Proposal Discussion Anti Botting Agreement Idea 3.1 Player incentivised, VR compatible in-station "not-a-literal-Captcha"
- Thread starter Jane Turner
- Start date
o7 cmdrs
Well you have some that are trying to flip the galaxy Democratic, Communist, (the only place it could work is in a game after all), or Patronage, or whatever, others trying to stop them, others trying to snipe valuable systems away from other powers, or just hold on to what they have. Many of them seem invested in the outcome of these activities to the point that working at it like it's a job is perfectly fine, and lying/cheating is permissible, even laudable, as long as their team wins. It could be that the appeal is like IRL politics but people actually have power to effect changes they want in the game's landscape.
That there are bots isn't really even a question, it is how prevalent they are. Are they numerous enough, capable enough, that they are changing outcomes, or are they just placebos? Good luck charms for the winners, and boogeymen for the losers?
You're probably not denying their existence, but there's a lot of people here who are.
Go on. name names. Prove it ... oh wait.
EDIT: I replied because I take your comment as implying I am one the people you are referring to, even though I've never denied bots are being used, I've only ever asked for proof .... proof you've avoided providing, hence my sarcastic comment, which, to be fair, you earned.
Don't worry, I wasn't talking about you. There are some people though, who just straight up argue bots aren't a thing, despite the evidence.
And yeah I know you're not convinced by the evidence, but this doesn't make the evidence any less relevant. When posting that evidence I mostly just hear arguments that it is "old" or that we shouldn't talk about it and just report it to FDev instead. Or that people aren't convinced because reasons? When you literally record automated CMDR's on video and people are still not convinced, I'm not sure what they expect. A screen recording of the software functioning from one of the botters? I'm asking seriously, what kind of evidence would convince you? Since recording automated accounts in the open isn't enough?
The issue isn't whether botting is in the game. It is, and it's not even worth arguing against that.
The question some of us are asking is whether botting is so prevalent in the game that it warrents changes to the way missions work for this very specific issue. The suggestion so far is that FDev will accept reports of botting and will act on them if there is any wrongdoing.
There is a separate suggestion in here that since FDev acknowledge that BGS manipulation is a game in itself, perhaps we could have something better than the current inf grind that exists. Easy missions could have next to no influence gain, difficult or time consuming ones could give you more than they do. Perhaps this would make botting harder, perhaps not, it's a different issue, but inf grind in competitive BGS play is really boring.
Given FDevs history with updates though, is this something that is worth the risk of breaking by making changes?
By all means, discuss this, flag up that some groups use bots and encourage people to report them as well as share knowledge on what to look for. My question with this (with my mood on this topic admittedly impacted by the glib answer I received initially) is whether this is game impacting enough to make a change that affects literally everyone who plays?
I wholeheartedly agree with making BGS more dynamic and interesting btw, I would much rather get involved in a half-hour long mission with lots of moving parts and interesting gameplay (for a lot of INF) than just repeat courier or trade missions. Making BGS less grindy, and more about strategy, more about getting involved in it, with more interactive gameplay... I'm all for it. The problem is that personally I think small changes are more likely to get FDev's attention, if that makes any sense. They're more likely to hear me if I ask them to add a more detailed traffic report in the station's news board (to better clear out botting vs player opposition), than if I ask them to rework and overhaul the mission system altogether.
And to answer the question as to whether you think it worth it to change anything about the game at all, it's all up to personal opinion. Personally I enjoy doing BGS despite all the bad things about it, and so do many of other groups, big and small, in fact, BGS is mostly why I play this lovely game, since it gives me a purpose that is less sandbox-y.
When taking this into account, of course I'd consider it worth it to change the game if that means I'm more likely to face real players, instead of automated accounts.
A lot of people aren't invested enough or interested at all in the BGS and PowerPlay, and thus would rather see no changes that could potentially inconvenience them in any way to solve this issue, since this isn't an issue for them. Honestly, for the people who have this opinion that because the BGS doesn't matter to them, FDev shouldn't waste manpower in fixing it... I don't think I have much arguments to convince them of anything.
To me though, and to a lot of other people, this is the kind of gameplay I engage with the most, the kind of gameplay that builds a lot of the great communities I'm a part of, and I find it a great shame that some dude in a basement with a switch is doing his best to destroy it with ilegal third party software, and that there's not much being done about it.
I understand it that there's animosity between certain player groups here (I've seen mine mentioned a lot of times), but personally, if some other group that I have animosity with started an initiative to make the game better in PvP (Something that I'm neither interested or invested on), I would support it anyway.
I would argue, that regardless of their effect on the BGS, trade systems and missions need to be far more varied and engaging.
This proposal represents a pathetic intrusion upon the game. Requiring a player to look up something in a manual is beyond ridiculous. Just say NO. If FD was ever stupid enough to implement such a constraint, I'd be the first one to capture the manual and provide an external tool that provides an automatic manual look-up response to it.
And there was no internet. But even then, this sort of thing was pretty common.
So was smallpox.
Not being sarcastic now, I would genuinely be interested to see this video/recorded evidence myself. I don't profess to be knowledgeable in botting or even in cheating. I also have no interest in doing it myself (I wouldn't dare risk any of my 3 accounts ... 2 of which I hardly ever play), but I would like to see what others consider to be a problem. Take that as wanting to be better informed.
Feel free to PM me a link to the video, I am fairly sure that won't be against the forum rules.
I remember that thread and the replies you got that it doesn't matter at big scale or something like that. In the end to me it was a very dismissive and "our methods are the right one" type of response.
I did some testing into some other mechanism not that long ago and ran into the diminishing returns/t. As I was testing something else and you&friends did the tests already I wasn't going to start looking into what the exact numbers were, but can confirm that they are there. Same with the overall trade diminishing return, there are there too.
So maybe the 1 gazillion pos/neg carrier supported trade is not what it seems to be like? I didn't tested it yet, but it's strongly supported by results from applying the knowledge in the wild. The tests also suggest that some levers have a different result than expected if combined. Maybe the bgs and lever interactions are not as well understood as some people think they are or do.
Nobody truly knows how the BGS work. At this point it's like what people tell you about quantum mechanics... if you claim to understand the whole of it, it means youi don't.
The work people like Goemon do, people like Ian Doncaster do, or people like Jane Turner do, is what gives us the best current understanding of it, but it doesn't mean anyone has cracked the code and knows everything about it.
Frontier devs know exactly how it works, or at least how it is supposed to work and they can also see exactly what was done & by who. That information is intended to be hidden however, hence the reason why they ask to report suspected cases to them. Whether it's bots or any other kind of cheating all we'll see is the effect stop happening, and if it isn't bots or any other kind of cheating it'll continue to happen. In neither case will FDev tell you you were right or wrong, although they could give a summarised account of (for example) the number of accounts banned for X reason.
They did something like that with the 5-for-1 engineering exploit, which was players abusing a clearly unintended game mechanic.
Yeah, although I wouldn't take "no bans" as a sign that there was no foul play.
If you can't trust the referee find another pitch to play your game on imo.