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Cyaxares II
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Posted - 2010.12.13 18:00:00 -
[1]
Edited by: Cyaxares II on 13/12/2010 18:00:52
had to laugh in a slightly hysterical fashion when I thought about what effect this "devblog" will have on the various GD threads.
CCP, you could have just taken the easy route and invented some impressive number "<x>-thousand bots got banned during the last 12 months, <y> big RMT organizations were dissolved" and most people would have been happy.
Instead you decide to go the hard way and pour some additional oil into the fire - #1 forum troll, CCP.
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Cyaxares II
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Posted - 2010.12.13 21:11:00 -
[2]
 Originally by: Mynxee
Originally by: Datcorinna Erunde
For your convenience the great Wollari even colored the shown systems accordingly to the amount of the occured kills. He colored it from white (like "almost nothing") via green, yellow, orange up to a fine, perfect visible shiny red (like "unusually high occurance of NPC kills in this very system OMG OMG!!!!!!11111" or, more fitting "look here CCP, here are the bots!").
Third party tools to the rescue...again.
in-game map would do the job, too, in this particular scenario.
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Cyaxares II
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Posted - 2010.12.13 22:16:00 -
[3]
Edited by: Cyaxares II on 13/12/2010 22:17:01
Originally by: Vincent Athena
good stuff
admit it... you are just waiting for some botter to offer you a consulting gig and that post was your advertisement 
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Cyaxares II
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Posted - 2010.12.14 08:26:00 -
[4]
Edited by: Cyaxares II on 14/12/2010 08:26:00
I have said it before but let me repeat it:
It is very possible that botting has become far too big to fail.
If I were Dr. EyjoG the only way I would agree to a serious removal of bots is if I would get a "place covert NPC order" button in my EVE client in return.
Spiking mineral/LP prices and a general tendency towards deflation would be a hardly predictable mix.
Falling PLEX prices (measured in ISK) because of less demand by bots would only make RMT worse and cost CCP RL money.
IMO economic turmoil could lead to much larger complaints than a few concerns about botting (a topic that gets some traction on the forums every few months and then gets forgotten again).
So the only way I would feel safe about large-scale bannings of bots would be if CCP has the option to play the market by selling minerals, setting up PLEX buy orders with freshly created fiat money, ... (via straw man characters of course) and decides to use this option to enforce soft boundaries on possible extreme market reactions.
not to mention that the 0.0 playing field would get even more uneven - if you nerf the ISK generation of alliances in general those that have an ISK advantage now (and manage to make this ISK appear legit before the eyes of GMs) will enjoy it for a very long time because everyone who is poor right now has no way to catch up (atm they can rent a constellation, bot the hell out of it and work their way up from there).
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Cyaxares II
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Posted - 2010.12.14 10:57:00 -
[5]
Originally by: Clone 1
Also page 1 of this thread is cached improperly and get '500 - Internal Error' when logged in from ip range 86.45.x.x (ireland) BUT works fine when logged in from 174.36.x.x (germany).
I get the 500 (since yesterday evening) when visiting the first site while logged in - if I am logged out I can view it just fine.
84.151.*.* (Germany)
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Cyaxares II
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Posted - 2010.12.14 11:59:00 -
[6]
Edited by: Cyaxares II on 14/12/2010 12:04:30
Originally by: Jaqel Broadside
90% of players are in high sec, therefore a majority or at least half of the CSM should be made up of high sec players. If this cannot be done then get rid of the CSM altogether and replace it with a voting system.
- many high-sec players are just alts of 0.0 players.
- 0.0 players actually vote for their candidates, apparently many high-sec players can't be bothered to vote at all.
- Ankhesentapemkah showed that you can get enough votes for a CSM seat by spamming high-sec hubs. She also was stupid enough to get booted from CSM for a NDA violation (tough luck if your representatives throw away your votes like that).
- nevertheless being backed in your candidacy by a large alliance makes things much easier (you cannot fail completely, have some additional manpower at hand for your campaign/forum support, ...) - high-sec players are split in much smaller groups than the alliances and powerblocs in 0.0 which makes it much harder for them to speak with one voice.
(But that just means they fail at the organization/coordination game and is no excuse for them not being "properly" represented at CSM).
- as one who currently has no affiliation with a 0.0 alliance here's why I would never vote for a high-sec candidate:
I can trust just about any 0.0 dweller to be fairly knowledgeable and aware of most high-sec playstyles (doesn't mean (s)he supports them - but at least (s)he knows about them).
I have met too many high-sec dwellers who know close to nothing about life in low-sec and 0.0 (scientists have postulated that there should be life in low-sec - however, direct evidence of it has yet to be found).
edit: points 11-15 are stupid.
the only way I can make sense of point 16 is by taking it as a reference to the Achura bloodline.
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Cyaxares II
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Posted - 2010.12.14 12:47:00 -
[7]
Originally by: Shurikane
You can't apply that to EVE. Not now, not ever, never will happen. If someone looks like he's botting but you can't prove he's botting, then your hands are tied. Imagine you're at a trial and you have to show the evidence. If you can't say "We found this program running on his computer and it's a bot program." then sorry, nothing you can do.
if there would be any trial it would be about the ToS - but as long as these are compatible with law CCP has no need to provide any justification for banning you.
besides... short of taking control of the customer's computer there is no way to "prove" that he is botting. It's always a judgment call based on circumstantial evidence.
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Cyaxares II
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Posted - 2010.12.14 14:11:00 -
[8]
Originally by: Jaqel Broadside
Have they improved life in High Sec at all ? Have they reduced high sec income ? Have missions been forced into low sec ? Is there a continued effort to keep pushing what is left of high sec income down ?
hmmm... I thought high-sec was the place were you can run your mission bots in complete safety?
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Cyaxares II
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Posted - 2010.12.14 16:30:00 -
[9]
Edited by: Cyaxares II on 14/12/2010 16:34:47
Originally by: Jaqel Broadside
Perhaps you would want to see an Olympic games full of machines instead ? Don't you think you are missing the whole point ?
(a) of course this already exists (various robotics competitions)
(b) I heard doping was pretty common among athletes - similar game to botting in its present state if you think about it (only that the athletes don't risk an account but their one and only body while playing the game - otoh the possible rewards are much higher, too)
Apart from the social aspects (alliance management, the spy game, more refined forms of fraud/scamming) the cap in player-skill in EVE seems to be pretty low.
Take a logistics pilot (which is said to be one of the more challenging roles in EVE) and compare his work to that of a standard MMO healer. He has to manage his rack of 4 remote repair modules, 2 cap transfers and an afterburner - healers in other MMOs have about 30 different spells to pick from (and while you can maybe do your job ok-ish with using only 5 of them there's plenty of room for improvement and a great healer will be able to decide in a split second which tool out of his full arsenal of spells to use).
No wonder people try to automate the logistics ships (with varying success).
Take Starcraft as another example - you can spend years working on improving your own playstyle (and there are many different aspects to master) and AIs tend to be pretty terrible at the game (there are competitions for Starcraft I AIs but nobody in their right mind would try to "cheat" with an AI while playing against human opponents; the only thing I have read about Starcraft II was some guy using genetic algorithms to improve build orders).
Olympics are interesting to watch because player skill plays a large role in athletics and the skill cap is extremely high.
(Even in the highest of tiers you still have people like Phelps showing up and redefining skill ceilings).
Formula 1 is probably the closest you get to an engineering competition in a popular sport.
But if a competitive game doesn't leave much room for player skill the natural route seems to be to look for skill differentials in the meta-game.
Of course I agree with your assessment rgd the profitability of a game as the one I had envisioned.
MMOs sell that well because it is usually very easy to succeed at them in one form or another and very hard to fail (success more a function of time investment than actual mental or motorical skill). Skill caps are pretty soft - otoh when you turn the game into a competition over algorithms you introduce some relatively hard skill caps and many people wouldn't like that.
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Cyaxares II
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Posted - 2010.12.15 07:28:00 -
[10]
Originally by: Apollo Gabriel
The Pink Bunny Test is the last, best hope for banning macros, here is how it works:
1) Allow GMs to turn off mining modules (and only mining modules)
2) Allow GMs to minimize all active windows.
3) Allow GMs to spawn a Pink Bunny over the module buttons.
4) Allow GMs to open a chat box irrespective of client restrictions directly above the modules
5) If the player reactivates their modules then bot, otherwise enjoy the funny conversation which will follow.
no way a programmer could teach his bot to react to this test by telling the GM a random variation on "f*** off" or "no english".
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Cyaxares II
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Posted - 2010.12.15 13:38:00 -
[11]
Originally by: gfldex
As it seams there are 2 bots out there right now.
no idea what game you are talking about but it doesn't seem to be EVE.
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Cyaxares II
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Posted - 2010.12.16 09:03:00 -
[12]
Edited by: Cyaxares II on 16/12/2010 09:11:42
Originally by: Jaqel Broadside
CCP has some real problems. They code in Python yet the tools being used to bot are most likely coming from Microsoft - which can be programmed in Visual Basic, C#, j#, C++ and some new meta languages like F# - and in fact they all compile to one machine independant code base.
I don't code in Python but I imagine it doesn't support the Microsfot tools directly. Python will ALWAYS be several steps behind simply because of the huge platform Microsoft caters for.
Some suggestions perhaps are better not posted on a public forum - but I also wouldn't dream of trying to teach grandma how to suck eggs,, grandma knows very well what a mouth with no teeth can do.
But THE biggest suggestion I can make is get in touch with Microsoft as I am pretty sure other software vendors have faced the same problem and, seeing as the tools are coming from Microsoft's own code libraries I'm pretty sure they will help CCP out.
argh.... you're totally wrong (well you might be right about you're grandma but that's sth I can't really comment on).
Choice of programming language does not matter at all.
The stupid "macro/OCR" approach to bots is always technically possible (if you allow multitasking).
Hooking into other applications is something that is handled by the operating system and is possible in every desktop OS if you have admin privileges (because it is a functionality that is necessary for debugging tools).
Now, Python can make it easier to hook into the client without going low-level but as the popular toolkit for botting authors advertises support for Age of Conan, EVE Online, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, World of Warcraft, ... (i.e. doesn't require Python and just uses plain Windows APIs) I doubt many people make use of this "weakness".
People like to write code in C# or VB because it is easy (compared to C/C++) and because Visual Studio (Express) is such a nice (free as in beer) IDE.
But if you are going to write a bot "from scratch" you'll end up calling the Win32 API (for which every major porgramming language provides wrappers) all the time and won't make much use of the .NET libraries.
Language does not matter. Neither on the client's nor on the bot's end.
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Cyaxares II
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Posted - 2010.12.16 15:57:00 -
[13]
Edited by: Cyaxares II on 16/12/2010 16:05:30
Edited by: Cyaxares II on 16/12/2010 15:59:20
Originally by: Jaqel Broadside
Originally by: Cyaxares II
Stuff
The Macro process you describe should be easy to spot.
It's just a matter of knowing if the call was made internally by the client or not, then it is game over for all botting activity.
I think I am out of this discussion.
I freely admit that my knowledge of computer security is a bit sketchy (but then I am an economics grad student) - however, from my POV the only way you could enforce your idea of "how things should be" would be in hardware.
Your ideas require the operating system to lock down the computer nearly completely and require hardware to secure the operating system (hello Blue Pill).
Of course that's the exact opposite of the purpose of a personal computer.
So if you think "lockdown" is the solution to bots (or any sort of malware) I invite you to stop using PCs and switch to console games (and witness how even the most complicated "protection" schemes do eventually fall to the ingenuity of hackers).
edit: if you would think through your ideas ("if I do x an intelligent bot author would do y, so I would have to do z to prevent that, ...") you would re-discover Trusted Computing after very few steps. By that point you would hopefully realize that even if you think Trusted Computing is a good idea it is a completely unrealistic goal given the culture that has developed around general-purpose "personal" computers.
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