Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Instead of forcing humans and bots to adapt to a game controller UI:

Please consider to make some "catchas npc ships" that appear randomly (more than randomly on people suspected of botting) in space only with random name painted on their hull (these special npc would not appear at all in overview).

They have some ewar effect, impossible to detect but with real consequences for the botter.
To make them go away you need to talk to them and put their hull name in the chatbox.

The idea is that a human could react easily but a bot could not read letters and numbers distorted on a ships hull, and the bot would have no way to detect this npc ship or its effect otherwise.
After some time, the captcha npc ship could then signal the position of the bot in a chat channel ...

Couldn't have put it better myself.

Captcha is potentially a good idea, but it absolutely MUST be implemented in such a way as to not break the look and feel of EVE, and must not make this turn into Forsaken World. If you can think of a good way to do that, I'm all ears. Otherwise, you won't get much support from anyone.

Captcha is a dumb idea.. mainly because there isn't a way to make it bot proof enough that wouldn't also become a bed of thorns in the side of regular players.

And what about those of us who can't read captchas?

And what about the fact that bots are better than humans at the damn things anyway?

And what about market bots?

Whenever I see a bot, I'm always sure to taunt it in local so it can warp away and cloak.

Agreed, but there needs to be some form of in-game protection mechanic that a miner can (partially) rely on because they're gonna be "too busy" to check local/dscan/overview as often as they should.

I'm not saying something to make in impossible to gank them ... but something to simply delay a would-be ganker long enough to give people a chance.

Terrible caffeine-deprived off the top of my head at 0400 ideas:
1. Asteroid belts are extremely dangerous (i.e. straight DPS) to non-industrial vessels. blah blah RP reason barges et. al. are OK in belts.
2. Non-Industrial vessels cannot WTZ on a belt (say ~50KM out is the best they can do ... "mining" frigates and cruisers exempted). Mostly because of point 1.
3. Non-industrial vessels have severely reduced sensor strength when targeting anything closer than ~50km to the belt location (i.e. the WTZ beacon).

The local list is still transmitted to the client in WH space, it's just hidden by the client after being sent. Hence, if you have a hacked client or a bot running via python injection (or w/e it is they use) then you can see the full local list.


That's a good point, but I suppose it depends how intensive the mini-game style mining is. Mining could easily be raised to anomaly-level difficulty, which provides only a ~10 second delay between a potential jumper jumping in and them being able to warp to your site.

(less if the ganker is any good and has been through a short time before and bookmarked your site.)

I'm not saying something to make in impossible to gank them ... but something to simply delay a would-be ganker long enough to give people a chance.


1) Would finally kill belt ratting. Which, I must admit, is a terrible "profession" as is, but some people still persist in doing it and it does provide some amusing kills. (Even in low sec, the number of people belt ratting in low sec is horrifying. They must be making like 20m an hour.)

2) Again this would probably annoy belt ratters, although I suppose you could move the belt rats too so they hang around closer to the warp in point? Would you still allow players to warp directly to the belt itself if they bookmarked an item such as a wreck at the miner's location?

3) That would probably protect belt ratters a little too much, miner's might need some protection due to their tendency to more or less go completely afk, but a belt ratter at the very least always tries to warp out when you land. Giving the attacker's ship severely reduced sensor strength means they'd likely always escape.

All in all I'd say the best way would be to just not make active mining so horribly complex and involved that you can't even glance at local. Any other changes are difficult to achieve balance in, especially when you factor in that finding the miners in the belt takes time using directional anyway, and the fact that belts are involved in another profession that would be effected.

Still, I doubt CCP will ever go down the path of "active" mining either way. Although it's going to be interesting seeing what they do with ring mining.

I think there s some room for some creative thinking.

I dont know the precise Turing test to implement, but it should make life easier for bot hunters, creating a new profession.