Look at the influence graphs for Fuelum on Inara.
No. It wasn't bots.
Artie has this data compression algorithm on the INARA data.
It shows this week’s data at high resolution, but historical data is averaged somehow.
So yeah you’re right - recent data is dynamic and volatile, but the data from the start of October has a suspicious linear fall off.
Now the linearity could easily be due to the data compression averaging a set of wiggly losses.
But JTrinity talks about linearity of influence loss / gain being demonstrated in systems where specific known bot accounts were working.
The real problem in Fuelum is that no-one is recording traffic data to match against influence data.
Frontier don’t keep logs either.
So ultimately if you let it go by without catching it, you can guess or talk till you’re blue in the face, but you’ve got no evidence. So it almost doesn’t matter if it “actually” was or wasn’t bots - you can’t know.
It certainly is within the capability of a group to push TFRM down, especially without opposition. It doesn’t need to be bots here.
But what you can do:
When you see suspicious activity - tell me.
15 Cutters in a low traffic system? Count rising at 3 or 4 an hour?
A hundred Cutters?
Just PM me.
Monitoring Cutter and Python traffic is almost the only thing I’m doing in-game these days.
But I have to agree with Phisto - this looks like folks not automata.