EVE General Discussion

I recently read an article on EvE-O forums called "The #1 reason why CCP will NEVER ban bots..." by Mai Khumm

It does not tell the real reason nor has anyone else who replied touched on the real reason they cannot deal with the "Bot" issue.

The REAL reason CCP cannot deal with the "BOT" issue is a simple one.

Manpower.

CCP is like any other company in this world, trying to stay alive in it's current economic status.
They simply cannot afford the manpower to investigate the botting complaints ad/or suspects.
There are a multitude of things they could do but they cannot for various reasons.
In the subscribers eyes all they see is the cash flowing in from their subs and all these shinies that CCP gives us.

You as the subscribers don't really know what goes into a company of this size in order to bring to us the game we play today.

IF they had the manpower, it would be very simple to get rid of hundreds of "BOTS" a week and yes I said hundreds per week.

Here is how simple it is.

I used to play a game before EvE called Freelancer.
CCP in fact has modeled the market and the standings from that very game.
Anyone who has played Freelancer knows this to be true.

I will show you how the simple solution on HOW to remove the botters relates to Freelancer.

In Freelancer anyone with the proper server rights given to them can teleport to an exact location.
We know the Dev's and others in CCP can do the same thing, as those who have fought in the tournaments can attest to this teleportation ability.

They also have the ability to be unseen in local as well as on your overview.

They can observe the bot and using a set of guidelines for determining if it is indeed a "BOT" and ban it.

When I ran the Freelancer server I could determine right away if someone was a "modder" or was cheating in other ways. But managing the hundreds of people coming and going was a full time job.

So I created the [SP] aka server Police.

These people were hand picked players who had no affiliations with the other clans on the server and wanted to see fair play for all.

I never had any incident in which they abused their powers of the [SP] and my server ran smoothly for years.

But these people were volunteers and I didn't have to pay them.

Now CCP will never give a subscriber [SP] rights on their server because sooner or later someone would abuse it or have the ability to distribute the credentials to others who would.

So it all goes back to the manpower issue.

So how does CCP get more manpower to have an [SP] team?
Up our subscription fees?
Use some of their profits?

You guys come up with the solution to their manpower issue and how to pay for it without cutting into their bottom line, and I would bet they would at least toss the idea around for a few minutes.

Now if CCP really wanted someone to help with alot of the issues that make this game less appealing and increase their subscriber base and do more to make their bottom line larger they know how to contact me via this account.

And stop trying to say CCP doesn't want to remove bots and make this game better because they do!
They wouldn't and haven't come 8 years for nothing!

…aside from the Freelancer market being nothing like the EVE market, and EVE being released two weeks after Freelancer giving them very little time to model anything based on that game (not to mention that the market model for EVE is far older than that and that Freelancer's standings mechanics weren't particularly original so they wouldn't have been copying FL anyway).

In fact, the only thing worth emulating from FL in EVE is its space geography — the way you noticed moving around the Sirius sector when you jump from one system to the next (and with, what? 50 systems compared to EVE's 7500, that's a whole lot easier). Pretty nothing else is worth salvaging, and that includes the way one would detect or deal with cheaters in that game.

Why do people keep suggest this as a way to stop bots? It won't at all.

Why? The reason is that the bots (sophisticated ones) are not just screen scraping the local window. They are performing python injection into the Eve client. This means they know what the client knows.

What does this mean? The eve client has to know about people in local/on grid etc... even if they are not shown in local. We see this in effect in a wormhole. Therefore, the information is still there for the to access. Its the HUMAN player that cannot know what is in local as the client doesn't tell them unless they hack it.

You really think they wouldn't be able to adapt? Botting adapted to get around Blizzard's Warden which is incredibly invasive. And you think that just changing from check Local to Pres DScan>Check DScan is going to be impossible for the botters to adapt to?

Ever heard of keeping someone cloaked on gate?

If you think you can solve anything in EVE by giving a player taskforce special GM/Dev powers, you've either lost your mind or you are completely unaware of the game you are playing.

Dunno, doesn't change that bots can watch DScan better than people. Second, if you keep Null based on Anoms (scannable without probes) and get rid of local, nobody's going to rat there to begin with, so getting rid of local necessarily means removing the isk generation to probing sites. Third, anything people can do, Bots can generally do better.

Corruptible police force with magic powers? Yes please, create thousands and unleash them upon the game.

I don't care how many bots CCP does or doesn't ban.

But the ease with which the client's python code can be decompiled and with which bots can hook into the client process is a disgrace.

Manually looking for botters is a waste of time.

It's sad that CCP doesn't want to implement proper behavioral analysis but I can imagine that this is not only a matter of false positives but also of server-side resources (when the bot detection takes more CPU cycles on the server than the bots cause, the whole unholy rage argument doesn't apply anmyore)

There are ways to easily spot some of the bots anyway - Linkage

/c