Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I kinda like this, but have a few modifications to it.

In order to keep mining vessels, they would need to be modified.

example - barges and exhumers would be specifically designed for these ships. They would retain their ore holds and their cargoholds would be used to house "Strip Miners" which would specifically be a mining laser on a platform.

Mining barges and exhumers would be modified to be defensive ships. They would need to be present in order for the strip miners to be active

Much like now, each barge/exhumer would have specific bonuses, such as being more tanky, designed for heavy hauling, or designed large extraction.

Basically, mining barges/exhumers would be what they are now, but a bit more tanky, with guns/missiles for defense, and "strip mining" platforms.

The strip miners would only harvest directly into the controlling ship, so the player would need to remain within a certain range in order for them to be active.

other than setting the strip miners to harvest specific ores and placement/recovery of the strip miners, the player would have no other interaction with the strip miners.

Recovery could be performed at any time, and thus these strip miners would be similar to sentry guns, but not classified as a drone and does not fall under drone skills or your ship's drone capabilities.

A hulk would still only be able to use 3, and a skiff would still only be able to use 1.

Basically, the only thing a bot could do to fullfill what a player would need to be present for is merely docking, undocking, launching, and recovering strip miners.
At this point they would basically become nothing more than a simple macro, which isn't against the Eula.



This would actually be less of an isk drop that it would be an isk spout.

If the players are not rewarded for destroying NPC rats via bounties, players will not be happy.

It's bad enough they need to defend against general random npc spawns as well as other players.

If these progressively increasing npc spawns were given bounties, then players would start up a mining OP just to farm NPCs that come to them, and on top of the mining, this would be a buff in isk payout.

However, the idea of essentially removing the player from the aspect of mining does help to negate any benefits a bot gives.

That said though, a defender bot would still allow a bot to mine constantly, as well as earn isk from bounties.


The only way to completely remove bots from the picture is to remove players from the picture.
this would basically mean fully automated mining that continues even when the player is logged off much like skill training.

It would need to be very similar to PI, in which the player sets it up, and every once in a while they come and recover the ore.
Sure a bot could do this part, but still, this is nothing more than a simple macro.

However, even this would be quite contraversial because there are times that players enjoy mining OPs and there are players that enjoy Eve solely due to mining.
If you wanted to get rid of bots you'd have to completely remove this, and that would **** quite a few people off, even though others would enjoy it.
It's a catch 22...Though, removing a method of gameplay in exchange for a non-interaction aspect isn't something CCP would be going for.

So, my response to Nikk Narrel's post is the most likely way to keep bots from profitting more than a player, but at the same time a bot could still run 23/7.

But I do feel that it's a form of mining that players would enjoy being involved in a lot more because it's consistent production when in belt, and they can afk mine...

I guess my overall point is that while I like some ideas, and not so much others, there's always a catch 22.

Either it can still be performed by a bot, or it completely removes the players from mining....

I think the first is less negative than the last though....

Um, I know it is beside the point of what you were saying, but yes, macros are against the EULA:





Maybe if you have military-grade AI software sitting around on your computer, yes. But most bots are rather easy to spot if you gather the right information.

For example, mouse movements that "teleport" from one place to another all the time, or mouse movements in perfectly straight lines or curves that don't wobble realistically (data can be gathered at very high frequency by your client and descriptive statistics sent to the server), or very consistent timing/highly normalized distributions of timing between clicks, or lack of reasonable downtime during or between game sessions, or too many/too few clicks on a button on average to activate a module (humans will make timing mistakes and spam the buttons and such) or huge total number of hours online, or actions/reflexes that are inhumanly fast especially when the speed is sustained for long periods of time, or too much precise coordination/overall activity per second between characters that are on the same IP address, or lack of any or reasonable camera behavior (only a bot would NEVER zoom or look around in realistic ways) etc. etc.

At least, any of those could flag a person for a human GM to investigate more closely, and at most, a combination of flags might reasonably auto-ban a player.

You aren't using your brain here.

Do you think CCP is so stupid that it doesn't realize a player that is online mining constantly for 23 hours a day is a bit suspicious? If you actually do this, they will flag you almost instantly (they definitely monitor that type of data), and you are almost guaranteed to get banned within a couple of days, once it becomes obvious that it's not just a 1-time caffeine-induced Eve bender.

I don't know what level of sophistication CCP uses in their anti-cheating software (and if I did I wouldn't share it), but "randomizing stuff" is a pretty crude method of hiding your tracks as a botter.

Humans aren't very random at all. Nor are they robotically consistent. They are INconsistent, but in highly patterned ways. And unless you have access to large amounts of detailed player data from many different accounts (like CCP has), it is extremely unlikely that you will successfully predict what all of those patterns are, such that you would know what to program your bot to do.

In other words, if you're writing an anti-cheating program, you don't look for "is it random or not?" You look for "Is it patterned in one or two particular ways that are consistent across real humans?"

Which means that if they wanted to and spent enough effort at it and had the right skilled professionals, they could catch you pretty much every time, within minutes, no matter how much you attempt to randomize.


No, the EVE SERVER updates once per second. The CLIENT updates probably 100 times a second or more. Which means that if they wanted to, they could measure the trajectory of your mouse movements to look for irregular, curved, sequential mouse positions consistent with human-like wrist movements, and where you look with your camera (at interesting things? or just random, weird directions?) and all kinds of other stuff like that that could easily distinguish a bot from a human, even if highly randomized. Unless the bot is made by a psychology professor...

Any of this type of clientside analysis would simply be summarized and then sent to the server every second ("yup it looks like he's cheating from the clientside!" or "nope, all clear"), except obviously all encrypted and distributed and **** so that you can't just spoof the "all clear" signal.


You do both.

Are you suggesting that CCP does not understand how to take an average of several numbers? Or maybe you don't?

Here's a quick tutorial:
1) Add up all the numbers of hours online
2) Divide by the number of total days
3) Result: average hours online per day.
4) Compare the number in (3) to some sufficiently high number like "18." if greater than or equal to 18 for two-three days in a row, ban the player.
5) Compare the number in (3) to some slightly lower number like "12." If greater than or equal to 12, flag the player and send a human to go watch their behavior to see if it looks like a bot.
6) If greater than "8" for 14 days in a row, perhaps also flag the player.

Oh I know. It is indeed quite possible that CCP makes almost no effort at all.

But the thread is about how you CAN stop mining bots. I am describing the many ways that you could do so with nearly 100% effectiveness, IF you wanted to put the effort in as a game designer.

Okay fine. Perform the same calculations, but subtract any full hour during which no mouse clicks were registered. Proceed as before.

Those aren't "bots" or "macros." Those are third party programs that use a CCP-sanctioned (and CCP provided!) programming API specifically designed and distributed to allow people to make those kinds of programs...

They aren't something CCP "discovered." They intentionally and directly brought about their existence.

lol


Well, the problem is there are probably macro miners that are better at there gotcha pop ups than players....Also, what if a player is afk and it pops up.

Maybe they're color blind?

Point is, with humans you expect failure at some point, while with computers they're only as good or bad as their programming.

As long as these gotcha mechanics were programmed into the macro, then they'd be able to deal with them 100% of the time, and be more efficient than a real player.

I think the point is that bots inflate the supply of minerals, making the price pretty low.
A human is not going to outcompete a bot, the bot won't get tired, it will haul in more ore, making the ore the human does ore cheaper.
As you've pointed out, there is multiboxing.
After the mining barge change, for a while I was taking advantage of the buddy system + activation by plex (which they don't allow anymore), and in a little over a week, I could have as many mining alts as my computer could handle mining away in retrievers, which weren't outmined that much by older toons (indeed, after mining 5/ice harvesting 5, I still had about 30 days before I'd need to do it again)
I started with ore, then got lazier and switched to ice + more alts, then abandoned it altogether and went back to incursions.

http://sphotos-b.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/218923_10101347066654453_921292516_o.jpg
Free 51 day trial alt mining!

At least the free 51 day trial loophole is gone... doesn't seem worth it to do serial 21 day trials - granted you could always activate the accounts with RL money, and receive a plex, so if you pay with RL money and don't PLEX your account, you can still do 1 51 day trial account per month for no extra money, but you can't do like I did and spam 3 or more, and then train a real account to fly an orca.