Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I would like to propose an idea.

I play several free MMORPGs. In many of them, they have anti-botting features in the form of a Captcha -- a popup asking you to type in two randomly generated words. These words are in odd fonts and distorted so bot programs cannot read them. This pretty much kills all Botting in the games that add these.

Given the absolutely grievous state of mining in EVE, I propose that activating a Miner (or similar device), should in fact randomly cause a Captcha to pop up.

If this Captcha is unanswered by the time the Miner, Mining Drones, etc finish their cycle, the cycle is aborted and the device (and all other similar devices) are turned off.

This would prevent all Bot Mining and help restore the EVE economy to legitimacy.

There are some who would comment that this would harm dual box miners. However, I would point out that if you cannot check on each of your miners between the extraordinarily long mining cycles, you are not much better than the botters.

In addition, I am not advocating having this theoretical captcha appear every time the items cycle -- ideally it would be random, appearing on average about once an hour or so. If you cannot check your miner about once an hour, I honestly do not feel bad for when some random ganker blows it up.

This would be a temporary solution in lieu of a possible upcoming re-examination of the mining interface -- namely, if it's so boring people would rather pay $15 a month to run a bot than do it themselves (and so primitive an interface that it can be automated by a simplistic bot) then perhaps it needs to be made more engaging and ultimately more fun.

you fogrot to mention that thsi HAS been mentioned before, and that the fact that EVERYONE hates captchas has been the shoot-down every time.

7/10: you almost had me ragin. Nice troll, bro.

realistic current miners would just quit. One captcha you have to figure out is hard enough, scale that to five miners? you spend more time fighting capcha then actually mining. only the better built bots would be left at all.

also miners who legitimately spend much of the time afk, because of long cycles or other activities. watching a movie is not uncommon while mining.

oh and dont get me started on noob miners that spend the majority of the time warping back and forth to the station because they dont have access to orcas or bigger mining crews.

Not needed..

Better aggression rules will mean less bots..

In space and on markets.

Except on markets it would be in the form of better tools for embargoes, boycotts and general boost to standing based features.
A bot on market would be useless if active players activity gave direct benefits in trade. So tax and broker fee reductions, hangar cubic meter rental reductions etc. In the end the bots would need to undock, or integrate into gameplay.

The bot problem is linked directly to the pve gamestyle. The more ccp caters to pve they make botting easy. Most pve is players acting like bots, so botting that is simple. To easy mining, to easy marketing, to easy ratting all leads to someone thinking I can code a bot for this.

Automation should be a logical and natural one, and be done at a risk. So auto mining, autpilot, automarket, etc all at the risk that an active player will take advantage of your absence. So some better supported and balanced features for sequential script like behaviours might be useful, as long as the active player style always gets granted an advantage, and player aggression is introduced in that option..

Here I might want to ask if ccp would consider a market embargo mechanics that basically lets npc stations chose sides, based on standings. So players in the corp would need to move their market operations to a station where they have standing above their opposing part? There are plenty of npc corps and stations to make this a part of the game that isnt to abusable. Also making it a "paid" part where each npc corp would need to be bribed to enact it and price was based on standing differences that made sense..

Right now war decs have huge influence on certain game play styles, but perma docked players are too safe imho.

im a person, i dont bot, when i use normal interwebnet i fail at stupid captchas at least 2 times out of 10.

in fact theres some research that points to the fact that some bots are much better at captcha than PEOPLE!

ccp doing good job with bots currently.
we dont even need more aggression mechanics.

most people read or watch movies, and its been known that some people even do HOUSEWORK! like vacuuming and doing the dishes while waiting for a rock to break.

While searching for something last night eve related i did happen to stumble across a rmt site trading in all eve goods.
these are the other aspects id like ccp to tackle also.

some how 1500 people apparently left trading comments about the service, that chances of possibly data matching those comments with in game Account data, could put alot of people & there accounts in jeopardy.

Do you er, use miners all that often while running blockades?