EVE General Discussion

My argument was that there's no need to run software on the client to analyse the client's behaviour.

Thankyou for providing another argument demonstrating how hard it is to detect bots.

My point here is that ANY of these could be bots OR human players. Despite what you thing, it cannot be detected without massive amounts of stats - over time - to locate any patterns that might exist

And as posted above, which was my next point, injecting randomness to break patterning in code is soooo easy to implement it's not funny. Notwithstanding that a player can also choose to have day off here and there and log earlier on odd days to randomise it even more.

this

Chess has been botted .

The bots have millions of combination of board postions stored in their database.
then their is some logic to follow the best path.

How do you prevent botting in chess ? you don't because you would need to break the rules.

How do you prevent botting in Eve ? thankfully eve can be a bit more complicated than chess but unfortunately the mechanics that the bots are exploiting are arguably less complicated . So is the answer, you don't because it would break the rules of eve ?

Or is the answer to implement a mechanic that would make it infinitely more difficult for a bot to function in eve.

No one wants to be bothered with more complexity or extra methods. The truth however, is that something needs to change in eve.

Whether it be the mechanics that the bots are exploiting or a simple mini game that's impossible for bots to solve .

the mini game would be the easiest to implement . but i would personally prefer a mechanics change.

and as for a the third option . several billion dollar companies have utterly failed at keeping bots off of Personal Computers for decades. you honestly think a million dollar budget will achieve more than those companies have ?

and have in the past




more to the point, arent there MMOs that run programs like that already?
WoW for example.
I know there are things inside their software package that trip my malware detecting programs when Ive had it installed in the past

Programs like Warden and Punk Buster do not stop botting.

There are various ways to bypass both of these programs as well as there being many bots which still remain hidden from Warden.

I also found it funny when Symantec started to treat Warden as malware after an update and try to delete it.

different human-computer interface developed by CCP

You plug your nodes on your head and things will happen. No other interface allowed, token to calrify user as well as brain scan prior to login.

Moral of the story is : How far you gonna go to fulfill "threat" reduction. Is the actual alternative reality worth losing so much of our imaginary "rights"

Blizzard had a lot of botting problems with Diablo and later with WoW. They use a two-pronged approach.

First off, if they detect a compiler and/or decompiler, they dumb down the bot detection code, so the bot developer cannot accurately determine whether or not the bot will be caught by the production detection code. In this way, the devloper cannot figure out counter-measures for producion bot detection alogrithms becuase bot detection will only run at "full power" if no developer tools are present.

Secondly, they look at actions taken by the bot : server-side DB reads in the form of stuff you shouldn't know, memory writes or over-writes faster than humanly possible. Also, the bot detection code does checksums against the client and somehow has methods to detect when the correct checksum is being faked. And when they think they found a bot, a GM randomly PM's the bot/player. They can detect some forms of emulation, so if you are running a virtual machine they can detect an outside environment calling the shots. Some extreme forms of hardware emulation are not detecable but cost in the range of $100K (buy them from HP) and are intended for the engineering lab and/or hardware development team.

Blizzard does more - similar to virus checkers, they keep a list and strings of code samples to identify known bots and test for their presence. So, if you have a bot, then change it's name, or create a variant, they can still find it. I'm positive they do stuff that is a well kept set of secrets.

Blizzard stopped the bots by invading your machine at a virus-checker level. CCP can stop the bots too, but as many have said, they may or may not have the corporate will to do so. Did they already lay off the bot guy they supposedly hired ? If not, what is that guy up to ???