ED - A Script Kiddie's Wet Dream

[[VR] Mad Mike]

no one come in defending it with "but but but blaze your own trail yada yada yada??"

For the record I hate cheaters in online games they are pond scum and the fact that they post brazenly about it in public forums sadden me

 

[MarkAusten]

What our fellow forumites who are not idiots did not know is that JTrinity tried to post the evidence, and her post was tagged as "moderated." It is apparently now lost in the echo chambers that are the trolls and moderators of this forum. Fortunately, texasp8 posted a link as well, along with a few others.

Never have I encountered such a jaundiced and prejudicial moderation team. Not ever. Not even the Star Trek Online people are this monumentally biased in favour of some forumites and against others.

You can report the mods in the same way that you can report the posters. Griping about it on the forum is contrary to the forum rules, although I could be wrong about that. So if you have a problem go via the official channels. I, for one, don't really want to hear your opinions on the subject which are, let's face it, just a tad biased, not to say off topic.

 

[biot]

no one come in defending it with "but but but blaze your own trail yada yada yada??"

That's why it's called Elite DANGEROUS

Oh man I used the wrong trope again

 

[sollisb]

no one come in defending it with "but but but blaze your own trail yada yada yada??"

For the record I hate cheaters in online games they are pond scum and the fact that they post brazenly about it in public forums sadden me

There's a whole different ball game in the 'blaze your trail' ala Mr Braben, and blazing your own trail to damage the game and community, with a bot..

 

[MarkAusten]

I'm a programmer and would seriously tip my hat to anyone who could make a bot that could fly a ship from one station to another let alone a planet. I don't think it's been done myself. If Frontier finds that it has been done by someone, they shouldn't ban them, they should hire them!

There's an automated script that does virtually that in existence. As far as I could see, however, it was very slow and not entirely reliable.

 

[IamNickMan]

When are you going to get around to dealing with the bots, FDev?

There are issues, and then there are ISSUES. Bots used in Power Play and BGS are a CRITICAL ISSUE.
If it is permitted to continue (let alone grow) the game will rapidly cease being about or for players at all. Players will become irrelevant. No player can move as much cargo/trade/merits as a bot. All the game will end up being is a contest between script-kiddies. Is that really the future Braben envisioned?

Stop putting it off. Even if it costs you some sales of extra accounts, it is critical the game remain centered around the players.

Can confirm. Bots are hitting powerplay and BGS. It is a huge concern in a game where grinding is the game. Competing against bots with voting power & prep power are destroying powerplay. Botting will kill off BGS for pmfs soon as well once they get the strategy behind it down. As for people who don't believe they exist. I've personally seen video, tracking, and their movements. I will not however out the person who has done this work unless they out themselves and provide the proof since FDev has worked with them.

 

[Brett C]

Can confirm. Bots are hitting powerplay and BGS. It is a huge concern in a game where grinding is the game. Competing against bots with voting power & prep power are destroying powerplay. Botting will kill off BGS for pmfs soon as well once they get the strategy behind it down. As for people who don't believe they exist. I've personally seen video, tracking, and their movements. I will not however out the person who has done this work unless they out themselves and provide the proof since FDev has worked with them.

As for the botting, please report the accounts, via the in-game report tool and please do file a Customer Support ticket regarding it. CS will act on it, and will take needed actions.

 

[Patau82]

Can confirm. Bots are hitting powerplay and BGS. It is a huge concern in a game where grinding is the game. Competing against bots with voting power & prep power are destroying powerplay. Botting will kill off BGS for pmfs soon as well once they get the strategy behind it down. As for people who don't believe they exist. I've personally seen video, tracking, and their movements. I will not however out the person who has done this work unless they out themselves and provide the proof since FDev has worked with them.

How do bgs bots work? What do they do jump and honk, bounty hunt, complete missions, trade, ect?

 

[texasp8]

Take off, navigate through mail slot, orientate to make jump, jump, avoid star and jump some more, avoid star and orientate to the target station, drop into station, docking computer. This allows them to trade and run some types of mission. It's not possible to tell if anything in station services is automated. Since they didn't appear to run 24hrs a day, one might think not. I suppose honking would also be possible, but again no way to tell.

 

[Zarek Null]

Just this week I encountered a commander using automation to toggle his thruster color back and forth between red and blue to generate a police lights effect. The problem was that it caused huge lag, making everything in the instance move in slow motion, essentially denial-of-service attacking my computer. And he was doing it *during* PvP initiated by him. I told this guy what was happening (i.e. that his macro was causing lag) and warned him that he could potentially be banned, but he just replied saying that I must have a slow computer (which I don't).

 

[sollisb]

Take off, navigate through mail slot, orientate to make jump, jump, avoid star and jump some more, avoid star and orientate to the target station, drop into station, docking computer. This allows them to trade and run some types of mission. It's not possible to tell if anything in station services is automated. Since they didn't appear to run 24hrs a day, one might think not. I suppose honking would also be possible, but again no way to tell.

Pretty sure, Voice Attack already offers auto-honk

 

[Martin Schou]

As for the botting, please report the accounts, via the in-game report tool and please do file a Customer Support ticket regarding it. CS will act on it, and will take needed actions.

But that's part of the problem - for some of the accounts that we suspect, they never show up in open, which means we can't report them via the in-game report tool (unless I've misunderstood something, you can only report accounts you've encountered).

For PowerPlay in particular, it should be relatively easy for FDev to check accounts - ask around, and the PowerPlay community will be more than happy to point you to the systems to keep an eye on. Soholia is a good example for Mahon. Not every account delivering merits to Soholia for Mahon is a bot, but the amount of merits that are delivered every single week, and when the drop-offs happen, happens to coincide with when we are able to observe them being in Soholia.

That should narrow down the accounts that are potential bots (again, not all of them are) from a few million to maybe a dozen (for Soholia). Then you start comparing their travel times from star to docking in other systems with that of the mean travel time to those stations, and if they're outliers (the ones I've seen are very slow movers), that just makes them even more likely to be bots.

But, and this is the important part, it is impossible for us to flag all of these accounts. We can only flag some of them. The heuristics for flagging them HAS to be done on your end, and with how dealing with and fighting against (suspected) bots takes a massive toll on a player base that is already feeling more ignored than Harry Potter living with the Dursleys, you need to give us feedback on it beyond "we've received your report". This holds true for pretty much everything PowerPlay related, but that's for a different discussion.

The feeling on our end (my player group) is that the bots are only hit when we've lodged enough reports that they can't really be ignored any more, then those accounts are hit with a temporary shadow ban, and immediately resume their behaviour when the ban is lifted, and then we start seeing even more suspected bot-activity. And we get no feedback beyond "we'll look into it", which (as I mentioned before) is absolutely useless - it's downright soul destroying to see highly motivated people pour dozens of hours into compiling evidence, videos, graphs and other data, only to have it seemingly ignored time and time again.

Even if it's not the intention, it ends up giving us the feeling that you (FDev) simply do not care. That leads to the question of why should we continue reporting those accounts? That then feeds into why should we continue to report bugs? And in the end, why should we continue to play the game? For a lot of veteran players I know (1,000+ hours), the only reason they continue playing is the community, because it's the only thing that is able to outweigh the negatives of these types of issues, but even that is starting to erode. There's only so much you're willing to put up with, even when you love the people in the community you're part of.

 

[CMDR Tom D]

Many people in the Alliance Office of Statistics have been devoted to researching and countering these bots for at least 6 months. the attacks have been ongoing since june/july last year.

These bots are a HUGE threat to anyone involved in Powerplay, BGS or anything revolving around background simulation, or mechanic that doesn't require player to player interaction.

FDev needs to work out a way to counter this ASAP or and huge problem will be on their hands in the long run. Fully automated behavior that requires little to no player input for extended periods of time have huge, utterly huge implications to the rest of the game.

Increasingly frequent sales for dirt cheap accounts have fueled this epidemic, and FDevs inability to root out blatant botting that doesn't require client manipulation has let it fester.

IF you think this isn't an issue you're fooling yourself.

 

[ilo]

But that's part of the problem -

Considering a shadow-ban is that you can continue doing whatever you do in solo then.. I'm not sure this will work.

Anyway, filling up cutters with PP papers again and again is actually very expensive, but I reckon the PP level 5 50M payback balances the accounts. Maybe, if this wasn't the case, people couldn't just self-sustain bots like this.

So.. NERF the PP level 5 pay!!

 

[Mengy]

Just this week I encountered a commander using automation to toggle his thruster color back and forth between red and blue to generate a police lights effect. The problem was that it caused huge lag, making everything in the instance move in slow motion, essentially denial-of-service attacking my computer. And he was doing it *during* PvP initiated by him. I told this guy what was happening (i.e. that his macro was causing lag) and warned him that he could potentially be banned, but he just replied saying that I must have a slow computer (which I don't).

That's not a bot though, that's a hack as you can't change thruster colors while in flight in the actual game. Bots mimmick human commands, hacks do things which are not normally possible.

 

[ilo]

That's not a bot though, that's a hack as you can't change thruster colors while in flight in the actual game. Bots mimmick human commands, hacks do things which are not normally possible.

Isn't there a binding for changing colours of the engines?

 

[ryan_m]

Considering a shadow-ban is that you can continue doing whatever you do in solo then.. I'm not sure this will work.

Anyway, filling up cutters with PP papers again and again is actually very expensive, but I reckon the PP level 5 50M payback balances the accounts. Maybe, if this wasn't the case, people couldn't just self-sustain bots like this.

So.. NERF the PP level 5 pay!!

Shadowban results in you being unable to interact with the BGS, too.

 

[CMDR Tom D]

As for the botting, please report the accounts, via the in-game report tool and please do file a Customer Support ticket regarding it. CS will act on it, and will take needed actions.

Brett, we can't report them anymore, the most we get now is them occasionally board hopping into open sat in a station and heading back to solo to do their rounds.

We really need a robust way to detect them in game without directly interacting with them.

 

[Mengy]

Isn't there a binding for changing colours of the engines?

Not that I'm aware of. I am pretty sure you can only change engine colors at the livery menu while docked at a station.

 

[texasp8]

Not that I'm aware of. I am pretty sure you can only change engine colors at the livery menu while docked at a station.