More like how many steps to the toilet, coffee machine and cargo hatch and the most efficient daily routine.
Proposal Discussion: Things that could help player groups identify a possible bot attack
- Thread starter CMDR Jal'Bur
- Start date
More like how many steps to the toilet, coffee machine and cargo hatch and the most efficient daily routine.
Oh, I see where your error lies... The HOTAS patch is actually in the Swahili dictionary module...There's nothing I like more than connecting my HOTAS and firing up Libre Office and finding they're not compatible with each other.
somehow ironic in this thread about more data to crunch
i do that a lot, and believe me, seeing is not a phiysical input heavy activity. and now excuse me, i want to do more
(note: i like the ATC line of "sit back and relax" if you have docking computer clearance)
somehow ironic in this thread about more data to crunch
i do that a lot, and believe me, seeing is not a phiysical input heavy activity. and now excuse me, i want to do morebirdwatchingmontitoring the spawn of npc rare traders by some manifest scanning
(note: i like the ATC line of "sit back and relax" if you have docking computer clearance)
But thats the issue for me- to combat bots you need to make complex piloting the goal. Do that, and make it central to the BGS bots go away naturally and you don't require huge amounts of data.
I guess that's where we differ - I reckon it wouldn't be that hard to make a bot play smarter than most of the players on here - and determining which CMDR are bots becomes more of an issue.
For a start anyone doing Ceos / Sothis is probably a bot - who would do that for hours? As for CGs ...
Yep, that is true, and agreed. I mostly just want to look at certain activity and see whether or not it is sus.
I'm pretty sure seeing the exact numbers of absolutely everything, wouldn't even be benefitial for us. I just want things to be a bit clearer... some of the evidence of botting constitutes naming and shaming and even then, most if not all that can be done is reporting to FDev so they take action. A bit more clear information might help make better decisions when it comes to informing FDev.
Because any squadron could do that therefore gaining access to that information. And since PMFs don't grant special privileges to any particular player or squadron, there is no way for CMDRs to formally claim ownership or control over a minor faction. I could see this work to an extent if a PMF was permanently attached to the squadron of a player that submitted the application for one, and this was somehow reflected in-game (for instance, through faction-related cosmetics or small token discounts only available to the members of said squadron). But any meaningful benefits is too much power to give IMO.
An interesting discussion, I too would like know who has been visiting
But thats it: that relies too much on point to point flights and is not complex. If the BGS were inverted and you needed to be more proactive during flight you'd naturally filter out chances of automation.
OR, we could just have a more interesting game that does not rely on constant, repetitive actions, that are so well suited for bots to do.
Ultimately the topic boils down to: “How can we verify that this ships constantly doing the same repetitive things are real people and not bots”
It’s sad that this is even a topic to be discussed.
Ultimately the topic boils down to: “How can we verify that this ships constantly doing the same repetitive things are real people and not bots”
It’s sad that this is even a topic to be discussed.
Having the existing information exported to the journal would be nice.
Not to stop bots or anything, it'd just save me some effort retyping it.
Not to stop bots or anything, it'd just save me some effort retyping it.
Yup. Exactly this.
Additional, anonymised stats would be great. But the whole opening gambit of this thread is that the information will be helpful to identify bots in action. It will definitively not prove bots are in action, because it couldn't demonstrate bot activity, rather it's just stats which could fuel mere opinionated comparison of "this is more activity than I think is reasonable, therefore it's a bot", which is a useless assertion.
But of course, making it anonymised is going to be hard. Even without CMDR names, you wouldn't be able to disassociate, say, "A hundred thousand tonnes of good X got traded" from the resultant spike in a single faction's influence... so instead of accusing CMDRs of botting, we'd now be accusing factions or squadrons, which is actually pretty worse.
And that's the issue with everything around these suggestions now. It's not evidence of botting being sought, rather, it's just statistics which are being sought to form opinions of botting which are as grounded as saying your car is allergic to vanilla icecream. It simply doesn't prove anything. And while FD might see that and not act, it would not prevent those initial rumours circulating, turning the whole fair into a witch hunt led by some 20k players.
tl;dr Yeah cool, stats are great, but don't think for a second this will do anything to help detect and prevent bots.
EDIT: Just so I'm not sitting here shooting things down, I'll reiterate my position which has already been echoed by other players here; make the meaningful BGS tasks more complex, not bottable actions. Make doing things like tip-offs and returning a decrypted wreck/settlement data package reward me for the hour or two (plus a bit extra) of lost effort influence which could otherwise have been spent doing actual work for a faction. Get rid of the basic, easily farmed activities and conditions which generate them.
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Hope I got everything together, doing a Morbad post, so stick with me:
I have proposal number 3 already, don't need to put it into a separate thread as it's as ridiculous as this one.
Everybody should have the option to download the journal files of every CMDR who was in a 153ly radius sphere[1] to their CMDR daily. It would make spotting bots very easy and no false positive would be reported to FDev. The names can be "anonymized" with CMDR 1, CMDR 2, aso. Also everybody downloading the journal files has to pinky swear to not use the data in their out of game bots, programs, and spreadsheets.
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The whole proposal looks more like a data grab to me. Don't you data mine already enough from in-game and out off? There is never enough, is there? It's funny people who heavily use automation out of game for optimizing game activity complaining about bots. The majority of people who I play with turned off all plug-ins do to the rampant data mining and the only ones who really are neg impacted are players who could give a rats behind for the bgs. What I would like to see is the opposite, have less in-game data so easily available and some of the out of game bots and spreadsheets go up in Smoke.
[1] Or make it a cube with the players position as the center and 76.5ly into each axis direction.
It's not, it's to feed the bgs bots and spreadsheets.
Your group is not running the station, you are not even a hired hand for the station controller. Lore wise, you said that you will support that "random" faction and they had no say in it at all. Never heard off a npc faction rejecting the "help" of CMDRs either.
See above, the ones wanting that granular details are most likely the ones who will abuse it. The accuracy of the bgs bots predictions will be increased manyfold.
Does it really help identify bots? Hypothetically if I know that this data will be displaying I would make the bots traffic look like everybody else. If I run 1 bot 1000 times, 1000 bots 1 time, or 50 bots 20 times makes no difference at all. Again hypothetically. You as well as everybody else know that this extra data will not only be used for finding bots, but to figure out what the opposition is doing or has done to then use for their own purposes.
I don't think having CMDR names on the boards is a good idea at all. The bounty boards are already used to track the people on it in real-time.
The only extra things I could see useful is something like Jane proposed, the number of individual CMDRs per ship type, and a separation of the bgs bounties and IF bounties on the board. Everything else is just data to feed the machines. Some uncertainty or mystery is something good in the daily bgs grind, and it is a grind.
Again, your sqdrn is not the faction, same as your group is not the in-game pmf. The faction is a npc one just like all the others. Only difference is that you pledged you sqdrn to it without asking the faction and in case of a pmf you were also allowed to name it and write an intro. That's it, no special treatment, you are not controlling anything at all. It's called bgs for a reason.
Idk, the more data the better you can work things out. You just have to go at it with an open mind, not looking to confirm your view. At least that's my experience. There is already to much data available in game and out, really don't think more will be better. If you suspect a bot, report and FDev will have a look. What they do from there is on them and no amount of extra data will change that.
Disclaimer: I'm against the use of heavy automation in game and out off, especially for adversarial game play. Same as using bgs exploits (like shooting each other for bounties) don't use them or ever plan on it.
To kick off the discussion on the first point in this thread [ Anti-Botting Agreement | Frontier Forums ] and to continue on from the discussions on the [A-BA Discord] there are a few practical changes that frontier could make to the game to allow players to better identify suspect accounts and report them to frontier for verification.
The open-only discussion has been thrashed to death and frontier have made no indication that they will ever implement it. It would only be a partial solution to BGS and PP botting anyway, due to how p2p networking works. A clever operator of a bot could ensure that they never instance with other players via p2p. Even if one were able to instance with a botter at best open-only would lead to video evidence of robotic flight behaviour or video evidence of god-moding, which frontier would still need to verify.
So the ideas that have come up so far centre around providing players with better information regarding activity in a system beyond the existing in-game panels, including:
- more detailed traffic reports. Currently there is no way to tell if 90 pythons on the traffic report is 90 different pythons or 1 python making 90 visits. Showing the top 10 visitors to the system and how many times they visited over 24 hours could be a way of flagging suspect pilots.
- longer bounty boards, not just top 5 but maybe top 20 and better crime reports - showing a more detailed break-down of who is picking up bounties
- a better bounty report, showing for example the top 10 CMDRs dropping bounties over 24hrs
- better trade reports, showing not just what is being sold but how much, including the average profit margin
The intent of this post is to kick off discussions on this one area of how to spot a bot and how to make it easier for players to spot bots and report them to frontier. There are holes in this idea. Go ahead and point them out
I have proposal number 3 already, don't need to put it into a separate thread as it's as ridiculous as this one.
Everybody should have the option to download the journal files of every CMDR who was in a 153ly radius sphere[1] to their CMDR daily. It would make spotting bots very easy and no false positive would be reported to FDev. The names can be "anonymized" with CMDR 1, CMDR 2, aso. Also everybody downloading the journal files has to pinky swear to not use the data in their out of game bots, programs, and spreadsheets.
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The whole proposal looks more like a data grab to me. Don't you data mine already enough from in-game and out off? There is never enough, is there? It's funny people who heavily use automation out of game for optimizing game activity complaining about bots. The majority of people who I play with turned off all plug-ins do to the rampant data mining and the only ones who really are neg impacted are players who could give a rats behind for the bgs. What I would like to see is the opposite, have less in-game data so easily available and some of the out of game bots and spreadsheets go up in Smoke.
[1] Or make it a cube with the players position as the center and 76.5ly into each axis direction.
It's not, it's to feed the bgs bots and spreadsheets.
Your group is not running the station, you are not even a hired hand for the station controller. Lore wise, you said that you will support that "random" faction and they had no say in it at all. Never heard off a npc faction rejecting the "help" of CMDRs either.
See above, the ones wanting that granular details are most likely the ones who will abuse it. The accuracy of the bgs bots predictions will be increased manyfold.
Does it really help identify bots? Hypothetically if I know that this data will be displaying I would make the bots traffic look like everybody else. If I run 1 bot 1000 times, 1000 bots 1 time, or 50 bots 20 times makes no difference at all. Again hypothetically. You as well as everybody else know that this extra data will not only be used for finding bots, but to figure out what the opposition is doing or has done to then use for their own purposes.
I don't think having CMDR names on the boards is a good idea at all. The bounty boards are already used to track the people on it in real-time.
The only extra things I could see useful is something like Jane proposed, the number of individual CMDRs per ship type, and a separation of the bgs bounties and IF bounties on the board. Everything else is just data to feed the machines. Some uncertainty or mystery is something good in the daily bgs grind, and it is a grind.
Again, your sqdrn is not the faction, same as your group is not the in-game pmf. The faction is a npc one just like all the others. Only difference is that you pledged you sqdrn to it without asking the faction and in case of a pmf you were also allowed to name it and write an intro. That's it, no special treatment, you are not controlling anything at all. It's called bgs for a reason.
Idk, the more data the better you can work things out. You just have to go at it with an open mind, not looking to confirm your view. At least that's my experience. There is already to much data available in game and out, really don't think more will be better. If you suspect a bot, report and FDev will have a look. What they do from there is on them and no amount of extra data will change that.
Disclaimer: I'm against the use of heavy automation in game and out off, especially for adversarial game play. Same as using bgs exploits (like shooting each other for bounties) don't use them or ever plan on it.
Jane Turner
Volunteer Moderator
Indeed.
Is there anyone who would object to the number of accounts showing in addition to the ship types? And if so why - it's not a trick question!
If botting is a problem I want FDEV to handle it, not other players for obvious reasons. This is too much information on player activities imo.
While I have no doubt you would contact someone for a diplomatic resolution, can you see the possibility that another person could simply use that information to harass and grief that person or persons?
I'm sorry but I can't get onboard with these measures. It's too much power and information placed in the hands of a community we know will not always be good honest stewards of that power and information. This would change the game and how it's played in ways we can't even begin to guess from this broad outline, and I fear not for the best.
The big issue that I have... is that people keep denying it is a problem. Not saying it is you, but even though the botting is obvious, a lot of people will just point out that someone attacked you and that you're crying foul because you are losing. Whether they do it in bad faith or because of legitimate concern for witch hunts is a bit irrelevant when they do have some plausible deniability.
FDev clearly doesn't actively look for bots or have an anti-cheat program in place that picks up botting incidents, they rely on people reporting it. So if people have better ways to recognize a bot attack from a master-class BGS attack from a shadow fleet with no discernible purpose other than mess with you... it makes it easier for people to identify such incidents, and then report them.
The idea is to not cause any witch hunts... it's a lot, a loooot easier if FDev deals with it. And people reporting suspected incidents helps FDev know where to point their magnifying glass.
I would object, because it has no in-game bearing, and would just fuel further ill-evidenced speculation of bots. Again, one account entering and leaving a particular system lots. Sounds like a normal day in the life of a BGS runner.
Except it does have in-game bearing... being counted multiple times is very misleading, and the "and would just fuel further ill-evidenced speculation of bots." sounds a lot like "It would help people identify bots". I don't see how that is a bad thing in any way.
Doesn't sound like identifying bots at all. Just sounds like identifying how many times an individual enters a system.
You would be very wrong in leading that as "evidence"