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.
