I see things are going well here.
Proposal Discussion Anti Botting Agreement Idea 3.1 Player incentivised, VR compatible in-station "not-a-literal-Captcha"
- Thread starter Jane Turner
- Start date
I'm surprised it's gone on as long as it has.
No, that's an observation. Observations aren't insults. You can't do simple searches or you wouldn't need me to do them for you. Go ahead and report my posts. I welcome you to. I've not been the one name calling here, you have. So bring it on
I'm so scared.
I don't agree with your conclusion (I'm sure you don't either) but that is pretty funny
I think casual accusations of 'must be bots' mask the actual scale of the problem & have served only to create a feeling of paranoia. FUD.
What I'd like to see (privately) is a list of cases where botting is suspected, which I volunteered to cross check against my own knowledge. I provided two examples earlier where work I knew about was attributed to bots when the reality was actually the opposite.
Actually, flying and navigating the universe can and already has been scripted.
If it takes talent and effort then you should not be able to substitute one for the other since this a Boolean function of And. If it takes talent OR effort then sure you can substitute one for the other. Either way it's a mundane task most of the time especially if it can be botted.
I don't think mining bots will ever be a thing and that's not the point I was making. I was saying that since people who normally would not mine were doing it in droves then there was something attractive about mining suddenly. When the hand of god changes the market and the physical galaxy to combat that then really it doesn't matter if you affect the bgs because it's going to be regulated by the magical fiat of gameplay reasons.
It would be great if hard work in the game could create some really crazy trading opportunities but with the invisible sky buddy righting all wrongs there's no point in it.
For this reason I think a lot of people are apathetic about bots affecting the bgs.
As for power-play, every power should require some type of interaction with other ships in order to pick up merits. It doesn't have to be combat. You should have to go out and scoop something like pods or relics or anything like that to get merits. You could even assist disabled vessels or a combination of these things to mix it up some. Picking up and delivering leaflets is begging for scripting.
Automation and Scripting - An investigation into further abuses of BGS and Powerplay
TL : DR For several months, The Alliance Office of Statistics have been tracking and monitoring up to 20 seperate accounts that have been using automated scripts for station services, flight and travel from system to system. Collectively this has been used to undermine Powerplay powers and...
In the post I have indicated you will find evidence of what you are looking for. Even years ago they were used to influence the power play and bgs. This is a fact, bots exist and the fact that you can't find any evidence is in fact irrelevant to the discussion.
The video clearly shows the suspicious and equal behaviour of multiple monitored ships inside and outside the stations.
There are developers who are creating automatons using artificial intelligence and you can easily find these too. The video is a few years old, but you can easily see how they have evolved.
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OK, yes the video shows odd behaviour, but with the names blurred out it's hard to draw any conclusions. The video does not show that these are bots, merely that they are behaving in a way most players wouldn't. Ultimately, what I think is irrelevant, it's what Frontier thinks that matters. The video's date is 3 years ago, so I am going to consider it the case that this video was passed on to Frontier, and they've taken any action they deem appropriate.Automation and Scripting - An investigation into further abuses of BGS and Powerplay
TL : DR For several months, The Alliance Office of Statistics have been tracking and monitoring up to 20 seperate accounts that have been using automated scripts for station services, flight and travel from system to system. Collectively this has been used to undermine Powerplay powers and...forums.frontier.co.uk
In the post I have indicated you will find evidence of what you are looking for. Even years ago they were used to influence the power play and bgs. This is a fact, bots exist and the fact that you can't find any evidence is in fact irrelevant to the discussion.
The video clearly shows the suspicious and equal behaviour of multiple monitored ships inside and outside the stations.
There are developers who are creating automatons using artificial intelligence and you can easily find these too. The video is a few years old, but you can easily see how they have evolved.
The reality is that a 2017 BOT will now have become even more evolved in certain aspects of interaction with the game.
However, the argument cannot be that some players are asking others to bring evidence.
The more evolved they are the less obvious they are. Besides, many of them will be in "group" and "only" modes.
If we start accusing each other as players then we are also free to accuse Frontier of how dated their approach to game mechanics is.
Also continuing to read that certain features to the game can't be changed because they were promised by Frontier is wrong. All games evolve and many people struggle to understand how so many features promised by whoever financed the game have actually been excluded and will never be included again.
I think it takes a lot of honesty to understand how the mission system doesn't work as well as it does. It takes complexity.
You can't expect to have a game with 2014 logic when in 2021 BOTs do 90% of human actions. Getting a material from point A to point B nowadays is not enough.
There are mechanics used by some groups that massively sell material to the negative profit market to crash the factions that control the stations when they should be using the black market instead. Too bad that in the black market you don't have the price reference on Inara or Eddb and you have to calculate it yourself.
This is another example of another feature badly inserted when in fact you can do the same thing without going to look for illegal materials (less present in the game) and that are profitable to the black market.
So do you not see any problem in that you or noone else, seems tol be able to produce any evidence that support the WIDE SPREAD use of these things? most here that are sceptical to any such claim, are in agreement that you can create bots, but if you are unable to give any compelling evidence that this is a WIDESPREAD problem, then why should we spend alot of resources to create anything to stop this? when those measures most likely will have negative impact for the majority of players.
This is definelely the case:
However, the argument cannot be that some players are asking others to bring evidence.
Because some players are running around screaming about all the bots that is ruining the game and that something needs to be done about it. Then it is up to them to bring forth the allegations to support their claim... For what all we can know, you are running a massive BOT farm that is ruining the game, and if we where to keep telling everyone about it, wouldn't you end up being upset and basically want us to shut up or bring evidence prove our allegation?
So do we need to prove you are a botter or not? becuase if we do not need to propve you are boitter and claim you are, then where would we end up? Certinaly not with being truthful, as anyone, and everyone can just make stuff up and noone is allowed to fact check any such claims of evidence...
Not quite, the bots are potentially indistinguishable as the difference between a bot spamming passenger missions and a human spamming passenger missions is how long the human can keep it up for.Sounds like the bots have evolved to be almost indistinguishable from humans
I suggest any Captcha style quiz just won’t be enough. What we need is something a little more...2019
“You’re walking along in the desert, you look down and see a tortoise crawling towards you...”
The guy scheduling and scripting carrier trips?
And there's the nub of the problem. There are human character traits which lead a real person to carry on doing a repetitive game activity all day and night while remaining uncommunicative.
I'm not criticising or ridiculing such people, just saying that they can get very involved in games like this. I think it's good that they find something they can do well and enjoy. I got to know one as far as that's possible in text chat in a different game. (Actually, he preferred text chat).
I consider it more likely that OP has been up against people like that than bots, because in that hypothesis I can understand what the motivation is.
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The question is whether playing the BGS competitively could spark the sort of emotions that would lead a group of players to spend every available moment to attack another player group.
The answer is yes.
You’d better keep it up, or I’m gonna have to kill ya. Unless you’re alive, you can’t play, and if you don’t play...
I think I went a bit batty there
It is your analysis that is wrong.
The evidence in the BGS is based on data collected from players via EDMC, EDDISCOVERY and the like that goes into a database. Not all information can be collected but the effects can be noticed. You are still pointing to the fact that we do not bring evidence when Frontier does not give access to information.
The argument is that there is no objective in-game data to prove that an event happened or not. It has been asked for a long time to have in-game data and not to refer to the good will of the players.
Third party tools cannot fully replace Frontier tools and these tools have never really had access to this information.
Entire squadrons that engage in BGS on a daily basis notice, as much as Inara can record, very strong fluctuations that cannot be countered in any way.
I believe a few screens have also been provided in other posts.
You have to add all sorts of bad mechanics to crash faction influences as I explained in the previous post (e.g. selling commodities at negative profit and failing passenger missions).
It seems that on the Frontier site you can't open any kind of discussion and improvement without being attacked as blasphemous and people crying about BGS, Power Play and incentivising open play. It's frankly unclear why improvements and updates to the game should be opposed in this way. The discussion that has been started by some seems to me to be calm and reasonable.
If videos are brought in and cmdr names are censored then the footage becomes unbelievable, screens of influence fluctuations are irrelevant, having noticed with your own experience of large factions that something is wrong is ridiculed.
It feels like a dog biting its own tail.
One part of the community shows a problem, the other community asks for evidence like a jury, they are shown what they can show as it is in the public domain and of course as much as Frontier allows them to show with third party tools, but still not enough.
Our hands are tied, we bring what we can show, but the attack is continuous against those who want to improve Elite and prevent, through stupid and old mechanics (2014 -> 2021), the proliferation of BOTs and CHEATS .
I honestly don't understand why the official forum is like this.
I don't think a product that has been on the market for so long should consider evolving into something that protects against this and is compelling to large communities.