I'm looking forward to the next powerplay activity where Archon collapses... completely coincidentally.
Issue 6 - "Automated Accounts Influencing BGS and Powerplay": Omission from the Top 20 Issues Report
Thank you for the clarification and the update. It is appreciated that you state the issue of botting is something you are aware of.
To the issue of botting, cheating and other problematic issue in general for Elite Dangerous. It is all well and good to say that you are aware of it and are working on it. In the end, only actions matter. Actions needs to be taken so that players in-game notices a substantial difference that are meaningful for the players. Words count for nothing if actions are not taken.
There is a great deal of cynicism in the player base about Frontiers way of dealing with difficult issues in-game. A common perception is that Frontier does nothing when a difficult issue is raised and says nothing, hoping that being silent will make the people complaining about that issue go away (and with them somehow the issue itself will be magically resolved). True or not, this is the perception many players have. To regain trust from players who have lost their trust, words mean nothing, only actions count.
And I would like to add my voice to everyone else here on the Forum that the issue tracker as it functions now is not working well for dealing with bugs and issues. You need to find other solutions.
To the issue of botting, cheating and other problematic issue in general for Elite Dangerous. It is all well and good to say that you are aware of it and are working on it. In the end, only actions matter. Actions needs to be taken so that players in-game notices a substantial difference that are meaningful for the players. Words count for nothing if actions are not taken.
There is a great deal of cynicism in the player base about Frontiers way of dealing with difficult issues in-game. A common perception is that Frontier does nothing when a difficult issue is raised and says nothing, hoping that being silent will make the people complaining about that issue go away (and with them somehow the issue itself will be magically resolved). True or not, this is the perception many players have. To regain trust from players who have lost their trust, words mean nothing, only actions count.
And I would like to add my voice to everyone else here on the Forum that the issue tracker as it functions now is not working well for dealing with bugs and issues. You need to find other solutions.
Thanks for this update Bruce - a few comments.
2) Needing eleven "independent" reports of a bug (original + 10 confirmations ... plus however many duplicate reports and their confirmations dilute it) is really excessive to prove that an issue is "legitimate" ... especially when the other Frontier games only require 3 confirmations (4 reports). Are we so much more unreliable than Planet Zoo players that you think if only - say - eight of us report experiencing the same bug that we might all be lying or mistaken? As another poster indicates here ...
It feels like there are some bottlenecks at this Confirmation->Acknowledgement stage which weren't previously present.
1) This is a pretty good measure of how confusing the Issue Tracker process is, if even you're mis-speaking on it. Issues in the Confirming state of course can't be voted on at all - they need confirmations / "can reproduce" comments instead.
2) Needing eleven "independent" reports of a bug (original + 10 confirmations ... plus however many duplicate reports and their confirmations dilute it) is really excessive to prove that an issue is "legitimate" ... especially when the other Frontier games only require 3 confirmations (4 reports). Are we so much more unreliable than Planet Zoo players that you think if only - say - eight of us report experiencing the same bug that we might all be lying or mistaken? As another poster indicates here ...
... this does not inspire confidence in the issue tracking process or a feeling that reporting bugs in Elite Dangerous is a worthwhile activity. It's always - which it shouldn't be - a consideration for me: do I report this bug, knowing that if I want it to go anywhere quickly I need to find ten other people to fill in a form too. Often the answer is "no" - I have been successfully discouraged from reporting a bug (there's a few I haven't reported by now) - which is surely not what you want from the process.
There's currently 19 other issues in Confirmed-but-not-Acknowledged state ... is there anything else we can provide in terms of information on them that would help internal confirmation? Some of them like https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/35645 have been waiting for Acknowledgement for months now ... while others like https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/41848 or https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/40224 have been waiting for a while, but have plenty of information on how to reproduce and can be replicated with a single glance at the right system map.
It feels like there are some bottlenecks at this Confirmation->Acknowledgement stage which weren't previously present.
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One of the biggest issues with botting is that despite FDev constantly telling us that they are investigating it and doing things in the background, many player groups still are facing the issue of targeted botting and are disappearing from the game because of it.
Some individuals not only use Bots to their advantage in PP/BGS, but they actively target player groups with the aims of erasing them from the game, certain player factions that were once 30 systems strong now only exist within 4 systems and control none of them, not because of real player conflicts or opposition, but because they were unfortunate enough to cross a handful of individuals that can apparently outperform many of the largest groups in the game combined in sheer manpower and stamina.
They do not only target player factions, but Powerplay player groups as well. Throughout 2017-2018, Mahon powerplay was targeted by these individuals in an incident that is thoroughly documented here, here and in many other places such as reddit, youtube and twitch vods.
This absolute disgrace of an event only stopped plaguing Mahon powerplay and Alliance squadrons/minor factions not because of Frontier's action, but because the individuals behind it had to be convinced by Alliance players to finally stop. This is not to say that action wasn't taken by Frontier (something will be important in this post), because everything indicates some accounts were indeed banned/punished in this incident, as it is explained in the links above. This was simply not enough though, as it took several months of back and forth with Frontier for action to be taken, and once that happened, it took but a month for the bots to return, with a combination of new accounts and old accounts that survived Frontier's actions.
This known group of individuals then took to Fifth Column and BGS automation against Yuri Grom, the only player-made PP power in the game. After being unable to fight it off, as no human could, EG Pilots, the founding squadron of Yuri Grom, just decided to abandon powerplay altogether.
As a sidekick, we know of at least a dozen squadrons, big and small, who were targeted by the same infamous players, as well as other powerplay powers such as Antal.
Many other groups have expressed concern that they think they've been targeted by botters, like Winters, Aisling and ALD.
The group that I'm a part of has been targeted by these individuals since at least December 2020 and they have not stopped for one second. Despite themselves forming part of a relatively small powerplay-supporting group with a lot to do, they seem to have no issue sparing an enormous ammount of manpower, one that probably surpasses that of the biggest powerplay groups such as FUC or Aisling PP, in order to fight meaningless conflicts against other player groups to delete them from the game.
When we say that we want better communication, we don't mean more "we're looking into this". Some people might consider it a bit cynical to pretend that Frontier is doing absolutely nothing about it, but I will say that whatever they are doing, it is not enough.
While this post adresses concerns that Issue N°6 had been deliberately omitted from the most recent issue report, it doesn't do much for the people that have been victims of this automated griefing, which doesn't just come in the form of in-game opposition, but also comes in the form of targeted harassment and provocation through Account, Ship and Carrier names.
We won't get our systems back, you won't take away loss-making 5C systems from PP powers, and none of us will get back all the human effort that has been erased from the game due to blatant automation. This is why it is imperative that action is taken as soon as possible, and why the people that have been talking to you for months about this (in our case, 9 months of back and forth with Community Managers and the official Frontier Support in private conversations) need to be given something more than just the reassurance that you care. A similar post was made by frontier in February of this year and yet, none of us saw any changes indicating that action has been taken.
Frontier, we need something more. Not reassurance, we need you to work with us. Despite what some notorious forum-dads might want to make you believe, botting is actually really blatant and easy to identify. There is not much room at all for plausible deniability, we know who they are and you, based on the apparent action taken against them in 2017-2018, know who they are as well.
Some individuals not only use Bots to their advantage in PP/BGS, but they actively target player groups with the aims of erasing them from the game, certain player factions that were once 30 systems strong now only exist within 4 systems and control none of them, not because of real player conflicts or opposition, but because they were unfortunate enough to cross a handful of individuals that can apparently outperform many of the largest groups in the game combined in sheer manpower and stamina.
They do not only target player factions, but Powerplay player groups as well. Throughout 2017-2018, Mahon powerplay was targeted by these individuals in an incident that is thoroughly documented here, here and in many other places such as reddit, youtube and twitch vods.
This absolute disgrace of an event only stopped plaguing Mahon powerplay and Alliance squadrons/minor factions not because of Frontier's action, but because the individuals behind it had to be convinced by Alliance players to finally stop. This is not to say that action wasn't taken by Frontier (something will be important in this post), because everything indicates some accounts were indeed banned/punished in this incident, as it is explained in the links above. This was simply not enough though, as it took several months of back and forth with Frontier for action to be taken, and once that happened, it took but a month for the bots to return, with a combination of new accounts and old accounts that survived Frontier's actions.
This known group of individuals then took to Fifth Column and BGS automation against Yuri Grom, the only player-made PP power in the game. After being unable to fight it off, as no human could, EG Pilots, the founding squadron of Yuri Grom, just decided to abandon powerplay altogether.
As a sidekick, we know of at least a dozen squadrons, big and small, who were targeted by the same infamous players, as well as other powerplay powers such as Antal.
Many other groups have expressed concern that they think they've been targeted by botters, like Winters, Aisling and ALD.
The group that I'm a part of has been targeted by these individuals since at least December 2020 and they have not stopped for one second. Despite themselves forming part of a relatively small powerplay-supporting group with a lot to do, they seem to have no issue sparing an enormous ammount of manpower, one that probably surpasses that of the biggest powerplay groups such as FUC or Aisling PP, in order to fight meaningless conflicts against other player groups to delete them from the game.
When we say that we want better communication, we don't mean more "we're looking into this". Some people might consider it a bit cynical to pretend that Frontier is doing absolutely nothing about it, but I will say that whatever they are doing, it is not enough.
While this post adresses concerns that Issue N°6 had been deliberately omitted from the most recent issue report, it doesn't do much for the people that have been victims of this automated griefing, which doesn't just come in the form of in-game opposition, but also comes in the form of targeted harassment and provocation through Account, Ship and Carrier names.
We won't get our systems back, you won't take away loss-making 5C systems from PP powers, and none of us will get back all the human effort that has been erased from the game due to blatant automation. This is why it is imperative that action is taken as soon as possible, and why the people that have been talking to you for months about this (in our case, 9 months of back and forth with Community Managers and the official Frontier Support in private conversations) need to be given something more than just the reassurance that you care. A similar post was made by frontier in February of this year and yet, none of us saw any changes indicating that action has been taken.
Frontier, we need something more. Not reassurance, we need you to work with us. Despite what some notorious forum-dads might want to make you believe, botting is actually really blatant and easy to identify. There is not much room at all for plausible deniability, we know who they are and you, based on the apparent action taken against them in 2017-2018, know who they are as well.
No you don't. You understandably want more, you certainly don't need more.
You have found yourself in a position where you feel unable to trust the referee (Frontier Support). All you can do in that situation is play on a different pitch.
The lack of action you describe can be explained just as easily by a paranoid player base whipped up into a frenzy of witchhunting as it can by inaction on the part of FDev, and inaction can be explained just as easily by a lack of evidence rather than to apathy.
The good thing about it is an indication to the originator of how important that bug is to the rest of the players or at least how widespread it is.
this 100%.
there are a large number of smaller issues (market UI errors, arms and legs running animations mismatched, etc) that i fear will never actually be addressed or fixed simply because there's no way that ten other people are going to report them. one such bug i managed to actually find a duplicate report for so i didn't personally file (this is another major issue: the "related bugs" section is not useful at all for finding similar issues) but i was only the second confirmation in three months. at that rate of confirmation, it will remain broken for a year and a half.
i'm quickly becoming the type of person that no longer reports bugs.
Not even that - the bug will expire after a few months, and then need re-reporting. It will therefore remain broken permanently.
oh gosh i had no idea it was that bad. campaigning to get issues noticed really does seem like the only way to highlight issues and make sure they have staying power, with this knowledge in mind.
Campaigning to get issues sorted does seem the way forward. Just got to keep at it!
Precisely why basics things like Smuggling are yet to be fixed... it's really just a self-fulfilling prophecy the way things are set up. Unless an issue is a FOTM hot topic or backed by some issue motivated group with a generally-singular view on how things need to be, usually to the detriment of the game, it never gets fixed. The game is peppered with issues (resolved and otherwise) like this, and suffers heavily for it.
Smuggling isn't popular because it's broken. Smuggling won't get fixed because it's unpopular. Smuggling is unpopular because it's broken.
This is a bad approach. (Corollary: fixing popular bugs doesn't necessitate creating a good game experience, it's just firefighting)
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Because there isn't a finite number of issues on the Tracker, so it's not "taking up a space"
It is - on streams, on the forums, in general comms - maybe (and I realise this is a stretch) players could actually look at those comms?
This may come as a surprise to you, but the top 20 issues is actually only 20 issues.
You should ask those in the VR community how their campaign's going. Mind you one of the leading lights is forum banned so there might be a delay in getting a response.
And that’s a huge reason people feel disrespected.
Or maybe how important that bug is to a relatively small block of players but not that important to everyone else
That's why I don't play the purchased Odyssey anymore. Why? Because the developers do not pay attention to the problems in the game in VR mode at all. There are a lot of error messages on the tracker. And this is what the players are talking about, in the forum section of the VR game. But the developers do not read this section of the forum. It turns out that I bought the Odyssey for nothing. IMHO.
Yep, I don't bother reporting bugs anymore. I don't have a group of players to push my agenda.
It's kinda weird that the push to favor groups in early dev even got as far as the issue tracker.
