Proposal Discussion Anti Botting Agreement Idea 3.1 Player incentivised, VR compatible in-station "not-a-literal-Captcha"

Somebody send me that info please, I'd love to cross check it against stuff I've been involved with. I don't use discord (ironically I consider it cheating).

I just thinking crazy thinking here, would it not be alot easier to just permaban anyone doing any BGS work, as we can clearly narrow down their activities to be bot-like at times.and as we have heard, bots are ruining the game, so punish and erase anything that looks like a bot.

on a more serious note, why is it so had post the evidence here? you are very unlikely to encounter these in the open, becuase in open, other players can mess around with them so that is just another source of complication... so it is most logical that bots will be using solo or private groups,. and by evidence of other threads, solo and private groups should be much more "safer"... so what is the proof? some random dude saying so in a chat? some unexplained changes that do not fit your model of what you did that did not give the desired outcome?

Since there is no log avaialable to use what another player did, everything is just based on speculation and of what players are doing, we do not even know which players have visited a specific system, unless they are the top 5 criminals... so all that data would for the most part already be anonymized so no naming and shaming going on, so I do not understand the big trouble to produce this evidence of a widespread issue of botting... and if the evidence as so clear that it can actually pinpoint a single player, the obvious solution should be to REPORT that player, and if Frontier have recieved a report for that player, looked into it and did nothing, there are two obvious conclusions we think of
1. Frontier do not really care and goes nah, we are to busy playing with Odyssey, so we cant be bothered dealing with this at this moment.
2. Seems perfectly fine, just another dedicated player doing their thing...
 
As a comment on , 'there are no bots , prove it' , do the right google search, it will give you links to forums where players who DO bot, talk about/report if they've been banned or not, for how long , what modules they were using at the time and info on how they are going to try and get around it when they get back on-line after the timed bans...

The latest reports on those forums are from yesterday.
 
As a comment on , 'there are no bots , prove it' , do the right google search, it will give you links to forums where players who DO bot, talk about/report if they've been banned or not, for how long , what modules they were using at the time and info on how they are going to try and get around it when they get back on-line after the timed bans...

The latest reports on those forums are from yesterday.

Now you twisting things here, we are not refuting that there are bots, the issue is, how big of an issue they are... so how big of an issue is it?
 
As a comment on , 'there are no bots , prove it' , do the right google search, it will give you links to forums where players who DO bot, talk about/report if they've been banned or not, for how long , what modules they were using at the time and info on how they are going to try and get around it when they get back on-line after the timed bans...

The latest reports on those forums are from yesterday.

Send me a link to these forums please so I can verify what you're saying because I have tried searching for these botters and found nothing so far. Thanks.
 
As a comment on , 'there are no bots , prove it' , do the right google search, it will give you links to forums where players who DO bot, talk about/report if they've been banned or not, for how long , what modules they were using at the time and info on how they are going to try and get around it when they get back on-line after the timed bans...

The latest reports on those forums are from yesterday.
In my opinion, you should pass that info on to Frontier.
 
Cmdr BLIPs alternative Idea of the day.
What about letting everyone have self flying ships, with the tech provided by Fdev ingame ?
 
I just thinking crazy thinking here, would it not be alot easier to just permaban anyone doing any BGS work, as we can clearly narrow down their activities to be bot-like at times.and as we have heard, bots are ruining the game, so punish and erase anything that looks like a bot.

on a more serious note, why is it so had post the evidence here? you are very unlikely to encounter these in the open, becuase in open, other players can mess around with them so that is just another source of complication... so it is most logical that bots will be using solo or private groups,. and by evidence of other threads, solo and private groups should be much more "safer"... so what is the proof? some random dude saying so in a chat? some unexplained changes that do not fit your model of what you did that did not give the desired outcome?

Since there is no log avaialable to use what another player did, everything is just based on speculation and of what players are doing, we do not even know which players have visited a specific system, unless they are the top 5 criminals... so all that data would for the most part already be anonymized so no naming and shaming going on, so I do not understand the big trouble to produce this evidence of a widespread issue of botting... and if the evidence as so clear that it can actually pinpoint a single player, the obvious solution should be to REPORT that player, and if Frontier have recieved a report for that player, looked into it and did nothing, there are two obvious conclusions we think of
1. Frontier do not really care and goes nah, we are to busy playing with Odyssey, so we cant be bothered dealing with this at this moment.
2. Seems perfectly fine, just another dedicated player doing their thing...

Not wanting to Name & Shame on a public forum is fine by me, I could give plenty more info without that rule (but wouldn't anyway), I provided as much info (earlier in this thread) as I thought I could without assigning blame.

I am not a part of the wider BGSing community, I'm not a particularly social person, I'm not on Facebook, twitter or anywhere else other than this forum, and play the game in the game itself, using the tools the game provides (although obviously I don't live in a complete information vacuum outside the game). Spoilers & all that. I am self-taught from personal experience of having 'challenges' thrust upon me in the game and dealing with them in the game with tools my Cmdr has access to (as much as possible, I'm not religious about it :)).

What I am concerned about here is the apparent assumption that anyone outside the clique is doing it wrong, working 'in the shadows' and that the Devs may change the game (again) to favour the clique at the expense of my playstyle.

So if someone would be good enough to send me a list of events that are suspected of being the result of botting I'll be happy to cross check that against my own knowledge, just as I did with the examples I gave.

Given the self imposed restrictions I apply to the way I play I found it laughable that what I do could even be considered to be cheating more or less regardless of where anyone draws their line in the sand.
 
As a comment on , 'there are no bots , prove it' , do the right google search, it will give you links to forums where players who DO bot, talk about/report if they've been banned or not, for how long , what modules they were using at the time and info on how they are going to try and get around it when they get back on-line after the timed bans...

The latest reports on those forums are from yesterday.

So do me a favour & just PM me that 'right google search' so I know I am looking at the same thing you are.
 
A good way to get this looked at would be to send a report with details to the BBC, they have been running reports on Game cheats etc lately.

If the BBC reports on it, Lord Braben would appear from his suspended animation ! (coffin)
And as we all know, the BBC is recognised as being thorough, unbiased and an unquestionable authority on anything it says 🤥
 
maybe Old Duck can spread the love around:
I don't make private messages public, that's bad form. The person who sent me those messages is more than welcome to post (and actually has) here in this thread.

FWIW, I have no problems with changing the game to make it more compelling for humans and less compelling for bots. I'm of the opinion that if a gameloop is easy for a bot, then it is a "grind" for me. That's why I advocated for a supercruise autopilot all those years ago and celebrated when we actually got one. One way to fight bots is to give automation to EVERYONE for things that are tedious and repetitive (like I said before, automating repetitive tasks is the goal in games like Space Engineers), and the other way is to make the game more fluid, dynamic, lifelike, and unpredictable - just like real life. For example, it would take a serious AI to play Skyrim from beginning to end, especially if the writer of the AI had never played Skyrim (so they couldn't just preprogram decision trees). ED, on the other hand, very quickly becomes repetitive and predictable (and simplistic), and that's why writing a bot for ED is somewhat trivial for a qualified programmer. That's not to say I'm buying all the claims regarding bots (writing a bot that can win in combat without hacking the game feels "difficult" to say the least), but there does seem to be good evidence that there is cheating going on.
 
Now you twisting things here, we are not refuting that there are bots, the issue is, how big of an issue they are... so how big of an issue is it?
How long is a piece of string?
A very hackneyed response that means, simply "I don't know"

I understand the scale of the 'issue' is unknown, so could be from 1 to a million...
At least there are a nice list of groups who never botted signing up with a promise to not bot... That in itself is quite something :unsure:
 
The effectiveness of a bot is directly proportional to how mundane, repetitive, and “grindy” a game is.

In other words, if bots can work so well, then it tells you something about the game itself..
 
I find it utterly puzzling in a game where there are no real world rewards for "winning", some would go to the effort to write such bots.
The mentality of people who cheat in multiplayer games is a curious one. I know that some people do it simply to troll, while others believe that everyone is else is cheating so why shouldn't they. I've also heard someone argue (in earnest) that it creates interesting and emergent gameplay. And I guess that some people are so competitive that they will do anything to "win'.
 
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