Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Eve has so many boring parts in its game play that automation would mean most people simply automate almost everything and eve online becomes eve offline.

Maybe they should make the game less like a boring click fest and more interactive and player dependent instead of automating more boring crap.

I do understand your idea behind this. For example the X series has a great scripting tool that allows you to build very complex scripts and automate things. I liked it a lot.

But the difference is: X is a single player game. Nobody cares if you do everything automated and don't sit in front of the game.

It would be very bad if EVE gets this kind of automation. Auto pilot has drawbacks for a reason and depending on the complexity of your proposed scripts, this would just be like botting.

Also, wrong forum section.

Thread moved from EVE General Discussion to Features & Ideas Discussion forum.

No.

Unrelated.

He's a corp member.

If you think outside the box a little, I think you may start to realize that this "Botting Phobia" that the gaming community has developed might not be such a bad thing for Eve or any game set in the future where botting is as real as you or I.

The problem with bots (and by extension this idea) is that they're either illegal or compulsory; there's essentially no middle ground between the two.

If you allow this kind of thing to be automated it would essentially destroy mining as a career; it's so simple and the entry-level skill requirements are so low that everyone would have a mining alt to leave running overnight or whenever they can't actively play. Because it takes so little time and effort, and because it's not cutting into their 'real' playtime, those players will be willing to sell their ore at significantly lower prices than someone who is actively mining would. The end result is that it becomes impossible to make any half-way decent money from mining unless you're using a bot to mine 23/7.

It's 'realistic', certainly - there are countless examples of RL jobs being totally taken over by machines once someone invents a way of automating them - but making entire styles of game-play obsolete for anyone who doesn't want to just run a bot to do it isn't going to be good for the game.

Wait, you were thinking of allowing a player to do this with multiple ships at once on one account?
This was what I was assuming you'd do anyway and it won't make much difference. There's no way to stop a player starting up the client, setting up the bot to do it's thing, and then just walking away and leaving it to run.
I doubt that this would be enough. Even using T1 gear with low skills, a bot running for 15-20 hours a day would end up pulling out a lot of ore (or running a lot of missions, or whatever). If you're going to allow officially-sanctioned bots, you have to assume that most active accounts will be running them for the majority of the time that the player isn't actively doing something else.

So, make botter's jobs easier?

That makes sense I suppose.

Being able to simultaneously control multiple ships by uploading artificial intelligence into them would be both fun and more in line with realism.

AI controlled ships could be limited in ways that would discourage 100% botting I think.

Pipa Porto... Please stop posting on my thread. You haven't brought anything constructive or worthwhile to the discussion.

Unfortunately neither 'I would really like to be able to do this' nor 'this is realistic' offer any guarantee that the change in question is balanced or good for the game long-term.

EVE was designed with a one character = one ship paradigm. The mechanics were designed with that in mind, the ships were balanced for that, and the metagame developed based on that. Change that and you end up totally rewriting every aspect of the game, with corresponding problems for getting the new balance right. Like they say, you should never try to switch horses mid-stream.

As for botting; the trouble is that bots are built to exploit the simplest aspects of the game. If it's impossible to order the ships in question to mine an asteroid until they fill their cargohold, then heaven help you if you try to use them for anything complicated. Unless the new ships are so complicated to run that they're unusable, what would end up happening is that each bot goes from running one mining ship at a time to running 5 or ten mining ships at a time. That's a bad thing.

For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure Pipa and I are making exactly the same arguments. She's just less patient than I am.