Concern About Job Botting/multibox Hogging

[Ryle [N7R]]

So this discussion was raised last night in New Players channel. About five people, including myself, were discussing it, and then later this morning I saw yet another discussion on it, albeit briefly. Most of the people involved appeared to me to be solo players or returning players, or relatively new. Then someone said "botting is allowed, etcetc" and I wanted to raise a point.

Just because you can do a thing, doesnt mean you should or are encouraged to do a thing.

Seriously botters with 4-6 toons at a time, hogging up everything just so they can have how many dozens of toons? Thats really arrogant and rude to the other players out there slowgrinding their way up one toon at a time.

In other games I have been in, there has always been a fine line about things like this. Gray areas around spawn camping or hogging marketspace or so on. (the general rule of thumb has always been that if its denying content to other players, it should be put a stop to, at least in every other game ive played)

Really we just watched job terminals go through tweaks and updates to give us more jobs, and even staggering the jobs to make it more fair to grab.

Grab four or so toons and mob the terminal, get every job, right botters?

The little guy, the solo player, the returning player, the infrequent weekend warrior.... they all get cut short by greedy "minemineitsallmine" players swarming the system.

Rather than having the devs keep trying to fix the system thats never really been broken to begin with, can something be done to discourage botting of jobs? I dont know what mechanic it could be, but honestly in VT and Earth stations (last I heard) its been pretty ridiculous.

Maybe put all levels of jobs on all terminals, and mix it up so theres no one "precious best" place to go swarm farm with multiple accounts?

Just a thought. Edited February 7, 2012 by Ryle

[Tienbau]

I was thinking pretty much the same thing - increasing the job count still further and listing various levels. Then, if you're macro-ing you'll probably be picking up the lower level jobs, you'll still get XP but nothing like the actual 'live' players who can pick the highest level ones.

[Terrell [BT]]

[quote name='Tienbau' timestamp='1328657225' post='53295']
I was thinking pretty much the same thing - increasing the job count still further and listing various levels. Then, if you're macro-ing you'll probably be picking up the lower level jobs, you'll still get XP but nothing like the actual 'live' players who can pick the highest level ones.
[/quote]

Putting multiple levels of jobs at all stations with the terminals would still be a good thing, as different players at any given terminal may have different job levels desired.

I don't think that it will hurt marcroers much though. There were macros that could get a particular type of job and do said job when setup properly.

[Amethyst]

High level players can just as easily mop up all the jobs as low level players. Its not the killing process, its the job collection process. I've seen a page of jobs disappear within a second or two. The botter has a macro that auto-clicks to take 6 jobs, and then discards the jobs they dont want to take. Smart - yes, fair gameplay - no.

Same kind of people mop up gas in the same way - often carrying a couple of toons leveling up explore. Poproids are a good deterent. Lets have some explosive gas clouds with a unit of hydrogen in them with a random chance of BOOM.

I don't buy the 'attended bots are OK' thing - botting is botting.

[Tienbau]

should be a little better after the restart & sync.

[karu [WDL]]

[quote name='Tienbau' timestamp='1328657225' post='53295']Then, if you're macro-ing you'll probably be picking up the lower level jobs, you'll still get XP but nothing like the actual 'live' players who can pick the highest level ones.[/quote]autonomous macros are picking pretty specific jobs. they click on job, check few parameters from job description (like location name) and then decide if thats the job they after.

there is two things autonomous bots need[list]
[*]/starbase reset
[*]map navs are static
[/list]
/starbase reset on macro side is something like
[code]setmemory bd8860,0
setmemory bd7ea0,1239513710
keys /starbase reset{RETURN}
delay 100[/code]

map when zoomed out and moved to top-right corner, places all navs where bot expects them.

so imho:[list]
[*]scramble or lock down starbase reset memory address
[*]move jobs to random temporary navs and inject them to player session. modify job description accordingly.
[/list]
neither of them should disrupt normal players, but gives headache for botters (until they write a proper bot that is)

[Tienbau]

oh the bots are hooking the client memory to trigger events are they?

We're only really focussing on how to enable live players to be able to have some decent jobs available, not throw of the macro-ers. I have better things to do than engage in a mantis shrimp vs armour lobster evolution circle.

Now there are more jobs, a limit on how many jobs you can accept over time, multiple levels of jobs too. All should help.

[Falstar [MOD]]

I saw this suggestion somewhere - about making jobs so you can't forfeit them. I wouldn't agree to that, but I think a delay before you could forfeit may be helpful. That way anyone (bot or not) just taking 6 jobs all at once, would have to wait a little bit before trying to get more if they didn't like the ones they got. That at least would make job takers take them more carefully and have less thrown out.

[cbrown2300]

So now that we have botters..

Share more on how us lay people can do it. Provide some examples please. I'm a tad slow. Maybe the technical section?
What is the bot software or application title(s)? Can you help me out with the bot macros?

Haven't seen any farmer's yet but not sure..
I just want to play on an equal playing field..


Thanks! Edited September 13, 2012 by Starshot

[drjeff]

This discussion is a recurring theme of every online game...and it reflects the difference between common courtesy among people and those who are always "me first". Common courtesy in game and in real life, dictates that we are free to do as we chose as long as it does not negatively effect someone else's life or experience. This is the same general rule in gaming as well. The type of person who would create a Bot program to steal all the jobs at a terminal, then cherry pick the ones they want and screw anyone else who might be there trying to also get a job, is an unfortunate fact of life in the human experience. The battle for the DEV's has always been the dance with these type people to eliminate that type of activity somehow.....until the jerks create a work-around. This activity is an EXPLOIT, pure and simple and making this kind of activity a Ban-able offence seems to be the only real way to make it mostly go away....it strips the casual jerks down to the hard-core jerks. Then the DEV's must have a positive way of identifying who is Botting and ban them. In my experience, the E&B community has been better at not having a lot of jerks...way better than any other game I've ever played....but there's a bad apple in every barrel and those bad ones must be identified and removed or it spoils it for all of us.


[color=#ee82ee][size=5][font='lucida sans unicode', 'lucida grande', sans-serif]RIANA[/font][/size][/color]

[Rossdie [BT]]

As it is now isn't botting afk a bannable offense?

[Klyde]

Unattended macros have always been a no-no. From what I have heard attended macros are allowed, but don't know for sure. Never used em in live or here. I'm here to play the game, not have my computer do it for me... what's the point?

[HellHasArrived]

[quote name='Klyde' timestamp='1347671775' post='63407']
Unattended macros have always been a no-no. From what I have heard attended macros are allowed, but don't know for sure. Never used em in live or here. I'm here to play the game, not have my computer do it for me... what's the point?
[/quote]
No computer could ever heal like you anyways...

[DarkkHero]

AFK Botting is bannable.

[GenghisBob]

Don't know if this would be too hard to implement, but if you could make it so a player could only forfiet six jobs in 20 min. This way they might grab six jobs and forfiet some but soon they will be stuck with the jobs they grabbed for 20 min.

I say six because I rember when I could first do 105 jobs. I grabbed six combat jobs and almost got my butt kicked on the first one (just took too long to kill). I forfieted the rest and dropped back to easier jobs until I could get my next level of guns.
20 min. sounds about right to actually do the jobs, or at least some of them before getting more.

[Kingdud]

Lol...same issue we had in live. Just remove jobs or give a gameplay alternative. You'll never "fix" jobs to where people are happy until there's always a stack of jobs waiting for them and only them. :p At which point it's basically an XP fountain and why not just make more XP fountains that involve 'going outside', like gas cloud mining planets, or non-chaining farmable mob spawns in *many* places, so people can powerlevel combat and trade XP with killing and loot?

 

"It's monotonous!" so are jobs. Make the fields have a 'headshot' reward, so that if you can find some cleverly hidden pattern in the ships you can progressively kill through a chain of command and kill some top-end figure and get a reward (XP? Items? Credits?) similar to how you get a bonus now for clearing a mining field.

[Terrell [BT]]

Jobs or something similar is necessary, especially for the non-explorer professions to keep their EL balanced.  There aren't, and probably shouldn't be enough navs to get a player from EL0 to EL50.  Not all players like doing tour groups to get their EL up, and only the exploration professions have a steady supply of explore XP beyond the navs. 

[Knight05]

So this discussion was raised last night in New Players channel. About five people, including myself, were discussing it, and then later this morning I saw yet another discussion on it, albeit briefly. Most of the people involved appeared to me to be solo players or returning players, or relatively new. Then someone said "botting is allowed, etcetc" and I wanted to raise a point.

Just because you can do a thing, doesnt mean you should or are encouraged to do a thing.

Seriously botters with 4-6 toons at a time, hogging up everything just so they can have how many dozens of toons? Thats really arrogant and rude to the other players out there slowgrinding their way up one toon at a time.

In other games I have been in, there has always been a fine line about things like this. Gray areas around spawn camping or hogging marketspace or so on. (the general rule of thumb has always been that if its denying content to other players, it should be put a stop to, at least in every other game ive played)

Really we just watched job terminals go through tweaks and updates to give us more jobs, and even staggering the jobs to make it more fair to grab.

Grab four or so toons and mob the terminal, get every job, right botters?

The little guy, the solo player, the returning player, the infrequent weekend warrior.... they all get cut short by greedy "minemineitsallmine" players swarming the system.

Rather than having the devs keep trying to fix the system thats never really been broken to begin with, can something be done to discourage botting of jobs? I dont know what mechanic it could be, but honestly in VT and Earth stations (last I heard) its been pretty ridiculous.

Maybe put all levels of jobs on all terminals, and mix it up so theres no one "precious best" place to go swarm farm with multiple accounts?

Just a thought.

 

 

Why couldn't they just instance the jobs or something. Some mmo's i played for example tjhe wizard and warrior types. For resources such as ore wood etc they would INSTANCE IT. What that means is the item stays static and doesnt dissapear when its looted it just doesnt show as lootable for that person anymore. But now joe shmoe walks up and can loot it also. Its instanced resources. Couldn't the same concept be done for jobs? Jobs not being removed when they are acceoted? They are simple accepted by the player then locked out till those 6 jobs are completed rinse and repeat. The jobs are all the same after all to the same place doing the same thing so why couldn't it be instanced?

[Danemarkian]

I like the idea of just making the jobs available for everyone.  Knight has it right by it being instanced.   It should be there for anyone coming in looking for it.  For realism, obvioulsy it would make sense that the mission would be removed, however,  for gameplay's sake it make sense to have them available so that botters don't ruin the flow for the other gamers. 

 

If it's a bannable offense, then good.  Nothing worse than someone cheating in a game that's supposed to be fun.  If you can't put in the time to play, then don't play the game.  

[wireclub]

Botting is a problem and in my opinion it was a bad idea in the first place but we are stuck with it now and it is unlikely to change. Thing is those of us actually playing the game rather then watching a program play the game for them are faced with ridiculous waiting time's for jobs more so at the low end . and multiple ton's camping spots so we can't get a kill. Fun times we are playing in . But as mentioned I seriously doubt its going to change now it's the correct thing to do but it won't so basically just suck up and put up with the issue like many others hope things will be changed or stop playing .

[Stanig[IS]]

We have mechanisms in place to monitor botting actually.  What you see may be one person with a half dozen toons but is actually there playing them.  In that case, there is zero we can or will do, since they are actually playing the game.

 

The only time it becomes botting is when they are using a third party program to automate the process and do not respond to us when we check them.

 

Frankly this game is 13 years old, from a time when 128 megs of ram was considered good.  If someone wants to put in the effort to speed level themselves, hey man... have fun with that.  O_o

 

But they arent breaking the TOS if they are at the computer.

[dragonrose]

I just want to say, that I have NEVER had a problem with job terminals, no matter which level job I have gone after, I have always been able to get 6 jobs within a reasonable time frame, & even get the ones all for the same place. So I don't understand why everyone bitches about this, I play at all different times of the day/night & nine times out of ten there isn't even anyone else at the job terminals. Just my two cents worth.

[Stanig[IS]]

This thread is actually a necro from back before all the new bot catching systems were in.  I was rather surprised to see it resurface since the issue was pretty much killed off when the XP was halved and the botters were mostly caught.

[Luciferish]

Unless someone has figured out how to extract data from the client, such as what jobs are displayed in the terminal, it would be very hard to macro a job terminal.  The random nature, duplication of jobs coming from the listing and other little bugs such as CTD when jobbing would prevent a macro from being very effective.  Multi-box players all hitting the same job terminal for the same jobs however could be a little hard to deal with, but I haven't seen many doing it with more than one or two toons.

 

The major question that stands is are there ways to extract/inject data via the client.  To my knowledge the client was specifically designed to prevent this very early in it's development. Most of the macro methods I know about are input macros that control key and mouse input.  Rudimentary macros can be executed this way but could only be used for very simple tasks. 

 

Get Data From Terminal

Insert Data to client

Toon Movement

Docking, target selection and warping

Gating

 

All of these things could be done with a key/mouse macro for a single client but more than one or two would be nearly impossible. Even with AC Macro it would be very unreliable.

[Mimir[IS]]

This thread is actually a necro from back before all the new bot catching systems were in.  I was rather surprised to see it resurface since the issue was pretty much killed off when the XP was halved and the botters were mostly caught.

Wow what a classy way that the botters were handled. Personally I would have liked to see a public lynching but noooo the Devs/GMs kept it low key, they dealt with the issue and moved on... with not so much as a by your leave.  Very cool, so those of you that say nothing is being done think again.

 

Just my 2 credits worth...and as always I may be way off base here.