Thanks. was a bit impatient with replying.
Found it.
Edit:
Damn thats some evidence.
Thanks for the info.
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ED - A Script Kiddie's Wet Dream
- Thread starter raeat
- Start date
Thanks. was a bit impatient with replying.
Found it.
Edit:
Damn thats some evidence.
Thanks for the info.
I never understood these kinds of people, but yeah, it was bound to happen with Elite as well.
There are a lot of 'general' software out there now a days that can be set up with a script to control a bot, and then there's those that specialise it further.
But believe what?
I think most of discussions have been around - "is this intentional" - and in all cases it was 'no, it is not'. Also game having script kiddies or bots - yeah, but majority of them have either moved on or have made their lives difficult. As always, there are levels of grey in this discussion.
To be fair, OP claims seem to coming out of nowhere and sounds more like thread bait and less actual issue (comparing to well more talked about issues).
Well, honestly, most of the people will not doubt this programs can exist, I think the NO reaction was to 'it is ruining ED'. It hits the BGS or powerplay? oh sure.. is it bad?? yes!, now, 'the game will rapidly cease being about or for players at all', or 'Players will become irrelevant'.. 'All the game will end up being is a contest between script-kiddies'.. 'it is critical the game remain centered around the players.'. I'm sorry, but thinking there are still more players than bots, and that bots don't ruin the entire game (despite it CAN have a huge impact in the BGS or PP) does not mean we can't beleive these things exist.
There are a couple of misconception and concept semantics going on in this thread, so I'll try to clarify some of them.
* "There's no evidence/real evidence"
Of course not. At best we players can provide circumstantial evidence that suggests that someone is behaving in a very scripted manner, and that evidence is not something we're allowed to post on the forums or even on the main reddit, because that would be considered naming and shaming. At worst we're stuck with noting rather striking patterns. E.g. CMDR X is reported as a suspected bot. On date Y, there's reduced BGS and PowerPlay activity in CMDR X's normal neighbourhood. On date Y + 30 days, BGS and PowerPlay activity in CMDR X's normal neighbourhood increases again, going back to the exact same levels as before that 30 day hiatus. When you've reported 5 CMDRs as suspected bots, and you see this happen with 5x activity changes starting and ending on the exact same days, that leaves us with two options: Either those 5 CMDRs just happen to take a 30 day break at the exact same time OR your suspicions were correct, and the accounts in question were subjected to a 30 day shadow-ban - which they didn't really care about.
As players we are incapable of gathering actual, tangible evidence - at best we can provide information that suggests that something untoward is happening. We can't even provide video evidence to the public without doing significant editing to hide the CMDR names. If we show the names, the thread gets closed and we get banned from the subreddit/forum for a bit, and if we don't show the names, people will claim that we've manipulated the footage (which we'd have to) and that the videos are staged rather than showing the suspected bot accounts. Anyone here expecting to be shown a smoking gun, need to do a reality check and climb down from their pedestal.
* "This hasn't worked since the 32-bit client was killed, because memory injection is hard on 64-bit".
Nothing talked about here requires any kind of memory injection. Everything is done by emulating input devices (be it keyboard, mouse or joystick) and via screen grabbing (modern computers are exceedingly good at this kind of thing). It is quite literally impossible to do anything to stop these methods without screwing over a whole host of players who aren't doing anything wrong.
* "FDev gets everything through SSL".
No, they do not. Since the game is peer to peer, each client only sends relevant data to FDev. If you're in solo (or own the instance you're in), you only send data to FDev when changing instances or making transactions. That means that in the time from you arrive at a system until you move to the next instance (be it a station or a new system), no data needs to be sent. There's no logging of the input given, the route travelled to get from A to B etc. The upside is reduced network requirements, the downside is no ability to spot obvious bot behaviour. At best you can do heuristics to flag suspicious behaviour. I.e. if it always takes CMDR X 5 minutes between arriving at system Y and dropping into station Z, while the mean time for other CMDRs is 2 minutes, CMDR X is behaving in a very weird way (setting throttle to 50% immediately, rather than maxing out the throttle and lowering it once you get close to the station as most players would do). It also makes it impossible to actively monitor what a player is doing by spawning in as an NPC to track their behaviour.
* Pick-up scripts for PowerPlay.
These have been used for ages, and allows players to pick up their free 30-minute allotment while not at the computer. These scripts can be simple or complicated, but they aren't bots in the sense that we're talking about here.
What are the bots doing?
They run simple profit making routes between targeted systems. For example: Work out a trade route between Power HQ, preparation target (in order to screw over the Power in question) and a few target BGS systems in the area (bonus points for targeting a specific PMF that you and your friends dislike).
* Dock at Power Control System, pick up an allotment, buy commodities for next trade target system.
* Use the trade to affect the BGS - either by negative trading (which reduces the station owner's influence) or by positive trading if there's a suitable target for it.
* Once you're in the preparation system, drop off your PowerPlay goods as well. (For inbound preparations, you pick up PP goods in the prep system and deliver them to a Control System)
This is tedious and boring work, which any BGS manipulator knows and engages in - the difference is that regular players aren't doing it for as many consecutive hours as the bots can. The bots are able to deliver 16,000 merits every cycle (and a bit more depending on the server downtime) without paying a single credit for it, and get 50 million back in return, which can then be used to upgrade the ships being used and to massively offset any deficits from negative trading.
This is not particularly sophisticated from a BGS or PP perspective, but it is borderline impossible to counter by regular players. One person with a grudge and a wallet can relatively easily dump 60,000 merits per cycle AND have significant impact on the BGS, all without really doing anything themselves. And that is the issue.
Obviously, the bots don't need to work PowerPlay and BGS at the same time - they can do one thing or the other just fine on their own, and it's impossible for us as regular players to know what is actually going on - we simply do not have access to the data required to do any kind of realistic checking to see just how widespread it is.
Personally, I don't mind the pick-up scripts for PowerPlay. PowerPlay's mechanic for gatekeeping the merits is stupid, and this is just working around it. It's easy to fix the need for it as well - give each pledge X free merits per cycle, and don't allow them to get more than 16,800 (which is the maximum you get at rating 5) through fast tracking.
That, however, only fixes the issue for PowerPlay. Fixing it for the BGS is far trickier, and it pretty much (as far as I can tell) requires rethinking either how the BGS is affected (setting fairly low maximum impact per player and per system per day), or some kind of massive heuristic bot hunt.
* "This is coming out of nowhere!"
Yes - it's bound to. The botters aren't exactly going to run around bragging about it, and in this particular case, our player group has know about this for well over six months. We've filed numerous reports with FDev, and the only results we get are inferred because FDev does not want to tell us what the outcome of reporting a player has been. We have inferred that several of the suspected CMDR bots have been subjected to shadow bans, because the suspected bot influence dropped. We've been keeping a lid on things and avoided going public with it, because we didn't want to give nefarious people ideas and causing grief elsewhere in the galaxy. However, if you ask around in the right circles (especially PowerPlay leaderships) there are strong suspicions about botting with most of the PowerPlay preparation sabotage being suspected bot activity.
* "There's no evidence/real evidence"
Of course not. At best we players can provide circumstantial evidence that suggests that someone is behaving in a very scripted manner, and that evidence is not something we're allowed to post on the forums or even on the main reddit, because that would be considered naming and shaming. At worst we're stuck with noting rather striking patterns. E.g. CMDR X is reported as a suspected bot. On date Y, there's reduced BGS and PowerPlay activity in CMDR X's normal neighbourhood. On date Y + 30 days, BGS and PowerPlay activity in CMDR X's normal neighbourhood increases again, going back to the exact same levels as before that 30 day hiatus. When you've reported 5 CMDRs as suspected bots, and you see this happen with 5x activity changes starting and ending on the exact same days, that leaves us with two options: Either those 5 CMDRs just happen to take a 30 day break at the exact same time OR your suspicions were correct, and the accounts in question were subjected to a 30 day shadow-ban - which they didn't really care about.
As players we are incapable of gathering actual, tangible evidence - at best we can provide information that suggests that something untoward is happening. We can't even provide video evidence to the public without doing significant editing to hide the CMDR names. If we show the names, the thread gets closed and we get banned from the subreddit/forum for a bit, and if we don't show the names, people will claim that we've manipulated the footage (which we'd have to) and that the videos are staged rather than showing the suspected bot accounts. Anyone here expecting to be shown a smoking gun, need to do a reality check and climb down from their pedestal.
* "This hasn't worked since the 32-bit client was killed, because memory injection is hard on 64-bit".
Nothing talked about here requires any kind of memory injection. Everything is done by emulating input devices (be it keyboard, mouse or joystick) and via screen grabbing (modern computers are exceedingly good at this kind of thing). It is quite literally impossible to do anything to stop these methods without screwing over a whole host of players who aren't doing anything wrong.
* "FDev gets everything through SSL".
No, they do not. Since the game is peer to peer, each client only sends relevant data to FDev. If you're in solo (or own the instance you're in), you only send data to FDev when changing instances or making transactions. That means that in the time from you arrive at a system until you move to the next instance (be it a station or a new system), no data needs to be sent. There's no logging of the input given, the route travelled to get from A to B etc. The upside is reduced network requirements, the downside is no ability to spot obvious bot behaviour. At best you can do heuristics to flag suspicious behaviour. I.e. if it always takes CMDR X 5 minutes between arriving at system Y and dropping into station Z, while the mean time for other CMDRs is 2 minutes, CMDR X is behaving in a very weird way (setting throttle to 50% immediately, rather than maxing out the throttle and lowering it once you get close to the station as most players would do). It also makes it impossible to actively monitor what a player is doing by spawning in as an NPC to track their behaviour.
* Pick-up scripts for PowerPlay.
These have been used for ages, and allows players to pick up their free 30-minute allotment while not at the computer. These scripts can be simple or complicated, but they aren't bots in the sense that we're talking about here.
What are the bots doing?
They run simple profit making routes between targeted systems. For example: Work out a trade route between Power HQ, preparation target (in order to screw over the Power in question) and a few target BGS systems in the area (bonus points for targeting a specific PMF that you and your friends dislike).
* Dock at Power Control System, pick up an allotment, buy commodities for next trade target system.
* Use the trade to affect the BGS - either by negative trading (which reduces the station owner's influence) or by positive trading if there's a suitable target for it.
* Once you're in the preparation system, drop off your PowerPlay goods as well. (For inbound preparations, you pick up PP goods in the prep system and deliver them to a Control System)
This is tedious and boring work, which any BGS manipulator knows and engages in - the difference is that regular players aren't doing it for as many consecutive hours as the bots can. The bots are able to deliver 16,000 merits every cycle (and a bit more depending on the server downtime) without paying a single credit for it, and get 50 million back in return, which can then be used to upgrade the ships being used and to massively offset any deficits from negative trading.
This is not particularly sophisticated from a BGS or PP perspective, but it is borderline impossible to counter by regular players. One person with a grudge and a wallet can relatively easily dump 60,000 merits per cycle AND have significant impact on the BGS, all without really doing anything themselves. And that is the issue.
Obviously, the bots don't need to work PowerPlay and BGS at the same time - they can do one thing or the other just fine on their own, and it's impossible for us as regular players to know what is actually going on - we simply do not have access to the data required to do any kind of realistic checking to see just how widespread it is.
Personally, I don't mind the pick-up scripts for PowerPlay. PowerPlay's mechanic for gatekeeping the merits is stupid, and this is just working around it. It's easy to fix the need for it as well - give each pledge X free merits per cycle, and don't allow them to get more than 16,800 (which is the maximum you get at rating 5) through fast tracking.
That, however, only fixes the issue for PowerPlay. Fixing it for the BGS is far trickier, and it pretty much (as far as I can tell) requires rethinking either how the BGS is affected (setting fairly low maximum impact per player and per system per day), or some kind of massive heuristic bot hunt.
* "This is coming out of nowhere!"
Yes - it's bound to. The botters aren't exactly going to run around bragging about it, and in this particular case, our player group has know about this for well over six months. We've filed numerous reports with FDev, and the only results we get are inferred because FDev does not want to tell us what the outcome of reporting a player has been. We have inferred that several of the suspected CMDR bots have been subjected to shadow bans, because the suspected bot influence dropped. We've been keeping a lid on things and avoided going public with it, because we didn't want to give nefarious people ideas and causing grief elsewhere in the galaxy. However, if you ask around in the right circles (especially PowerPlay leaderships) there are strong suspicions about botting with most of the PowerPlay preparation sabotage being suspected bot activity.
But believe what?
As always, there are levels of grey in this discussion.
Contrary to some people's belief
I do investigate and report on topics that aren't widely talked about or "mainstream". This is one such example. My opinion on the scale of the matter is still undecided. The main reason I posted here was to say that I know it is a reality (a number of posts on the first pages of this thread were clearly saying bots don't exist).As to its wider impact on the gaming community - I agree that is unknown how large of a problem it is. We will have to wait and see (it might be very small, or it might be larger). It does appear Frontier do take action though (and I'd be very surprised if they didn't). That doesn't mean it isn't an ongoing problem though - even if it's only a very small one and only for a small group of players. Then again it could be far more widespread than people realise. At this point no one really knows either way.
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There's AP pilots for jumping from system to system - not sure about to an actual station and docking but u only need to activate your DC when in range so easy to macro that.
And another reason I support reducing solo/private BGS influence by 95%. If you want to engage in gameplay that affects players everywhere, you should have to do it in open. Either that, or private/solo get their own bgs, but we all realize that isn't happening lol.Contrary to some people's belief
As to its wider impact on the gaming community - I agree that is unknown. We will have to wait and see (it might be very small, or it might be larger). It does appear Frontier do take action though (and I'd be very surprised if they didn't). That doesn't mean it isn't an ongoing problem though - even if it's only a very small one and only for a small group of players. Then again it could be far more widespread than people realise. At this point no one really knows either way.
raeat
Banned
Google is your friend.
Hello all,
I'd like to drop in to clear up a few of the issues being discussed in this thread, in the hope that we can alleviate some of the concerns presented.
We do regularly take action on accounts we detect using client manipulation methods; this is a core function of our support and moderation efforts on Elite Dangerous. Over time we have come across cases ranging from automation scripts to full client hacks, and we have various accurate methods we can use to detect and confirm this is taking place. The video example being shared in this thread is three months old, and the associated accounts have already been reviewed.
The absolute best way to bring these players to our attention is either through an in-game user report or, if you have corroborating video evidence, via support ticket. Please bear in mind that a user report will not receive any further reply from us (as it's an automated web form), but every single one is reviewed by a member of our team. Tickets will receive a response, but only an acknowledgement of the report. We do not directly provide the outcome of an investigation, which may be why some players feel no action is being taken, but while it could be fun to know that your report directly led to disciplinary action we have to respect account privacy guidelines.
We are also pro-active with our investigations, reviewing a massive collection of information to pick out behaviours. Obviously I’m being rather shallow on the details of our detection methods so as to not give tips on how to avoid them, but over the lifetime of Elite Dangerous this has developed into a very efficient and thorough process which we are constantly tweaking and refining.
That said, no anti cheating process is flawless and instant. Occasionally an account will slip through the net, which is why your feedback on suspicious behaviour is vital to combating this behaviour. Give us the details of what / where / who of an instance of player behaviour which doesn't add up, and we'll take it from there.
Cheers,
CMDR Sticks
I appreciate that you can't be very transparent with what is going on in these cases but would it perhaps be worth occasionally posting some statistics on number of reports versus numbers of actions taken?
Even if the figures were pretty rough it would help give a bit of visibility to what you are doing and help assuage fears that not much is happening in response to reports.
Interesting, Martin. Especially your opinion that actually the impact on PP is low. My impression - unless I see some influence data otherwise - is that also for the BGS the impact would be low.
1-click trading no longer works. Plus, trade is by consignment, meaning selling all at once or 1-ton-at-the-time has the same effect. In general, we don't trade anymore for the BGS exactly because it was nerfed into the ground already.
So, do you have any concrete results to look at that would suggest the impact on the BGS is substantial?
Pretty sure the original idea of the Bgs was to simulate the effect of all our actions, playing with the bgs was something players came up with
raeat
Banned
When the moderators ruthlessly gutted one of my earlier posts, one of the things they edited out was me offering kudos for those people in this thread who were able to view the evidence once it was available and actually change their minds. This represents a healthy resilience, and I applaud you. My apologies for not presenting that link to you myself but I wasn't certain the creator of the video would want that information given here. Fortunately there were others, including the creator of the video herself, who were willing to provide evidence that any rational person would at least consider.
This is an example of why these moderators should not have the ability to edit posts. They simply do not have the tools for that task.
I may be the bull in the China shop amongst posters here, but sometimes you have to break a little China to start a conversation, especially when the opposition is deeply entrenched.
This is an example of why these moderators should not have the ability to edit posts. They simply do not have the tools for that task.
I may be the bull in the China shop amongst posters here, but sometimes you have to break a little China to start a conversation, especially when the opposition is deeply entrenched.
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With the ability of players to influence the BGS in such a way as to deny player factions a fighting chance at a home system, the original intent is largely irrelevant I'm afraid. Frontier gives out systems for player factions to fight for, supporting the manipulation of the BGS. I just feel that if you can fight against some player faction who is trying to claim a system, you should be forced to do so in open play.
To clarify, I actually have zero stake in those BGS fights, but I have seen the results of many. Some were brutally crushed and the group spent nearly a year trying to progress. It would be frustrating to know people were fighting against you and have no recourse but to give in.
Power play merits and the like would be difficult but just system influence should be opeingn on in my humble opinion.
Unless I misspoke, the impact on PowerPlay is significant, because powers are forced to run counter preps to outprep the sabotage systems AND focus on ensuring that they have enough votes to consolidate.
As for the impact on the BGS, that's not my area of expertise - I'm merely conveying the information I've been given as best I understand it. That being said, there were several instances of AOS being targeted and hit, which coincided with the systems the suspected bot accounts were travelling between.