Bot attack in eranin?

Genuinely curious: how do you know that?

In one of the previous bot threads the OP mentioned reporting and getting botters banned twice previously, it was the third time it happened that made him take to the forum about it.

Also you wont find people in the forum openly talking cheating as its naughty and against the rules. You can find them complaining about copping temp and perma bans elsewhere though, I won't give specifics as some eejit would get tempted.
 
This is such a hard subject to really get a straight answer to for some reason. I’m pretty sure it’s doesn’t have to be, but it is. I’m sure a large part of it is due to me not having any particular ties to any faction, system or power - to me they’re all the same because what I see is them all doing the exact same things. Systems house stations. Stations house factions, factions give missions. Missions give credits. Federal, Imperial, Alliance credits are all the same, with the same 1:1 exchange rate.
Just trying to see what someone else sees. I might have been wrong my entire life and trying to understand someone else’s position isn’t important after all.

I can only speak for myself in this case, but personally, manipulating the BGS for fun and profit is a large part of the game for me.

It's one thing to roleplay an Imperial agent in Federal space, supporting brave freedom fighters in their struggle against the evil Galactic Federation and the Corporate oligarchy which rules it. Without the BGS, though, nothing I do actually matters. It's all pretend.

The BGS is what transforms acting like an Imperial agent into actual results. Because what I do can affect the BGS, it's possible to manipulate it and, through my actions, change the face of a star system. Which is why it's something completely different to know that due to the BGS, it was I, Baroness Inga Stevenson, who encompassed their doom. :D

That feeling of being an Imperial agent changes yet again, should I succeed in the face of human opposition, especially since I don't often have a lot of time to play... and sometimes I'm in the mood to do other things. ;)

But its yet another thing when that opposition isn't other players who are struggling under the same game/life balance I am, but a player who is using a bot to play the game for them 168 hours a week, when I'm lucky to get in five.

While BGS manipulation doesn't necessarily have to be competitive, it can be, especially when two players' goals come into conflict. Just like direct PvP sucks when one player is using exploits, hacks, and cheats to gain an advantage, so does BGS play. Which is why I wish Frontier would take monitoring for bot activity seriously.
 
Read part of this thread and the question not really answered is what does playing the BGS actually mean?

Serious question, can anyone explain in a few words what I would be doing and why assuming I was playing ED to manipulate the BGS.
 
The BGS is what you do with big ships, rank and wealth.
Those things are just tools.
Maybe you need to get out of the kiddy pool and start playing the real game.

That’s the real reason IndigoWyrd doesn’t think the BGS is important. Because if he planted his flag and said “This System is mine” he would get totally creamed and find he can’t play the game and barely knows the rules.

Who's rules? And why make this personal? Why talk about the poster, not the post? Poor form all the way around. I promise, if I wanted to stake a claim to a system and a faction and make it thrive, it would thrive. But sitting around in one system, in a galaxy of millions seems an awful lot like sitting in the kiddie pool, with water wings and a life-jacket on to me. The entirety of the political systems of Elite is pathetic at best. We hear "inch deep, mile wide" often enough, but Elite: Game of Porcelain Thrones is barely an inch wide and a molecule deep. Intrigue? Complexity? Duplicity? Manipulation? Strategic Alliances? Trade Agreements? There's none of that here. Machiavellian schemes? Forget it. And in the end, what do you have to show for it? Nothing. Not even a sticker for your ship. Which is why I don't bother with it. Risk has more complexity. Checkers requires more mental effort.

But actually he’s right.
Botting won’t be “devastating to the community”.
Not if you don’t mind a lot of people leaving the game. (and yeah I have seen several “I can’t do this anymore” goodbyes from Alliance comrades so the botter can take comfort that the strategy is working)

Being a part of a different part of the community, I've not noticed.

But for me it will be the new way we play.

In order to play Elite, you will need to buy several accounts.
And you will need to buy scripting software.

I'm pretty sure stating your intention to become a botter is probably not a good idea. We may not agree with each other - and honestly you don't know me any more than I know you, but consider this a friendly gesture to keep you from shooting yourself in the foot. I'd wager there's a far easier way to deal with your dreaded 'bot-fleet' - like how about shooting them down? Gather your people, launch a full-scale attack and just continuously destroy them until you bankrupt their accounts.

Or learn a bit of networking, put on a while hat, and attack their packets. But stooping to their level? Can't support ya there.
 
I can only speak for myself in this case, but personally, manipulating the BGS for fun and profit is a large part of the game for me.

It's one thing to roleplay an Imperial agent in Federal space, supporting brave freedom fighters in their struggle against the evil Galactic Federation and the Corporate oligarchy which rules it. Without the BGS, though, nothing I do actually matters. It's all pretend.

The BGS is what transforms acting like an Imperial agent into actual results. Because what I do can affect the BGS, it's possible to manipulate it and, through my actions, change the face of a star system. Which is why it's something completely different to know that due to the BGS, it was I, Baroness Inga Stevenson, who encompassed their doom. :D

That feeling of being an Imperial agent changes yet again, should I succeed in the face of human opposition, especially since I don't often have a lot of time to play... and sometimes I'm in the mood to do other things. ;)

But its yet another thing when that opposition isn't other players who are struggling under the same game/life balance I am, but a player who is using a bot to play the game for them 168 hours a week, when I'm lucky to get in five.

While BGS manipulation doesn't necessarily have to be competitive, it can be, especially when two players' goals come into conflict. Just like direct PvP sucks when one player is using exploits, hacks, and cheats to gain an advantage, so does BGS play. Which is why I wish Frontier would take monitoring for bot activity seriously.

I've said it a few times - I get that some people like it, for whatever reason. I don't like it. Call me materialistic, but without a direct benefit, I'd rather put my efforts to more profitable uses. Doom though? Has a single faction, in the history of Elite, ever been exterminated or routed? If I were to kill a billion ships of the Brotherhood of Related Male Children, would this faction cease to be?

What's the point of having enemies if you cannot bathe in the blood of the last of their kind?
 
Read part of this thread and the question not really answered is what does playing the BGS actually mean?

Serious question, can anyone explain in a few words what I would be doing and why assuming I was playing ED to manipulate the BGS.
Look here.

I've said it a few times - I get that some people like it, for whatever reason. I don't like it. Call me materialistic, but without a direct benefit, I'd rather put my efforts to more profitable uses. Doom though? Has a single faction, in the history of Elite, ever been exterminated or routed? If I were to kill a billion ships of the Brotherhood of Related Male Children, would this faction cease to be?
Factions can be, and have been, retreated from systems they have expanded into. While they can't be removed from their home system, they can be removed from everywhere else.

What's the point of having enemies if you cannot bathe in the blood of the last of their kind?
What's the point of doing anything?
 
I'm pretty sure stating your intention to become a botter is probably not a good idea. We may not agree with each other - and honestly you don't know me any more than I know you, but consider this a friendly gesture to keep you from shooting yourself in the foot.

I agree. In any case, if BGS play becomes about who runs the best and most bots, this game has turned into EvE.

I'd wager there's a far easier way to deal with your dreaded 'bot-fleet' - like how about shooting them down? Gather your people, launch a full-scale attack and just continuously destroy them until you bankrupt their accounts.

You think these bots are in Open? That's funny. Sometimes one seems to make a mistake, but the video AOS captured last year is no longer possible. They are not in Open, and if they are, they just board flip and disappear again. After the (short temporary) bans from last year, they don't show in Open, generally. The bot operator learned from that.

Or learn a bit of networking, put on a while hat, and attack their packets. But stooping to their level? Can't support ya there.

That would be network hacking, and is illegal in most jurisdictions. That's far worse than violating a EULA and could lead to jail time. 100 years, even, if you're in the US and prosecuted under the CFAA. So rather extremely poor advice.
 
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Just caught up on the thread. Really just one question right now. How long do we wait for Frontier to do something about this?

we're in continuous touch with Frontier support on this. They don't talk about what actions they take, though, so it is largely a one way street in those tickets. They're looking into the reports. But since the botting continues, if there has been any action, it didn't stop the bots.
 
Look here.

Factions can be, and have been, retreated from systems they have expanded into. While they can't be removed from their home system, they can be removed from everywhere else.

What's the point of doing anything?

At the end of the day, the only point to any of it is to have enjoyed wasting some time. If you've manged that, you've done alright. If you haven't, you've done it all wrong.
 
I agree. In any case, if BGS play becomes about who runs the best and most bots, this game has turned into EvE.

There've been more than a few hundred pages of posts pretty much begging for this anyways. The phrase "be careful what you wish for" comes to mind.

You think these bots are in Open? That's funny. Sometimes one seems to make a mistake, but the video AOS captured last year is no longer possible. They are not in Open, and if they are, they just board flip and disappear again. After the (short temporary) bans from last year, they don't show in Open, generally. The bot operator learned from that.

I don't think about them at all. They don't affect what I do or how I play. I don't think they belong, as they are a blatant violation of the EULA.

That would be network hacking, and is illegal in most jurisdictions. That's far worse than violating a EULA and could lead to jail time. 100 years, even, if you're in the US and prosecuted under the CFAA. So rather extremely poor advice.

Only if you get caught, only if it can be proven. And it's called satire - illustrating one bad idea with a worse one. Though who would file the complaint? It's kind of like the guy calling the police because someone was stealing his marijuana...
 
I don't think that when CMDRs say "this game is turning into EvE" or "make it more like EvE" they mean it turning into a 3rd person, bot and resource management game, with no direct piloting. Nobody wishes for that.
 
I don't think that when CMDRs say "this game is turning into EvE" or "make it more like EvE" they mean it turning into a 3rd person, bot and resource management game, with no direct piloting. Nobody wishes for that.

I agree with you but why do we have bots in these 2 games for instance (i know it exists in others) ? Maybe gameplay mechanics are dumb and repetitive. That is why we have automation in car industry for example.

FD needs to go open only and change bgs gameplay mechanics. I am not sure the ones incoming will help you.
 
Easy way to find out, try get bots work for your BGS, if its possible then maybe it was used against you. If you can get successful bots then report hole thing to frontier. If you can't get bots, then probably they can't either.

And then what?

> Hey, FDev. Look what I did. I made a bot, it's very easy and highly effective at manipulating the BGS and PowerPlay ... wait, why have I been banned from the game and the forums now?

That is what I would expect as the result, because by admitting to doing it, you've admitted to cheating.

This is one of the problems with the way FDev is handling part of these issues. Unless we cheat by creating bots ourselves, we can only make inferences based off of very limited data collection.

* Traffic reports - not available in the journal, needs to be either manually transcribed or OCR'ed.
* Mission activity - noting identifiable outside of a single BGS update once a day; at best you can say "our group handed in 100 +++ influence missions, and we gained/lost x% influence".
* PowerPlay merit activity - not available in the journal, needs to be either manually transcribed or OCR'ed, not always properly updated on the client side.

That's all the data we have to work with.

Now, we can obviously connect the dots between some of them. For example, if we can see 2,800 merits going into a single system every hour for 60 hours straight, and we can see 4 cutters going into the same system every hour for 60 hours straight, then there's a pretty good chance that each cutter is bringing 700 merits every time. What we can't tell, however, is if this is 240 different accounts each bringing in 700 merits, a single account bringing in 168,000 merits or something in between.

Pointing at a system like that and asking FDev if this is human activity or not is fairly pointless, because the counter question from FDev will simply be "do you have anything to suggest it should be bots?" And we don't, because we do not have access to any of the data that would be required to tell. It's fairly obvious it's a bot, if it's a single account doing it for 60 hours straight like clockwork, but again - that's not something we can see.

Getting real time data with semi-anonymised data would obviously be extremely helpful, but for what I think are obvious reasons, that's not something that is available to us. It's available to FDev, but it doesn't seem to be used for anything like bot-hunting. I say "seem", because FDev refuses to comment on anything like this. Even when we gave them account names, the only comment we ever received was "*we'll look into it*". We then saw a drastic dip in merit and BGS activity for a bit, and then it was right back to previous levels - almost as if the accounts we suspected of being bots were subjected to a temporary shadow ban.

Anyone who thinks the onus is on the players to prove bot activity needs to give some serious thoughts as to just how that can be done. If they come up with a solution that won't get you banned, then I'm all ears.

At best we can say "*this looks suspicious*", but all investigation needs to take place on Frontier's side of things, because they are the ones with all the data. As long as we don't have access to that data, you might as well say that it's the people with savings accounts with banks that are responsible for investigating if the bank is laundering money.
 
I get that - people do get attached to things, be they little birds found in yards or NPC groups they named. I still don’t get the motivation to “adopt” any given faction, especially one that you didn’t name, though I suppose this is more a play-style matter than anything else, so I can at least relate to that. It’s a Purple/Green thing, and that’s fine. I’m a Silver myself, so Purple and Green can carry on as they see fit.

Still not sure about communal devestation though - sounds like a gross hyperbole. I’m part of said same community, just with a very different agenda.

Labels though... never going away. Human nature demands them, and I do too. But I do appricate your time and explanation. It helps.

Because people have put work into it. They haven't simply gone out to make as many credits as possible, they've done it with a specific goal in mind. What these possible bots are doing is targeting specific groups for whatever reason. The reason is irrelevant - what's relevant is that it seems to be cheating due to the overwhelming amount of clockwork precision to the activities.

Imagine for a moment that every time you undocked, you were presented with a rebuy screen with no indication of who killed you. Every single time. You'd obviously report this to FDev as a bug. Now FDev comes back with a reply a bit later that says they can't see any bugs - you must have been killed by something. Then you start talking to other people, and some of them experience similar issues. Every single time they try to undock, their ship gets blown up and the rebuy screen doesn't tell them anything about who did it - just that they died.

They've also reported this to FDev as bugs, and FDev just says "well, all we can see is that you were killed by something, and that's not a bug".

So you and your newfound group of victims start to get angry, because something is obviously wrong here. Someone chimes in and says "well, I notice that all of our names start with IND - let me make a new account called IND_00001", and reports back with the exact same issue. This is reported to FDev and the response is rather predictable. "It's not a bug - you're all being shot at and killed by ships." You test in solo, and same result and same reply - "you're just being killed by ships. That's not a bug, and the fact that you only see it happen to accounts called "IND*" is incidental. Give us evidence that it happens to ALL accounts with such names and no accounts with different names, then we'll start looking into it as a potential bug."

Now, you and your group of victims would obviously consider this to be devastating to the community, but imagine how angry you'd be if someone was constantly chiming in with "well, my name doesn't start with IND, and I don't see how this is a problem at all. Clearly you should just reset your account and give it a different name." That last guy? That's you in these threads.
 
Because people have put work into it. They haven't simply gone out to make as many credits as possible, they've done it with a specific goal in mind. What these possible bots are doing is targeting specific groups for whatever reason. The reason is irrelevant - what's relevant is that it seems to be cheating due to the overwhelming amount of clockwork precision to the activities.

Imagine for a moment that every time you undocked, you were presented with a rebuy screen with no indication of who killed you. Every single time. You'd obviously report this to FDev as a bug. Now FDev comes back with a reply a bit later that says they can't see any bugs - you must have been killed by something. Then you start talking to other people, and some of them experience similar issues. Every single time they try to undock, their ship gets blown up and the rebuy screen doesn't tell them anything about who did it - just that they died.

They've also reported this to FDev as bugs, and FDev just says "well, all we can see is that you were killed by something, and that's not a bug".

So you and your newfound group of victims start to get angry, because something is obviously wrong here. Someone chimes in and says "well, I notice that all of our names start with IND - let me make a new account called IND_00001", and reports back with the exact same issue. This is reported to FDev and the response is rather predictable. "It's not a bug - you're all being shot at and killed by ships." You test in solo, and same result and same reply - "you're just being killed by ships. That's not a bug, and the fact that you only see it happen to accounts called "IND*" is incidental. Give us evidence that it happens to ALL accounts with such names and no accounts with different names, then we'll start looking into it as a potential bug."

Now, you and your group of victims would obviously consider this to be devastating to the community, but imagine how angry you'd be if someone was constantly chiming in with "well, my name doesn't start with IND, and I don't see how this is a problem at all. Clearly you should just reset your account and give it a different name." That last guy? That's you in these threads.

Except is this what is happening? I rather doubt it, and your logs will show who or what killed you, so your ridiculous hyperbole is ridiculous. Nor have I made such an absurd recommendation. I did say I didn't grasp the fascination of faction and system manipulation, because it has no direct bearing on actual game play. Someone explained it in a manner that made some sembalance of sense to me. I still don't particularly care for this extremely narrow avenue of play. I have no particular reason to have any loyalty to one faction or another. I never named any, I don't have a fixation for any particular system, so for me, this isn't and never will be a problem.

I also did say that I do not condone this botting business, if it is botting, as this is a violation of the EULA. What more do you want from me? Go play with your factions, I'll go wander aimlessly, and we'll both enjoy ourselves. Well, I'll probably enjoy myself a bit more, unfettered by the worry about imaginary lines on an imaginary map, but you get my point.

Or you don't - that's not my concern.
 
Yeah I can't get that to play on my rig for some reason.
I'll have to wait for the iTunes release.

I'm keen to hear which bits make it into the discussion, and which bits they leave out.

It's actually interesting. The discussion on bots starts about an hour and a half in.

The real question is: Why are these botters so obsessed? This costs real money and time. This goes far beyond the usual gamer megalomania.

Fortunately for me, I have other things to do that are more fun. Like naps. :)
 
It's actually interesting. The discussion on bots starts about an hour and a half in.

The real question is: Why are these botters so obsessed? This costs real money and time. This goes far beyond the usual gamer megalomania.

Fortunately for me, I have other things to do that are more fun. Like naps. :)

The botters seem to be trying to break the game. That would force (or allow) the devs to mod-out the exploits, or kill powerplay altogether.
 

Goose4291

Banned
It's actually interesting. The discussion on bots starts about an hour and a half in.

The real question is: Why are these botters so obsessed? This costs real money and time. This goes far beyond the usual gamer megalomania.

Here's your reason:

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