Come Odyssey, we may have the opportunity to join an anti botting police force and interrogate officials for information at bases ... or maybe just leave it to the moderators 
Proposal Discussion: Things that could help player groups identify a possible bot attack
- Thread starter CMDR Jal'Bur
- Start date
Stick me in the less info camp please, I appreciate how the game is played is subjective, but imo the game should be played in the game with tools available to the Cmdr. I would remove the parsable logs completely and change the ToS to outlaw the automation of large scale executive management tools, favouring instead the actual piloting of ships and following trails of breadcrumbs (tracking players on the bounty boards is a good example of this imo, and should not be easily done (ie automatically scripted) outside of the game).
I effectively want Ian Doncaster (an example from this thread, sorry Ian) to be manually typing stuff rather than automating stuff, and while inevitably anything can be automated I'd be happy to be in a position where I was beaten by an opponent that just put that level of effort in rather than looking at highs & lows on a spreadsheet. If I wanted that I'd play Eve.
I effectively want Ian Doncaster (an example from this thread, sorry Ian) to be manually typing stuff rather than automating stuff, and while inevitably anything can be automated I'd be happy to be in a position where I was beaten by an opponent that just put that level of effort in rather than looking at highs & lows on a spreadsheet. If I wanted that I'd play Eve.
But does it really? We are to believe there are people who commandeer tens to hundreds of bots. If I would be that individual, obviously I'm not, I would just mimic a random pattern with my bot army to fit into that new statistic and anybody looking at the data would be not wiser than now. It's just a new and easy obstacle to overcome for the botter.
Also if the bots are not even moving and the same missions are "reused" multiple times there is no traffic showing up on the board, beside the initial one, I assume. Or you could use a carrier to jump the bots into the system. With a little research you can find the pattern of activity and nobody knows you were there. I run sometimes operations in different corners of the bubble and in Colonia on the same day thanks to my carrier and alts.
Yeah, that is actually true. The problem is that they maintain cutters at a constant 200 traffic for... months? You can predict the traffic too. Tomorrow the station they are supporting with trade enters a lockdown, and suddenly 200 cutters dissapear and 200 Condas show up, switching their efforts to failing missions by dumping passengers and a few other activities.
Or when you say "tomorrow their best move would be to hit the outpost" and they replace 300 ships torn between Cutters and T-9's into 300 Pythons. All of this goes on for months. What you are suggesting is a great way to hide if you're a real player... but not a good way to hide a constant, 24/7 never ending effort of automated accounts.
They clearly need to jump in and out. if they were forced to wait 15 minutes per jump to do their trade loops in order to hide I'd consider that an absolute win.
And by the way the examples above are taken from real examples, not made up hypothetical situations.
Jane Turner
Volunteer Moderator
Yes it does - if the aim is to reduce false positives. And I already pointed out that an outcome would be to raise complexity a bit for botters - which frankly is currently looking like it might be the best we can hope for
Not to nitpick, but I know plenty of squadrons and groups that consist of as few as 3 people.
It's still an ambigous measurement of support at best.
Kind of the whole point of including squadron members in the initial figure!
all 20k of them?
When you have 160 squadrons signed up, including literally every PowerPlay power, that figure is not really controversial. Of course there are alts and inactive accounts present in squadrons, but it is up to them to give the info they are most comfortable with. Now, this does seem like nitpicking! Unlike the comment above.
It's disingenuous to include that 20k number and you know it.
It doesn't even have to be hundreds of CMDR's. 20 automated accounts that experience no burnout during full 24 hour shifts, without bathroom breaks, sleeping breaks, work breaks or even alt-tabbing to do literally any other activity at all in the internet can easily beat hundreds of CMDR's at the BGS game.
No, I don't. Several of the largest squadrons in the game have signed up, including every PP Power. Feds, Imps, Alliance and all the independents.
Say 15k if you want to be conservative, maybe that figure is more comfortable for some here.
Bless even with 15k people signing up its still crickets from Frontier.
I am sure they would. But that was not he point I was trying to convey. This kind of operation would be detected without your reports
Maybe, but it sure as hell got your attention though. Rent free as some say
I disagree, I doubt they have a system to automatically detect bots. Frontier themselves have said, quote "Investigations about automation take a long time"
Call it morbid curiosity the way you can't help but look at a car crash on a motorway.
No I like to call it brigading. If we're talking about misleading numbers, the usual suspects constantly making the same comments in these threads give but an illusion that they are the voice of the community. You're not. A large group of people either join the discord directly or resort to DM's to ask questions, instead of having to deal with forum PvP.
Hell I might make a bet for the next post, how long it will take for the same 6 people to show up saying that they disagree lmao
Why is it when you and your fellow comrades are challenged on your numbers or your claims of bots with questions and requests for proof you instantly jump to help help im being attacked?
You're 20k signatures is mince and you would get a little credence if you stuck with the number of squadrons because 161 is still an impressive number.