In this thread Jane Turner is just another poster as she wouldn't be permitted to moderate a thread she is participating in.
Recently there was an accusation that a player group had to be using bots because they out-BGS'd the 'experts' which, of course, is unthinkable... So we get a 'crusade' over bots because someone's ego got dented.
I'm not disputing the possibility that automated accounts are working in the game - but as they are allegedly operating in solo said claims are, understandably, based on assumption.
But, look at the positive side of things, have a super-powerful player group behind a pogrom on bots, it has to be great, doesn't it? Calling for other groups to get behind their 'flag' makes for an even more powerful statement also...
The impartiality is presumed, but hardly relevant here as opponents are still getting their say in this discussion, it's not like anyone who opposes the need to tackle botting is being "canceled".
PC's Rule, Consoles Drool over what a PC can do.
So funny, but so true! That shouold be printed on tee's or hoodies!
Of course that's possible, but do you think that the 146 groups, all powerplay commands and now 18,000 individual that have signed up ahead of us are also crying wolf?
It is
POSSIBLE but highly unlikely, I've not seen bots with my own eyes, as in robotic "commanders" punching in cargo runs with the regularity of a metronome, but should I have seen them? Were you runnign a shaddowy drone bot operation, would you run it in open? Didn't think so...
I have however seen PMF's of seemingly only a half dozen CMDR's achieve superpower levels of logistic in BGS swings, raising an eyebrow or two on my side, with thought bubbles floating abover our heads with the word "bots?" contained therein.
They are not signing up to a captcha-like system, they are just happy to agree not to use bots (and help out if evidence of botting is found). That can be done without believing botting is actually a significant problem.
Finding the use of bots within the game contemptuous is an almost universal maxim amongst players, however, to progress from the inefficacy of rimmer and his smegging leaflet campaign...
Source: https://youtu.be/5WgUktfdDy4?t=100
Which is why I've went from !Hoorah!" --> "Sign me up scotty!" --> "Heres's some ideas to police this!"
I imagine that the amount of signatories is really an indication the lack of faith people have in FDs obfuscated investigations. Whatever is done the end result is the same- you'll never know the outcome unless you see the action you were facing stop. It does not help that many systems in ED have to be picked apart and guessed at where doubts begin to materialize.
Which is why I want to see antibotting brought into the game, if I take a kicking I want it to either be a hands of a squad of better motivated / more efficient CMDR's than my cause can muster, or at the hands of some superior intellects, the likes of which might cyber cripple nationastates. I for one would rather see top league coders crippling BGS / Powerplay than blacking out half a country. If they've got that level of intellect on their side, I'd have been unlikely to have out BGS'd them, and I'd rather they tied up their time out-BGS'ing me than blacking out a major population centre. However, I refuse to be / object to being beaten by script kiddies.
How about creating better content so people who are actually playing want to do the things botters are automating? You get thousands out mining brainlessly for hours on end just to see a meaningless numerical increase in their mostly worthless credits but for some reason working to affect the BGS with these mundane, boring and tedious actions can be be better done by the obviously Sasquatch level clandestine bots.
Hmm? Sure, money in game has been inflated to irrelevance, but your post genuinely confuses me, are you proposing mining bots are the future? Or that since mining is tedous but done by hand, then if the bgs is getting botted it must be tedious^2? BGS is one of those things that needs talent an effort, and you can substitute one for another, hence a bot mindlessly running a-->b cargo can be as effective as a Wiley fox CMDR.
So it could possibly fly a ship completely autonomously, yet there are no calls from the anti-bot side to ban the very things that can be easily used to make a bot.
Instead they'd rather add something that would end up hampering or annoying those who aren't botting to try to catch bots that would likely get past the anti-bot measures because the botter would manually do them if, and when, they pop up.
If it walks and talks like captcha...
I seen supercruise assist as being "a botters wet dream" and it appears I'm not the only one who thought that. Flip side to that argument is if I wer a bot scripter, I'm pretty sure I'd add OCR and read the time to destination and throttle to 75% when the ETA on the hud was less than 7 seconds, so SCA
MIGHT make naff all difference from a botters point of view.
13 pages and no mention of "the bomb".
That, i have seen happen sept last, haven't looked much since.
Is it still a thing and bottable?
Has the carrier cargo discount/surcharge "bomb" not been parched out yet? 'Guess not or you wouldn't still be snarky about it, so wow! Yeah! This needs fixing.
good point and good question.
i don't know the answer, but do you mean this?
Just a little technique using Fleet Carrier Markets to effect a station owners influence. Valid Strategy or Awful Exploit, only FD can say, but I would want a shower afterwards. We are only in Beta, but I cant see any of the mechanics changing in a way to prevent this, any changes are likely to...
forums.frontier.co.uk
if so, that's pretty specific. should be easily detectable by the affected factions. also doesn't seem hard to automate. not that i have direct experience with automation in elite, but the subtasks are simple and predictable.
then again that's an "exploit": a shortcut that just makes a legitimate tactic very easy to play out manually. botting is a whole extra level.
Using a carrier's artificial commodity prices to tank a market is not, imho, genuine game play.
