The bots can stop work in peak hours.

And even then, that just kicks the can a bit further down the road. The botters then go and module shop for Prismatic shields, do the Cutter grind (down to less than 8 hours these days and trivially easy to program a bot for) and run the bots on massively profitable wing missions and they don't care about their losses. They program the bot to evade and high-wake.

And then we have a bot army with hardened Cutters stuck in Open. Surely the problem is solved, right? We can kill them, right? Wrong, because the botters can just buy more accounts and more computers to run the bots on. OK, so you've got the bots in open, and you're flying wings of commanders killing the bots (most of which will be escaping because they're hardened and programmed to evade)... but like the bots care if there is two wings of 4 humans killing them and a hundred bots. The bots can win on pure volume of work.

Has it ever occured to anyone that a botting faction could emerge funded by someone with too much time and money? Someone willing to sink thousands or tens of thousands of dollars into crapping all over Elite? People are willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on ships for games that aren't even released yet, why not on pooping all over a game that's currently out?

The idea of players policing, opposing or defeating robots is insane BECAUSE IT CAN'T WORK. They can bot 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with hundreds of bots in an ever expanding arms race. That's why robots are taking over real life menial tasks: because they can outperform us and don't need food, sleep or days off and themselves CAN BE MADE BY ROBOTS, so their numbers can grow with little human intervention. As there are more bots the tools to create and deploy new bots will evolve and improve. There is no victory to be found on that path.

There is only one fix for the bots: a better historian database and ongoing analysis to identify bot activity by FDev. Identify any work done by the bots and turn it off. Shadow ban them. Prevent them from having any impact.

And go back and undo their past activity. If they can have no effect going forward and see their past work undone botting ends instantly. We can't fix this, only FDev can.

And this is the point that their massive conflict of interest crops up: every bot account is a sale for FDev. It could be that FDev have already identified how many recent sales were to botters, and realised that stopping botting will have a measurable impact on sales figures, the sorts of things that show up on financial reports. Yes, it's short sighted and doomed to inevitable failure, but since when has FDev shown particularly developed forethought? It could be that FDev recognise the problem and know all the players and even have a path to really stopping the bots but are dragging their feet because they have to seek funding to implement the fix, i.e. spend money to make fewer sales.

 

[Interstellar Overdrive]

How to solve the bots? Open only? Doesn't really solve the issue, the bots combat log anyway. And even if combat logging was somehow stopped in a way that doesn't punish people with unreliable internet it's only kicking the can down the road a bit. The bots can run in off-peak times. I can fly for days in open and never see another human player because I play when there are very few people online. The bots can stop work in peak hours.

And even then, that just kicks the can a bit further down the road. The botters then go and module shop for Prismatic shields, do the Cutter grind (down to less than 8 hours these days and trivially easy to program a bot for) and run the bots on massively profitable wing missions and they don't care about their losses. They program the bot to evade and high-wake.

And then we have a bot army with hardened Cutters stuck in Open. Surely the problem is solved, right? We can kill them, right? Wrong, because the botters can just buy more accounts and more computers to run the bots on. OK, so you've got the bots in open, and you're flying wings of commanders killing the bots (most of which will be escaping because they're hardened and programmed to evade)... but like the bots care if there is two wings of 4 humans killing them and a hundred bots. The bots can win on pure volume of work.

Has it ever occured to anyone that a botting faction could emerge funded by someone with too much time and money? Someone willing to sink thousands or tens of thousands of dollars into crapping all over Elite? People are willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on ships for games that aren't even released yet, why not on pooping all over a game that's currently out?

The idea of players policing, opposing or defeating robots is insane BECAUSE IT CAN'T WORK. They can bot 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with hundreds of bots in an ever expanding arms race. That's why robots are taking over real life menial tasks: because they can outperform us and don't need food, sleep or days off and themselves CAN BE MADE BY ROBOTS, so their numbers can grow with little human intervention. As there are more bots the tools to create and deploy new bots will evolve and improve. There is no victory to be found on that path.

There is only one fix for the bots: a better historian database and ongoing analysis to identify bot activity by FDev. Identify any work done by the bots and turn it off. Shadow ban them. Prevent them from having any impact.

And go back and undo their past activity. If they can have no effect going forward and see their past work undone botting ends instantly. We can't fix this, only FDev can.

And this is the point that their massive conflict of interest crops up: every bot account is a sale for FDev. It could be that FDev have already identified how many recent sales were to botters, and realised that stopping botting will have a measurable impact on sales figures, the sorts of things that show up on financial reports. Yes, it's short sighted and doomed to inevitable failure, but since when has FDev shown particularly developed forethought? It could be that FDev recognise the problem and know all the players and even have a path to really stopping the bots but are dragging their feet because they have to seek funding to implement the fix, i.e. spend money to make fewer sales.

How about adding some interesting mechanics instead of these menial boring tasks that can easily be done by a bot? Both improves the game and acts as a kind of Turing test. Two birds, one stone.

 

[Rubbernuke]

To truly destroy 5C as we know them you'd have to turn Powerplay into something akin to the BGS, where every action can only have positive outcomes.

Powerplay has 2 glaring weaknesses: voting, and being able to vote freely on anything and everything. If someone can vote to expand a rubbish system they will. In a BGS context no expansion is bad as they have no value attached to them- so 5C could pump a BGS PP hybrid silly and all they'd do is simply improve that power. It would in turn force them to play properly and externally oppose using legit methods - i.e. actually play.

 

[Bard Voronwe]

How about adding some interesting mechanics instead of these menial boring tasks that can easily be done by a bot? Both improves the game and acts as a kind of Turing test. Two birds, one stone.

That's part of the proposal, of course, but it would mean an important update to Powerplay game mechanics (which I totally dig ) that sadly we will not seen in the short term, so at least we should ask for a continuous monitoring in some crucial systems where is much more likely to find them. (we can't report them diectly because we can't see them, being those in private or solo mode, so the anti-cheat team should look at those systems looking for suspicious accounts, investigate those accounts and possibly perma-ban them).

 

[Bitterwhaler]

Yeah, I'm more than a little worried about the new update. Overall I like what they are trying to do to make the game more accessible, but bot enabling is a real concern there. That said, with all the (very real) Powerplay issues the game has, we have to be careful on catch all solutions/partial solutions like Open Only that have negative effects themselves. As some here have said, dedicated botters and such will likely find ways around, and while it's a pain, organizing outside the game to find ways to defeat such issues is a lot of what can make Powerplay so fun. Like, look let's try to get the lemon tree from dropping so many lemons on us sure, but lets make some lemonade in the meantime? I agree that monitoring would be a good start, I'm just not sure we should hold our breath on it.