Fall of Man

 

Today I would like to talk about botting and the measures taken to fight it, which I mentioned, yesterday.

Botting is nothing new to online games, but in an MMORPG that focuses on money like no other, botting can have a huge impact on the in-game-economy and everyones game experience. There are quite a number of different bot-types out there. They can either mine resources, kill off rats (NPC-ships spawning in different locations, e.g. asteroid belts), manage your buy- and sell-orders, simply fly around and move large quantities of cargo or even fight other players in large fleet engagements.

This is a double-edged sword to CCP. The accounts are paid for, so they generate income. Even if they are paid by obtaining game time in form of PLEXes via ISK (the in-game currency), these PLEXes have been bought of CCP by other players. So near- and intermediate-term this is a good thing for CCP. Botters pay!

In the long term, though, botters are a bane to the game. Not only can they, if used strategically, shut down whole systems for other players. They also generate a hyperinflation (if this is not countered somehow), because of their ability to be active many hours a day. This is a crucial point. If the standard EVE player, still having a life outside of New Eden, is able to invest just one or two hours a day in playing this game, he will have to do a lot more ISK to finance his PvP-experiences. EVE's mission-running and mining (probably the two mostly picked professions to make some ISK) are boring and unsatisfying at best. Now guess what happens, when a player increasingly has to do things he doesn't enjoy and decreasingly being able to do the things he enjoys in a game...

As I pointed out, yesterday, CCP are taking action.

I'll quote the most important lines for you and comment them:

| The Report Bot Feature
We recently added the Report Bot feature into the EVE Client. This feature should provide everyone with a straight forward way of reporting Bots right from within the game.

This is acutally a good thing, but it is not as easy as it seems. I'll come to that in a moment.

Now, the players reported using this feature are automatically investigated. If a reported player is identified as being a bot, the following policies are enforced:

• First offense: 14 days ban
• Second offense: 30 days ban
• Third offense: Permanent ban

Let's do some maths, shall we? Let's assume I'm running a single account with a mission-running/PvPing character and one for mining/hauling. I have only 1 hour a day during the week and 3 hours a day during the weekends, making 11 hours a week of playtime. So during a whole month I could invest up to about, say 50 hours in making ISK. Let's also assume that doing this a whole month through is sufficient to pay for a single account.
I could now buy a new account, using my non-EVE-playing girlfriend's/parent's/brother's/friend's name and train his basic botting-skills, then buy a bot and start letting it get in the ISK instead of me. Letting the bot work 12 hours a day you'll have the ISK worth a month of work in only four days. Using different systems every day will reduce the chance of someone recognising your pattern. This can easily be done for months and months. If you are unlucky and someone DOES realise the somehow artificial behaviour AND he has the spirits and endurance to work off his check list on reporting bots (see below) AND you are recognised as a bot user by CCP, you have to stop the procedure for 14 days. Then you can start again with no worries at all, because you will get a third chance, anyway. After that, you can just go on. Considering you had the bot running for 6 months until the account gets banned, it has already paid for itself and for your original one for about 21 months - nearly 2 years! This number can be raised by adding more botting accounts.

So, do you see a pattern in the ban policies and the fact botting-accounts generate an income for CCP?

| When to report a bot?
Bots are all about rules (events, states, conditions, transitions, actions) and goals! A bot reacts to events according to a predetermined limited set of rules, triggering appropriate actions in response in order to meet its goals. In a world otherwise driven by human players, most of the times this rule based behavior can be observed under close investigation.
Therefore, before submitting a report, we encourage players to perform a brief but structured investigation.

• Observe the behavior of the player and break it down into stages of processing (States, Conditions and Actions)
  
  • Break down the behaviour into states
    • What is each individual phase of the activity a subject carries on ?
    • Consider each phase a "State"
    • Example of states : "Idle, Docked, Warping, Mining, Hunting, etc"
  • Break down the behaviour into conditions
    • When does the activity of a subject change ?
    • Consider each change one or several "Conditions" that has been met and a transition to another "State" 
    • Example of conditions : "if state is mining and cargo is not empty then; if state is mining and ship is targeted and enemy is not NPC then; etc"
  • Break down the behaviour into actions
    • How does the subject carry on his activity ?
    • Consider each individual operation or group of operations carried out by a subject as an Action
    • Example of an action in a certain state when a certain condition has been met : "if state is mining and ship is targeted and enemy is not NPC then warp (to safe spot); etc"
• Try to determine if the player you are observing seems to act repetitively according to a strict set of rules (for example, executing the same steps over and over for an extended period of time)
• Try to determine its goals
• Challenge the rules (try to think of possible triggers that would cause it to respond in a certain way if it is truly automated)
• Trigger events and perceive reactions (does it respond to communication? How does it react to being locked or being warped in on? Does it react the same every time, for example by warping always in the same direction before returning to the exact same spot minutes later?)
• Finally, use your human intelligence to determine whether it is a soulless automaton or simply a fellow, single-minded player.

* Note
There are different types of bots, each type having other rules according to which they carry on their activity. Try to adapt your investigation to the type of bot you are observing.

I told you it wasn't that easy, didn't I? So basically, you are encouraged to start a lengthy research of the possible bot's behaviour. Not only is this wasted time you pay for - you also are doing CCP's job on this one! Let me repeat: You are paying subscription fees to be allowed to do CCP's job without being rewarded. And why should they? You have been so insolent as to set something in motion which will cost CCP-employers time and money! Shame on you, scoundrel!

| Abuse and consequences?
By the time of writing this blog, we have received more than 500 reports from players using this feature.  While some players successfully managed to report players who were bots, some players used this feature to report players who were far from being bots. There is a difference between not being able to distinguish a bot from a human and the clear intent to report players out of any other interests.
We strongly recommend against using the Report Bot Feature with any other intent than the one it has been designed for. Abuse of this feature will have consequences.

Of course this is important. You don't want to see another witch-hunt, do you? But the abuse of this would be the best way to counter the efforts[?] CCP are taking to stop botting. There are large, strategically bot using entities in EVE, consisting of hundreds of players. As long as the 'Report Bot' feature is usable by trial accounts, these entities could create free trial accounts and start reporting anyone they see. This would paralyse the security staff, even though their head may be one of Zeus' sons...

Let us all hope that Eve won't do to New Eden what she did to the old one...