Bot attack in eranin?

[Ralph Vargr]

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.

The discussion on Lave Radio mentioned the number of persons quitting *the game*, due to frustration with botting.

Most Power Play/BGS players have had this as a concern since the documented tracking of bots was made public.

But, what if trading was botted? That would affect a large group of players. It can already be done, as shown by the Power Play bots.

Another possibility, shown by by video on the livestream, is recognition of objects in space, which is needed for travelling.

Botted exploration is therefore possible. Mining would be *lots* trickier, but possible.

Combat is pretty much out, as the bots would log. Imagine the *immediate* wails of agony....

As discussed in the video, a business case would have to be made for someone at Frontier to *manually* hunt down the botters.

How long have certain bugs remained in this game?

So, as long as botting only affects subsets of the playerbase, Frontier won't go very far.

The discovery of botted *exploring*.... doesn't the new system have a *lot* more pattern recognition steps? Botting depends on screen recognition.

Hey! Maybe that's why we got the new exploration system!

The suggestions for BGS and Power Play being in open only, was designed to make botters come out, and have the commander accounts identified. If other gameplay is affected, and player loss simply *cannot* be hidden....

 

[Maolagin]

Ok, this has been a *fascinating* thread to read. Sent me down a few rabbit holes. Some takeaways -

• The posted stats/videos from AOS look like pretty credible evidence that *somebody* has cracked the problem of running automated flights.
• From a technical standpoint, it is absolutely possible to create CV-based autopilot scripts, at least for a subset of scenarios that occur in the game. There are even tutorial blog posts that do exactly this for Elite itself. Unlike the client-based hacks that game devs have been hunting down for years, these are totally undetectable with traditional DRM-type techniques, since they rely only on normal video output and KB/M input. Frankly any competent CS undergrad could probably throw one together given the sophistication of the available free tools now, so it seems safe to assume that several have done so.
• Obviously I have no idea whether Frontier is actively trying to detect this, but from what I've heard in other contexts, most of the large game devs have data analytics teams working to police this sort of thing, with varying degrees of success. It's fundamentally a hard problem though, even with full access to internal data, because it just isn't that hard to make a bot script look superficially like a really dedicated player. That said, I don't see any job postings at Frontier that look like data analytics specialists, so they may only be doing this part-time using QA/support staff, in which case I wouldn't expect great results.
• The best defense against this sort of thing probably *isn't* to swat down scripters with the ban hammer, since that's a game of blindfolded whack-a-mole. Rather, making the game harder to automate is likely to be more effective, and if done well has the potential to make repetitive gameplay loops more engaging. I wonder if some of the Q4 updates are aimed at that. For instance, those space storms look like they'd be pretty hard to navigate with CV tools. To be effective you'd really need such things to persist across relogs though, since it sounds like the current strategy is that the scripted ships log out if anything unexpected happens. But broadly, it seems like the reason people play Elite instead of EvE/X4/etc is because they really like flying. I imagine most of the player base would welcome deeper flight simulator gameplay so long as it didn't detract from the rest.

Note: CV="computer vision" a term that encompasses many things from simple filtering/pattern matching to advanced machine learning/neural net trained recognition systems

 

[Deareim]

Bot is a part of the problem in PP. ALliance is complaining as bot are wonderful haulers and that is how Mahon fort/expand.
But those who have weaponized expansion, you need to fight against H2Feeties. It is as much damaging than bot in PP. And FD has done nothing to address it.

 

[DNA-Decay]

Minimal interest to most, but this week they were in Eranin again and then moved to Jongaski.
The drop off slope in Jongaski seems to indicate that part of the fleet has been redeployed while part remains in Jongaski.
By now Cutter traffic in the next target system should be reading about 25.
PM me, if you've got suspicious activity and I'll move my monitor there.
Suspicious is about 25 and rising by 2 or 3 an hour.
Try not to wait until it's mid eighties before you let me know.
Thanks.

Graph shows Cutter numbers against time, one colour per system. You're looking at about three weeks of data.

 

[DNA-Decay]

The Fuel Rats lost control of their system today. (Fuelum)
I was down that way today, tuning my Frag cannons with Zac Nemo, but the system had already flipped. I hung out for a while because it’s nice to fight alongside folks, and there were still heaps of CMDRs helping the good fight even though the war was already lost.

I’ve been reading a few reactions on Facebook that are suggesting that The Fuel Rats Mischief we’re under bot attack.

Very hard to tell after the fact, unfortunately.

No one said there was anything suspicious going on in Fuelum, so those of us monitoring bot activity didn’t have anything in place.
I had a look at the influence graph history on INARA, and it does have that linear fall that Trinity talks about in Lave Radio episode 216: [URL-link here later]

[link to influence pic here]https://imgur.com/gallery/lZXjVDr

[link to live influence data on INARA here] https://inara.cz/galaxy-minorfaction/32603/

Anyways - Like I say, without the traffic reports we’ll never know about Fuelum.

So - again I say to you all:
“If you see something - say something”

Suspicious Traffic is Cutter numbers above 15 and rising at between 2 to 4 per hour. Falling traffic is useful too.
I check in here a lot, so just PM me and I’ll pass it onto the crews that are watching this sort of thing.
And if you are monitoring traffic in Fuelum, can you please get in touch as I’m keen to add your data.

Bit hard to tell at the moment with every man and their dog lending a hand after the Call to Arms went out: