So, how are FD doing at the whole bot detection thing?
FDevs vision conflicts with Elites features: Another win for bots.
So, how are FD doing at the whole bot detection thing?
I've noticed members of the community stop making reports all together due to the fact that when we go to tremendous efforts, the bots remain in the game, and continued hitting us. Whether it was factions, or power play it still continued. So why bother? Frontier are still the folks with all the cards and the big picture. We can only give you guys the direction to look currently. Right now, its Grom's 5c prep being the most obvious anomaly. I'm pretty late to the party on noting that anywhere, but why bother reporting it? I am positive next week, that massive 5c that is as consistent as Mahon's war with the bots will still persist.
Most of that is complaining and a small history lesson from my perspective, and I know you're just community managers, not the devs on the project, or the middle management making the decisions of what to put company time and resources in. But my real, serious burning questions are these:
When will Frontier get aggressive with the bots, in a way the community can see? Cause right now, whatever action has been taken, is not having an impact. We can clearly see bots actively in the game.
If its not a company priority to clean up and manage the problem now, when will it become one? Because in the eyes of atleast myself, and veterans who feel burned out of this game because of the lack of a real, serious, tangible response is driving players away, and doing some real damage to the community.
What can the community do to help support and direct attention to suspected botting? We only have part of the data. in the past, we've graphed prep progress of 5th column activities, we've gone so far as to report the hourly, bi hourly prep numbers and seen data consistent with bots running 24/7, and have reported it. We have caught suspected bots in the past in open, and reported it. We've communicated heavily with community managers about the issue and members of this community have continued to do so in order to prod Frontier into taking serious action. There are folks here who have taken the issue very seriously, and tried to confront frontier with data, real metrics, and communicate that this isn't simple finger pointing, but true anomalies inconsistent with any community activity other than botting. 'Not professional players,' because we're the professional players talking to you, spending hours a day, every day, protecting and tending to our part of the game. Frontier has even acknowledged that you guys can see the anomalies on your end.
So once again, after years of this. What could we possibly give you that would convince frontier to take serious action, hard bands. not soft shadow banning or temps? There is a serious part of the community that has given up on frontier, and thinks because it doesn't effect the direction of the game, and frontiers pocket in the short term, that you guys really do not care, and that our concerns seem to clearly not be getting past the support staff and community managers at Frontier developments.
It was capable and they quickly fixed it. The bot creators just didn't care to implement it initially for whatever reason.
One way to address this, while at the same time not giving away intel to the bot owners is to say each quarter, how many bot accounts were suspended in the previous period. That would give an indication of the scale of the problem and how it has been dealt with while not leaking information about the detection tactics
And when you find bots, you're gonna ban them three days from open and that's it? Yeah good luck with that.
Meanwhile in CqC where we could actually use some Bots....
Also OP, regarding Bots attacking Order of Mobius BGS I'm pretty sure that was players. Pretty certain because I was one of them. They thought they were being attacked by Bots because they couldn't see us. What with us being in Open and all.
In general there definitely is a lack of interest from FD with fixing long standing issues like Bots, Combat logging and certain Piracy bugs. Not sure why this is but after so many years it's got to have something to do with game design and limitations of any solution. Like a couple of people have said it's obviously more desirable from a financial position to retain new players than satisfy older ones.
In short, we've already bought skins and fancy lazors. This is good business sense for game longevity but obvs frustrating as hell.
Stock corporate responses which go against the
evidence we see with our own eyes also feed the narrative that FD don't really care about the issue.
On a final note, could someone not organise some Bots to repair those stations? Save us all the trouble.
Also OP, regarding Bots attacking Order of Mobius BGS I'm pretty sure that was players. Pretty certain because I was one of them. They thought they were being attacked by Bots because they couldn't see us. What with us being in Open and all.
In general there definitely is a lack of interest from FD with fixing long standing issues like Bots, Combat logging and certain Piracy bugs. Not sure why this is but after so many years it's got to have something to do with game design and limitations of any solution. Like a couple of people have said it's obviously more desirable from a financial position to retain new players than satisfy older ones.
In short, we've already bought skins and fancy lazors. This is good business sense for game longevity but obvs frustrating as hell.
Stock corporate responses which go against the
evidence we see with our own eyes also feed the narrative that FD don't really care about the issue.
On a final note, could someone not organise some Bots to repair those stations? Save us all the trouble.
Otherwise known as the "how to waste time and get repeatedly interdicted" technique.
The problem with that is that it doesn't matter how "rewarding and fun" you make the gameplay, nor how efficient a human pilot can be, a bot can outperform a human every time.
For example, a great human pilot can perform a basic station to station trade in under 4 minutes in a Type-9. A bot that takes four times as long still has an overwhelming advantage over the human pilot, because the bot can perform the same activity 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A human pilot, on the other hand, has to eat, sleep, work, spend time with family, and attend to the needs of the body.
Even if the human pilot turned playing Elite into a full time job, the bot will still come out ahead.
Unless the gameplay becomes the equivalent of CAPTCHA, someone can make a bot to do the work. It's really up to Frontier to step up and actively do something about the cheating that goes on in this game, including bots.
Why not both?
Which is a load of horse manure!!
Anyone capable of coding/scripting up what is being claimed, already knew and used navigation scripting. So the 'couldn't navigate to 'solo' mode' just doesn't make any sense.
All this nonsense about making it easier, is just devoid of any analytical logic.
IF! These bots currently exist, then they can currently, undock, dock and navigate. Why would they remove working code to replace it with some unknown and possible buggy AI that frontier produced?
Bots everywhere, but only a handful of the millions of players we 'apparently' have playing the game, have ever actually seen one.
Exactly. When they are in Open, it's because they want to be in Open. To what end, I could not say.
I agree, they probably won't. But if you'd regularly recorded the finger prints that the actions of the bots leave, like players I know do, you'll see a period of bot-downtime sometimes after a game update is released. It was assumed this period reflected the length of time it took for the authors of the software to update to handle new menu layouts etc. It is likely that adopting the new flight assistance methods would reduce the maintenance effort in the longer run, allowing them to spend more time on new features.
One explanation is provided by your first point. However, even playing in Solo leaves a finger print that others can see. When I quit playing a few months ago, you could see their actions in PowerPlay every week. There are multiple BGS groups which have been affected by them. The Lave vs Alliance conflict was decided by bots. If you record finger prints for long enough, you get pretty good at spotting bot-like behaviour. By 'record', I mean you can note PowerPlay numbers every thirty minutes, you can look at BGS outcomes in combination with station traffic news. If you do that for months, like players I know have, you see patterns.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of the bot-ers so far is not the software that they've written, but convincing the bulk of the player base that they don't exist, or that they have no impact on the game.
Manpower, time & money spend on simply removing bots could be spend elsewhere.
You weren't alone in your attack which is why Mobius got screwed so hard across multiple systems.
Some bots that attacked us in Gateway we started tracking. We know they have been a source of problems for several large PMFs, such as mobius and us contacting them is why they think they're being hit by bots, not because they couldn't see them.
I invite you to go back and look at the evidence on our original report on botting and specifically the means they have available.
We found the untrackable version of the software used visual and audio cues, not necessarily any software that pulls data directly from the game engine.
Now you have to be blind or stupid to think for a second that an in-game-built solution to a number of obstacles full-fledged bots have to overcome won't in some way make their lives easier. I don't think this will be the be-all and end-all of botting software but it's a failsafe, another way they can screw the system and thus increase their overall efficiency.
Let me relate to you an instance that occurred in Star Trek Online. Not of bots, but the concept is related.
People used to troll. Trolls will troll, and griefers will grief. Then some idiot in the dev team came out with a "party ball" that you could pop over people's heads, and they would be forced to dance uncontrollably as lights and lame music surrounded them. No defense, no opting out. Suddenly, trolling was stoopid easy. And suddenly...everyone was doing it. Zero effort. The devs gave people something so simple and easy that casual trolling became a thing. Till finally they released a defensive device, and the party balls became useless. Numbers of trolling incidents dropped like a stone, because suddenly it would require effort again.
What's the point of this? Yes, "the bots exist. they don't need the new modules." But now FDev have made tools that make it so easy that more people will be able to do botting when before their scripting skills might not have been up to par. FDev has lowered the bar to entry into the ranks of botters. The current ones will continue botting, and new ones that couldn't figure out how to do it before will figure out how to do it now. This will make a royal mess of things.
People will exploit things if the game allows it. Star Trek Online showed us that, as other games have shown us, including here in Elite.
Intersting story, but i don't see how it relates.
Bots exist now. Bots will exist in the future, with or without these modules.
The only "cure" is FD developing telemetry to identify bots and take action against them. And not sure they can. It would take a decent coder a matter of mintues to throw in some random factors into the code that would make it appear like a player was twiddling with the controls.
Here's my problem with this. How did you find out what the untrackable was doing? Please don't just refer me to a web page; I won't click. Tell me how you saw the invisible.
I know that bots are technically possible. I've thought about how one would do some of the OCR and navigation myself as it's an area I'm interested in. Other games are plagued by them but that's usually for gold selling, which isn't possible in ED. There's no financial motive to run a bot in ED.
The only evidence for the existence of bots here can equally be ascribed to activity of opposing players. In the Mobius case that was almost certainly the situation because of the way they survived it: provoking weekly wars in nearby systems so that they could only be in one war at once until the school holidays were over. Against bots there would have been no respite at the end of the holidays.
I'm not worried that an advanced docking computer will be a gift to bots which (1) may not exist and (2) if they do exist are doing fine without it already.