Does FDev care about botting?
- Thread starter Machnette
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Definitely not saying it happened here, but in principle, one could have created hordes of alt accounts during the Epic giveaway.
you dont fight the interdiction. you give up. Then boost away and continue on your travels. It's a 100% safe and dependable (scriptable) behavior. works 100% of the time.
Seems like a ridiculous amount of work just to mess with a BGS in a game... but who knows i guess
Absolutely. I'm pretty sure throwaway alts for cheaters are far bigger issue with that than people actually setting up bot army hordes.
You say that about a game where the players have been playing it for 5 years and it literally amounts to space trucker 3000 ...doing the same repetitive tasks over and over with absolutely no real impact on the game. Elite is a game played by people who are not afraid of spending a lot of time on activities others would find pointless or overly tedious.
edit: these are people who give themselves badges for managing to watch a loading screen 1000 times in a row to get to a system that is no different than any other empty system in the galaxy for absolutely no reason other than because it's there. Of course they'll spend the time to code up bots that use visual recognition to navigate for them.
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I guess that is true. The lengths some people go in perfectly legit things in this game sometimes boggles my mind.
Didn't say it was easy, just that I knew numerous way to get it done without modifying the clients.
. You have to know where to look, and how. Someone inside Frontier knows where the logs are, and how to read them.As far as an escalating arms race.. you can depend on a bot to be repetitive, it's in their nature. There will always be a pattern that differentiates them from a human. You can't block them all, but you can certainly give the creators diminishing returns and an uphill battle.
the current bots use the rendered screens to recognize things and act on them. You tie that in with the player journal and it's not a leap to create a bot that can do various remedial tasks. The problem is, most of the game is remedial tasks.
So while they may operate on some patterns, it would be trivial to add noise to those patterns. It would not be a great hardship. There's no need at all to touch the client or modify memory or such in any way. The bot would be indistinguishable from any player ...except by relying on certain actions in the game identifying it as non-human. Which is as we know from everywhere else we try to identify bots, an expensive never ending arms race that tends to involve annoying real players.
Fdev has set the bar very low to create a successful bot. Playing detective is just wasting their time and money. The right choice is just making the tasks bots need to do to be successful harder by making the current remedial tasks only viable to players who need to fund sidewinders and eagles. ...and making those actions have little to no effect on the bgs. Then make everything that is worth more or impacts more, placed behind a test of skill in whatever role being utilized. Those tests of skill can be created in a way that is just too hard to code a bot to be successful at handling ...while at the same time we all benefit from a game that is no longer devoid of interesting gameplay.
So while they may operate on some patterns, it would be trivial to add noise to those patterns. It would not be a great hardship. There's no need at all to touch the client or modify memory or such in any way. The bot would be indistinguishable from any player ...except by relying on certain actions in the game identifying it as non-human. Which is as we know from everywhere else we try to identify bots, an expensive never ending arms race that tends to involve annoying real players.
Fdev has set the bar very low to create a successful bot. Playing detective is just wasting their time and money. The right choice is just making the tasks bots need to do to be successful harder by making the current remedial tasks only viable to players who need to fund sidewinders and eagles. ...and making those actions have little to no effect on the bgs. Then make everything that is worth more or impacts more, placed behind a test of skill in whatever role being utilized. Those tests of skill can be created in a way that is just too hard to code a bot to be successful at handling ...while at the same time we all benefit from a game that is no longer devoid of interesting gameplay.
Ok. I found that doesn't work great for me as a player because I then keep getting interdicted over and over. However, if I beat the interdiction it tends to stop the cycle.
Feels like flight and docking assist is a big key to the botting in my opinion.
So all FD have to do to stop botting then is remove autodock and supercruise assist from the game!
Of course, that will never actually happen as they know there will be too many salty forum posts made about it ...
So all FD have to do to stop botting then is remove autodock and supercruise assist from the game!
Of course, that will never actually happen as they know there will be too many salty forum posts made about it ...
It can be half as salty if devs only allow supercruise and docking assist for console players only
Although, that would make it double salt from the PC players, as the console players would now have something they don'tIt can be half as salty if devs only allow supercruise and docking assist for console players only
You're right, they won't. We were just having a joke about it...
Out of curiously, what happens to the BGS state if you just sit in a station without undocking and take missions and let them time out?
Generally, the opposite effect of the mission itself, so say you took a Source mission, this (normally[1]) will result in +rep, +inf, +econ... so if you let it time out (i.e fail), it will result in -rep, -inf, -econ.
Note, this is different to abandoning a mission before the timer expires. You just get -rep for that. As far as methods for undermining a faction goes, it's pretty ineffective[2].
[1] If it was a mission to source Weapons, you'd see an extra +sec as well,, so presumably you'd get -sec if that failed too.
[2] There's certain missions which can be more actively failed, but that's still a pretty ineffective method. It would be preferable for all missions to have an alternate way to resolve the mission as "failure" for the mission giver. For example, selling all the goods for a delivery mission to the black market... note you can't actually fail a mission for this; you can only fail a delivery mission by letting it time out.
Fleet Carriers probably will make bot a huge issue.
Major RMT Russian/chinese traders of runescape and Guild Wars(I and II) that are know for botting are now on the market offering ED credits for really cheap prices and delivering with their fleet carriers - A While ago, and since they dont get any negative feedback we can assume that fdev are doing nothing to stop it.
The combat profit buff is another major thing to incentive botting, now you can sit on a Haz Res wiith a friend for a infinite amount of time and farm credits with a idle-bot turret boat, just need to load 2 tons of gold on your cargo hold and have one small healing beam.
Major RMT Russian/chinese traders of runescape and Guild Wars(I and II) that are know for botting are now on the market offering ED credits for really cheap prices and delivering with their fleet carriers - A While ago, and since they dont get any negative feedback we can assume that fdev are doing nothing to stop it.
The combat profit buff is another major thing to incentive botting, now you can sit on a Haz Res wiith a friend for a infinite amount of time and farm credits with a idle-bot turret boat, just need to load 2 tons of gold on your cargo hold and have one small healing beam.
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