Player Features and Ideas Discussion

They mine, they mission, they kill the NPCs in our belts, they run our anoms, kill faction spawns we would have otherwise found, and warp out the second local spikes. They are bots, and there are thousands of them. Bots run 23 hours a day, every day, and have a profound impact on our game economy.

Right now, all we can do to stop them is to report them when we come across them, but even then the hordes of bots doing empire missions can often be indistinguishable from other folks flying around. Furthermore, countermeasures like Captcha recognition bot-checks, devs hunting bots, or increasing the complexity of missions, mining, and NPCing, all are either impractical or subtract from our gameplay.

However, perhaps there is a way to deal with bots, not by subtracting from gameplay, but enriching it for individual players and groups.

I propose the idea of adding additional, mostly harmless, occasional, NPC spawns to a wide range of activities... hang with me here and read on.

If an occasional additional spawn were to be added to a mission, belt, anom, etc, indistinguishable from the rest of the NPCs present through number or type, instead only by look, location, or flight pattern. If that spawn only aggroed via light EW such as target painting, had no bounties or loot, and if that spawn where to call in overwhelming reinforcements when attacked (also no bounties or loot, maybe even sleeper AI)...

Bots would be unable to filter the extra spawn out, and attack, thus dieing horribly and quickly.

On the other hand, players, being human, would have the capacity to visually identify, via different ship color schemes, location of the spawn, or behavior/flight pattern, and be able to choose to not attack such an additional spawn, thus not changing the solo player experience.

And so, a bit of variety would be added for solo players, an added degree of difficulty, only present now and then (or maybe with increasing probability dependent on how long a player has been online and killing NPCs.. can you say bot?), that could be easily avoided.

But that's not all folks! While bots may die horribly, and players choose to pass on that fate, why not give groups of players something to do? Why not have that initial spawn, which would overwhelm a solo player, have further additional reinforcement waves behind it, and behind those waves, a single, minor faction BS or cruiser. Thus, giving rise to calling up your corpmates when you find such a spawn in your mission, your belt, your complex, your anom, and having them come help kill all the reinforcement waves, and get some nifty loot at the end!

PvE would be enriched and bots would die by the bucketful:

Solo players can avoid the spawns

Bots cant filter them out since the look just like the rest of the NPCs aside from telltales like location, behavior, or coloring, which are impossible to programmaticaly analyze, and thus they die horrible when they attack the trap.

Groups of players have a new activity to engage in when one of their corp members runs across such a different kind of spawn, thus fostering the social and interactive aspects of the game, and adding such aspects to what are normally solo activities.


Please comment and discuss. I'm sure there are issues, problems, and potentially improvements that I have yet to think of or am blind to.

Simply ensure that reinforcement spawns are sufficiently large that a group of 10+ would be required. Furthermore, neuts and scrams aplenty from the NPCs. Sleeper style AI would also be very effective against bots... why do you think there aren't any in the higher level wormholes?

If 10 bots or more where in the same place, spammed with NPC scrams, I'm sure a local fleet would turn up and be happy to shoot them.

having the occasional NPC in empire space run around with class 5 or 6 sleeper AI (complete with neuting/scraming) would put bots to bed in a hurry, though players would be able to find ways around such NPCs.