Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I came up with a simple solution that wouldn't require could get rid of 90% of the mining bots without changing game play much. Anyway, here it is.

Temporary Mining Licenses

There would be a dialog you could pop up from anywhere, with a CAPTCHA and that's it. You fill out the captcha and get a 1 hour license to mine. The license allows you to activate strips, mining lasers, or issue mine/mine repeatedly commands to drones. If the strip/drone/laser would auto-cycle after the license runs out it shuts down instead.

End result is that the least the afk bot-miners would now have to check in every hour to renew their license. If that doesnt seem to work well enough you can just shorten the license to 30 minutes. Eventually making bot miners pointless, unless your captcha is really bad.

Is so simple on the player side of things that it would throw the real miners, for however few are left into a tizzy.

If you hate the botters like every real care bear does, give this a bump, maybe CCP will take it to heart.

…because captchas are not already subject to automation and does not in any way annoy humans.

No, it wouldn't solve much except maybe make fewer actual people mine.

You do realise there are sites where third world people with internet connection can make a few cents an hour solving captcha... after captcha... after captcha?

It's a good thing there's no way automated software can solve captchas by paying people $0.01 each to solve them... oh wait....

The real solution to botting is not technical, it is to change the gameplay so repetitive activities are not rewarded. Rewards should be given for activities that require thought (e.g. planning extractor locations in PI) and not for the boring tasks (like collecting PI products once per day).

An advanced calculas captcha, only the chinese farmers will be left!

Great idea

Lets implement this, but picking on miners is so yesturday ...

Since you singled out one profession I am going assume you don't mine. So this change would not effect you.
Maybe, you run a mission bot or a ratting bot, maybe nothing, so lets put your brilliant idea to the whole of eve.

So you want to activate a module, move, etc pop up ...


I am sure this will get rid of the ratting bots, mission bots, mining bots, players new and old.


Not to mention the fun it would inject into PVP ....

Primary is ....
wait is that a g or a 9
hold on guys ....

2 hours later one frigate dead.


Thanks for thinking in a single view ... and running to the forums with it.
Your time and ideas are appreciated.

/end sarcasm

Captchas were effective 14 years ago. Right now there are services which you just transmit the captcha screenshot and get the result back in just a few seconds. How? They outsourced the captcha solving to 3rd world countries where they are paid pennies per captches solved.

How to kill bots? very easy, replace CCP workers who made new crap new UI and take them to wach asteroid belts 24/7? profit?

Im against boters but i spent in this game around 500 days, i dont care about them, i wont search them i wont looking for them, i wont waste my time, because of bots, im here to play eve and nothing more, realy not my job. CCP are responsible for this aspect in game, becuse they got money, and we pay for eve.

Oh, man... another one.

First of all, people in third world countries do not solve captchas for pennies. If you have an internet connection here (in a thrid world country), you have access to free learning resources for many programming languages. The lowest you can get is PSD to HTML/CSS and it's about $3-$10 per hour, depending how good you are at it (no tax included). If you are ready to learn something more complicated, like in my case, there are practically no limits to what you can achieve. I know it's not that much, but my $100 per hour for Zend coding is somewhat more than pennies for captchas. If you don't trust me, head to any freelancer site and look the demographics. I bet you'll see that 90% of the coders are from India, Pakistan, Eastern Europe or some other poor part of the world.

Captcha's were effective 14 years ago. Right now there are algorithms that can solve them.

Like people mentioned above, there are ways around this and it would be really annoying for people who are mining legitimately.

I think CCP should track mouse movements, something that can detect ocr/input/x-y repeatable movements that are to precise and non random for it to be human input.
When suspected, sends a log to CCP + raise a red flag, so they can investigate and take action.