Botting is a widespread plague of MMOs. A botter can gain insane amount of game resources since it “farms for free”: the time of the bot costs the player nothing. To be competitive with the botter, you must be very effective to offset the fact that your time has its opportunity cost. Assuming the botter is not dumber than you, you cannot win (the botter can actively trade as much as I do while having a bot running in the background getting him “free” income).
MMO developers struggle to fight bots. The reason is that the botting software constantly evolves and avoids detection. Behavioral scanning is problematic, as many commenters pointed out on my bot-finding post: I did not find a bot. I found characters that play extremely inefficiently and repetitively for very long time. While this description fits most bots and few players, claiming that they were bots is just like claiming “all people below 150 cm are children”. People who don’t fit into a description that fits most people are minorities by definition and the current politics are very favoring towards minorities. So while I still believe that CCP (and other game developers) don’t ban bots they knew to be bots, I accept that this isn’t because of the love of bots, but because of the fear of bad press because of maltreating the less then bright players.
To solve the botting problem, we first have to see what the fundamental problem is. It’s not the bots, they are just the consequence. The problem is that a dumb, mechanical but very time-consuming way of playing is rewarded. I mean farming in EVE Online in a way that provides 10M/hour income is very dumb. But if you do it 20 hours a day all month, you get 6B ISK, which is enough to pay for 11 accounts. Similarly, if you lose all your battlegrounds in WoW with very bad kill/death ratio, you still get about 100 honor points/game. If you can play 3 games an hour and play 20 hours a day, you can max out your honor every day. What is the best way of playing 20 hours a day? Botting.
What would be the solution? There are two, a harsh and a more dumb-friendly. The harsh approach is making all gaming activities losable. If you would lose honor points for losing a WoW battleground, no one would bot it. If a mining ship would have about 10M/hour fuel costs while in space, no one would bot or AFK mining. As this would be a game mechanic affecting everyone instead of a Game Master decision like bot banning, failing to be productive would be “losing the game” which cannot create bad press. Chess doesn’t ban dumb players from playing, they just lose all the time and quit. The above approach simply makes the game unplayable to dumb people. If you can’t win X% battlegrounds, you can’t play battlegrounds as you go negative in honor. If you can’t earn fuel cost while farming, you can’t farm, and if you can’t farm you can’t get ISK for anything in EVE.
However dumb people are also possible customers so no point losing them. So here is the dumb-friendly approach: you can use a farming feature X hours a week. I mean you can spend X hours a week in WoW battlegrounds, after that you can’t queue up for more. You can mine X hours a week/account in EVE Online, after that the miner modules fail to activate. You can also be in combat with NPCs (except belt and gate rats) for X hours a week/account, after that the rats give no bounty, mission completion nor leave wreck. You can spend X hours a week/account hauling distribution mission cargo. You can set/update Y market orders a week/account. This way the dumb player can still mine and get ISK from mining. But he can’t get rich. The smart player who can farm for 3x higher ISK/hour would get 3x more ISK and it couldn’t be compensated by botting 24/7. A botter would simply have no way to be competitive with a real player, so botting would be irrelevant.
A nasty mistake in the ganking guide was fixed: there is no need to continuously run the passive targeter, if you got a lock with it you don't get flashy yellow on his overview.
Jackpod and change in the WGBWC rules I wrote that the average T1 barge pod is about 80M. It’s true. However the pod costs have large spread. It’s not like most pods are in the 60-100 range. Most pods are empty or have a few cheap implants. Then there are a few extremely expensive ones. “Jackpod” - I use to write to the channel, celebrating that extraordinary player stupidity was found and defeated. To have the 80M average, for every 1B pod there must be a dozen empty ones.
When I originally created the WGBWC rules, I was thinking about my own first ganking experiment ending in 52B/month kills using just one ganker. Expecting members to perform 10% of my own isn’t an extraordinary request. Expecting members to perform 6% to be invited is even less.
Now that I gank again, I see that the randomness of the ISK value can be a cause of problems to member aspirants. If you are unlucky and get no Jackpods, the 3/5B needed to join/stay can mean 80-120 solo T1 barge kills (before high skillpoints or dual ganking you have little chance to kill T2 exhumers). On the other hand you can get to the limit with a single Jackpod.
So the rules are changed to the following: To stay in the corp you need to provide either 50 solo ship kills or 10B kills (not just solo). To get into the corp, you need to provide 30/6B. Of course the kills need to be in highsec, as the other rule says.
MMO developers struggle to fight bots. The reason is that the botting software constantly evolves and avoids detection. Behavioral scanning is problematic, as many commenters pointed out on my bot-finding post: I did not find a bot. I found characters that play extremely inefficiently and repetitively for very long time. While this description fits most bots and few players, claiming that they were bots is just like claiming “all people below 150 cm are children”. People who don’t fit into a description that fits most people are minorities by definition and the current politics are very favoring towards minorities. So while I still believe that CCP (and other game developers) don’t ban bots they knew to be bots, I accept that this isn’t because of the love of bots, but because of the fear of bad press because of maltreating the less then bright players.
To solve the botting problem, we first have to see what the fundamental problem is. It’s not the bots, they are just the consequence. The problem is that a dumb, mechanical but very time-consuming way of playing is rewarded. I mean farming in EVE Online in a way that provides 10M/hour income is very dumb. But if you do it 20 hours a day all month, you get 6B ISK, which is enough to pay for 11 accounts. Similarly, if you lose all your battlegrounds in WoW with very bad kill/death ratio, you still get about 100 honor points/game. If you can play 3 games an hour and play 20 hours a day, you can max out your honor every day. What is the best way of playing 20 hours a day? Botting.
What would be the solution? There are two, a harsh and a more dumb-friendly. The harsh approach is making all gaming activities losable. If you would lose honor points for losing a WoW battleground, no one would bot it. If a mining ship would have about 10M/hour fuel costs while in space, no one would bot or AFK mining. As this would be a game mechanic affecting everyone instead of a Game Master decision like bot banning, failing to be productive would be “losing the game” which cannot create bad press. Chess doesn’t ban dumb players from playing, they just lose all the time and quit. The above approach simply makes the game unplayable to dumb people. If you can’t win X% battlegrounds, you can’t play battlegrounds as you go negative in honor. If you can’t earn fuel cost while farming, you can’t farm, and if you can’t farm you can’t get ISK for anything in EVE.
However dumb people are also possible customers so no point losing them. So here is the dumb-friendly approach: you can use a farming feature X hours a week. I mean you can spend X hours a week in WoW battlegrounds, after that you can’t queue up for more. You can mine X hours a week/account in EVE Online, after that the miner modules fail to activate. You can also be in combat with NPCs (except belt and gate rats) for X hours a week/account, after that the rats give no bounty, mission completion nor leave wreck. You can spend X hours a week/account hauling distribution mission cargo. You can set/update Y market orders a week/account. This way the dumb player can still mine and get ISK from mining. But he can’t get rich. The smart player who can farm for 3x higher ISK/hour would get 3x more ISK and it couldn’t be compensated by botting 24/7. A botter would simply have no way to be competitive with a real player, so botting would be irrelevant.
A nasty mistake in the ganking guide was fixed: there is no need to continuously run the passive targeter, if you got a lock with it you don't get flashy yellow on his overview.
When I originally created the WGBWC rules, I was thinking about my own first ganking experiment ending in 52B/month kills using just one ganker. Expecting members to perform 10% of my own isn’t an extraordinary request. Expecting members to perform 6% to be invited is even less.
Now that I gank again, I see that the randomness of the ISK value can be a cause of problems to member aspirants. If you are unlucky and get no Jackpods, the 3/5B needed to join/stay can mean 80-120 solo T1 barge kills (before high skillpoints or dual ganking you have little chance to kill T2 exhumers). On the other hand you can get to the limit with a single Jackpod.
So the rules are changed to the following: To stay in the corp you need to provide either 50 solo ship kills or 10B kills (not just solo). To get into the corp, you need to provide 30/6B. Of course the kills need to be in highsec, as the other rule says.
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