actually a captcha cleverly implemented at ANY docking phase of the game would be a great way to kill botting

click on doc stupid lil block comes up confirming docking coordinates human has to type in the correct answer to the captcha puzzle.

Captchas. Captchas.

Not sure if trolling, or just really stupid.

Captchas. Captchas.

Not sure if trolling, or just really stupid.

If CCP wanted to get rid of the botters i would be easy. But they wont.

Would you be ready to run anti-botware to get botless eve? Would it work? Would it fail? Would it be the end of RMT or kill the economy? How do you think the game would change? Is there any alternative solution? What could go wrong? What would be awesome?

Can we at least agree it would be harder to bot than it is today right?

This x100000

CCP permits botting for a reason.

Any claims and so-called efforts to the contrary are to keep the greater player-base collective panties unbunched.

RMT controls most of 0.0. CCP not only knows this, they factor it into their business model.

Embarrased laughter : Final solution ? Snerk...

Authoritative statement : Every anti-bot measure that requires user interaction will end up causing more trouble than it's worth for legitimate users compared to the effectiveness against actual bots.

Mild sarcasm : As for anti-bot software addons... yes, great idea, have people responsible for boot.ini and several other lesser incidents gain access to code closer to the core of your OS, that will end well.

Players run bots and buy ISK illegally.
The final fix is to remove the players, but the result is well no game.

But you know, CCP finds Bots as they can and that time and work cost money that could go into game development.
Everyone says it is CCP job to police their game.
Well they do, but if the player base wasn't filled with so many ......... then CCP would have more money and time to spend on other projects.

So kick your botting friend in the head, and tell him/her to knock it off.

Stop talking like HK-47.

Forgive my ignorance, can you please explain to me how you would stop such actions if you were CCP?

Your ignorance is not my problem.

This is internets forumz and no one is paying me to educate you.

Imagination is the only limitation to the amount of information and statistics available to them. If you can't figure out how the one group who owns and controls the server-side coding/operation of the game might be able to identify systematic botting, there is no hope for you.... and there will most certainly be no forgiveness for your idiocy.

Forgive my brutal logic. Can you please explain to me how you are so dumb?

Lolz. man, you're a card.

So I can run 3 Tengu accounts. I run each for 4 or 5 hours at a time. If a neut comes into system I safe up. I do this 7 days a week.
Am I a bot or a human?

I run 3 Hulks on 3 screens. I mine 5 hours a day and I do it 7 days straight. After 5 hours, I log my other 3 Hulks and mine the same. While all my Hulks are mining away I'm doing my work at my desk.
Am I a bot or human?

I run a Domi and I do L4's all day every day. After 5 hours, I log my other Domi char and do the same.
Am I a bot or human?

Don't bother answering. You can't tell can you? If you think patterns are a way to detect botting. Well. Cough......

Only way I have EVER seen bots identified beyond doubt is by interacting with them. Their response is the giveaway, not the botting patterns themselves.

Oh and RMT. As fast as a sting nailed an RMT'er, he's moved, shut down his accounts and started somewhere else. And apart from a breach of EULA, what law has he broken? You cannot enlist the help of the RMT ISP's/law enforcment or any such agency. So how do you stop them?

To declare that CCP could "easily" stop RMT/Botting is about.... well..... as dumb as it can get. Sorry man.

The fact that you cannot think of ways CCP could easily attack RMT only proves the limitation of your imagination, nothing more. Another display of the ignorance you asked forgiveness for earlier.

and wtf law enforcement? What are you on about?

If CCP wanted to get rid of the botters i would be easy. But they wont.

I suggest.

Make a "I am human" test appear at every bounty payout with a simple math problem. Something like 3+5+2+7 = (?) and a 10 min. timer to give an answer.
If you fail the test your client logs off auto. If you keep logging in and failing the test a GM gets a message about it.

Would you be ready to run anti-botware to get botless eve? Would it work? Would it fail? Would it be the end of RMT or kill the economy? How do you think the game would change? Is there any alternative solution? What could go wrong? What would be awesome?

Your turn - flood away :)

If you have nothing to hide and you are a legitimate player, why be against it?

In my country the government gave rights to the police to record and store all phonecalls, mail and text messages to make it easier to counter terrorism and crime.

Lots of people were against that too but again, if it makes my legitimate life in my country safer then I'm all for it.

WOW has a piece of software that runs in the background, starts and stops randomly while ur running the wow client, if it detects bot software GM's are notified.

guess what, i played wow for 6 months with 3 friends. together we saw 3 bots in total.

i approve of anti bot software. as long as it only runs while client is active and doesnt take the resources of incarna because i would hate for my PC to catch fire while on login screen

If you have nothing to hide and you are a legitimate player, why be against it?

Only the people who use such things as RMT and bots would be against this.

Only the people who use such things as RMT and bots would be against this.

The legit people would not mind any CCP software running to see out the bots.

I mean all that's needed to catch bots is a software to track time between keypresses? If char 1-2-3 etc has the same time frame of warping to station for example, its a bot and they get auto banned.

I do have things to hide from CCP, specifically my bank account details, my Tax File Number, pass phrases for various services I administer, various documents covered by secrecy agreements that CCP is not party to. I have secrets and having those secrets does not make me an evil person. While I might trust CCP to do the right thing by me, there is no guarantee that CCP won't get bought out by someone I don't trust (such as SOE), and there is no guarantee that their supervisor program won't get hacked.

Taking the 5th or feigning ignorance should never be allowed as defence since we all signed on the dotted line and thus agreed to report any EULA violations we come across.

In addition, there is no way for CCP to trust any software running on my computer. I could write my own software which pretends to be their supervisor program and simply feeds back to CCP whatever information they expect their supervisor program to send back if I was a "legitimate" player.

Just installing CCP spyware is not solution since it can't detect LEGO robot pressing buttons on your computer.

What is needed, is for EVE to require webcam so that CCP spyware can continually check that there is player (not robot, not your cat) present when client detects button-presses or mouse movement. As a bonus CCP can add facial detection to also detect account sharing.

Just installing CCP spyware is not solution since it can't detect LEGO robot pressing buttons on your computer.

What is needed, is for EVE to require webcam so that CCP spyware can continually check that there is player (not robot, not your cat) present when client detects button-presses or mouse movement. As a bonus CCP can add facial detection to also detect account sharing.

actually a captcha cleverly implemented at ANY docking phase of the game would be a great way to kill botting

click on doc stupid lil block comes up confirming docking coordinates human has to type in the correct answer to the captcha puzzle.

and that would take me out of the game permanently - I have severe problems deciphering a lot of captchas on forums these days - let alone the inconvenicence of it all

Just a thought in regards to the Botting/Macroing/RMT-ing people caught in Sreegs' devious net of devious catching.

I thought it would be a great idea if there might be a special place in New Eden for those toons/accounts caught exploiting or botting/macroing/RMT-ing by the Devs.


There's an oft quoted and cliched saying along the lines of "There's a special place in Hell for..."



1. It of course relies on CCP's willingness to seriously address the problem (insert EVE meme at your leisure).
I am not necessarily saying that they do not - there just doesn't appear to be much in the way of meaningful "Perp-Walk"

2. Once the offending toon/character/account is detected the following actions happen:

a. Their accounts are immediately frozen and disabled
b. Their EVE-worldy possessions (from all toons on the account) are ejected in a special super large "Jet Can" in a random system in space (w- or k-). These containers would be scannable/probable using Deep Space probes and would offer a real neat surprise to the player(s) that located them.
c. The ship hulls in their possession (from all toons on the account) are transported to a remote beacon in the system they were located in.
d. This beacon would be called something along the lines of "Sreegs' revenge" or some other Lore - Appropriate name
e. These transported hulls would be derelict wrecks and un-salvageable. They would retain the names of the Toon caught and expelled for violating the TOS in the manner described above (botting, etc)

This would, effectively, be an EVE ship graveyard populated by some of the most despicable characters in New Eden.

We all are aware that rmt and bots are in Eve to stay. CCP is unwilling

Lolz. man, you're a card.

So I can run 3 Tengu accounts. I run each for 4 or 5 hours at a time. If a neut comes into system I safe up. I do this 7 days a week.
Am I a bot or a human?

I run 3 Hulks on 3 screens. I mine 5 hours a day and I do it 7 days straight. After 5 hours, I log my other 3 Hulks and mine the same. While all my Hulks are mining away I'm doing my work at my desk.
Am I a bot or human?

I run a Domi and I do L4's all day every day. After 5 hours, I log my other Domi char and do the same.
Am I a bot or human?

Don't bother answering. You can't tell can you? If you think patterns are a way to detect botting. Well. Cough......

Only way I have EVER seen bots identified beyond doubt is by interacting with them. Their response is the giveaway, not the botting patterns themselves.

Oh and RMT. As fast as a sting nailed an RMT'er, he's moved, shut down his accounts and started somewhere else. And apart from a breach of EULA, what law has he broken? You cannot enlist the help of the RMT ISP's/law enforcment or any such agency. So how do you stop them?

To declare that CCP could "easily" stop RMT/Botting is about.... well..... as dumb as it can get. Sorry man.

The EVE client is "dumb". All those key presses are fed back to the server. A study on bots in Ragnarok Online found that messages sent from bots had very discrete periodicity while messages sent from human controlled clients had uniform periodicity between commands. That is to say, the timing analysis you are suggesting could easily be done server-side on EVE Online just as it was done for Ragnarok Online. There is no need for any software to be added to my computer to monitor my key presses.

TimeToNextKeyPress += 150 + rand(x);

I would imagine every bot maker is clever enough to randomize time between keystrokes, as it's really just that simple.

GǪ I will say that I do not use my computer for anthing that I would not do or say in public GǪ

That is why I use a seperate computer for all of my 'sensitive stuff.'

So I can run 3 Tengu accounts. I run each for 4 or 5 hours at a time. If a neut comes into system I safe up. I do this 7 days a week.
Am I a bot or a human?

I run 3 Hulks on 3 screens. I mine 5 hours a day and I do it 7 days straight. After 5 hours, I log my other 3 Hulks and mine the same. While all my Hulks are mining away I'm doing my work at my desk.
Am I a bot or human?

I run a Domi and I do L4's all day every day. After 5 hours, I log my other Domi char and do the same.
Am I a bot or human?

Don't bother answering. You can't tell can you? If you think patterns are a way to detect botting. Well. Cough......

Only way I have EVER seen bots identified beyond doubt is by interacting with them. Their response is the giveaway, not the botting patterns themselves.

Oh and RMT. As fast as a sting nailed an RMT'er, he's moved, shut down his accounts and started somewhere else. And apart from a breach of EULA, what law has he broken? You cannot enlist the help of the RMT ISP's/law enforcment or any such agency. So how do you stop them?

To declare that CCP could "easily" stop RMT/Botting is about.... well..... as dumb as it can get. Sorry man.

Your over simplification is ridiculous. Patterns in details show bot vs human very quickly. If CCP's were detailed enough...

My point here is that ANY of these could be bots OR human players. Despite what you thing, it cannot be detected without massive amounts of stats - over time - to locate any patterns that might exist

And as posted above, which was my next point, injecting randomness to break patterning in code is soooo easy to implement it's not funny. Notwithstanding that a player can also choose to have day off here and there and log earlier on odd days to randomise it even more.

Over my dead body and / or unsubscribed accounts.

I want bots gone as much as the next guy - but like most people I have a large amount of personal content on my computer, plus a lot of work stuff too.

I would never knowingly allow a third party to monitor the goings-on of my personal hardware in any way, shape or form.

So what your saying is it's impossible because it would require

#1-information (that is readily available to CCP)
#2- taking the time to organize and analyze that information (OMG not TIME!!!)
#3-People might not bot every day (because this is an absolute necessity to identify them amirite?)

...wait. So how does that = impossible again?

It's like your brain is actively working to sabotage your comments. Maybe you have it running in reverse or need to drink a V8?

Stormshadow. Admirable suggestion but no. Yes I can trust the company but as we all know, companies are a collection of inidividuals and any individual can

go rogue.