It appears that RED has placed a number of bots currently named SCIN-?? at all the grey sector stations. Eventually these bots will need to removed.

First it gives RED and thier associates such as FAMY an unfair advantage in the game
Second and more importantly the bots are keeping all the station sectors constantly alive which takes up Guilds server space.

If the bots are not removed then sooner or later other guilds will also start running this type of bot to help even things back out and creating a large army of bots.

Sorry guys but I need my privacy.

Please remove your bots voluntarily and save everyone a lot of fuss....

You're a bit behind the times....we had a falling out. But I am not a fan of the number of bots either. So you get a +1 for your idea, and a -1 for your lack of up-to-date knowledge.

You can either have your 0 as a + or -

These bots are a clear violation of the ROC 1.1.3:
You may not disrupt the normal playability of a sector or area.

Sector/Area Disruption is defined as any activity designed to harm or inconvenience a number of groups rather than a specific player or group of players.


These bots DO inconvenience everyone who plays, and do disrupt normal playability.
These bots are all trial accounts being run on friend keys, what gives any guild the right to monitor all corners of space?
And they are almost unable to be stopped, or take a lengthy amount of time to find (also exploiting the collision bugs in the game [hiding in roids], logging in and out on a plugin to further reach different areas).

I have no problem with them if they are subscribed, but if they are only trials running on friend keys then they are not paying for their server space and need to be removed.

They are also at every UIT station and also several WH sectors. They seem to have an automated log in/log out cycle: they log in every 5 minutes for about 20 seconds, just long enough to poll the sector list and run whatever scripts they need, I expect. No doubt they cycle thru all alts of what appears to be many accounts to cover as many sectors as they are watching. Pretty effective, as I moved my trident around UIT and Grey, SCIN bots were effectively tracking my every port of call.

I hate player bots in this game, but how is this any different from the various flavors of "spotter" plugins that various guilds use? If these are paid accounts, they are paying to support the server use. If this is trial account abuse, it should be crushed.

As far as I am aware, any other persistent bots are paid for by long time subscribers.

I am at GDC and uber busy. I am just posting to say that I am aware of the discussion. I can't speak to whether the accounts are paid at present (I just don't know, no time beyond this post).

We do have the availability of captcha popup stuff in the client, and other features. Bots have always flown in a "gray area" for us: not specifically approved, but not dis-approved of either. I don't want to exclude things the player base considers beneficial, but there is some point when usage is being taken too far.

Fool me... i was hoping those were a testbed for Persistent NPCs implementation, from GS...

I don't have a problem with bots so much if they are run on a fully paid subscription account, but running them from a trial or lite sub is lame. Plus, having the bots log in and out, cycling thru 6 alts at 6 different locations seems abusive to me too.

I don't have a problem with spy bots reporting on player locations provided the bot is hiding out in space somewhere, allowing them to be searched out and destroyed by someone who doesn't like its presence, but hiding the bot in a station or inside an asteroid is lame, as is logging in and out to make it difficult to find the bot.

My suggestion to mitigate the station abuse would be to have an optional captcha to be entered after a given amount of time inactive, where if the captcha is not entered then someone sitting in a station wouldn't be able to see traffic in the sector from the sector list or in the bar. And launching from the station then exploding or logging in and out should not be a means to reset the inactivity counter.

EDIT: make the captcha an unobtrusive entry displayed in the sector list after being inactive rather than a popup dialog that would be disruptive.

I would like to add that i will not be buying vo again and I have no alts to play as i deleted them.

Heh... I think you're in the wrong thread, sjwest.

I like the concept and implementation, but the scope is a little insane. As mentioned above, banning bots would create a bad precedent considering the number of other uses they can serve. Moderation is the solution here.

TGFT have been using lite subs to run persistent bots since lite subs were released. I have proof from their internal discussions which I obtained though very clever espionage.

Check out these handy quotes:

[Sun Mar 24 22:37:27 2013] (guild) [Latos C-2] <Trader Jack> I have had a bot floating around a station, and near a wh. The one near the station they duel outside the nfz, then shoot up your ship.
[Sun Mar 24 22:37:46 2013] (guild) [Ukari L-2] <Ason-Wa Ralios> your bot should be docked, no?
[Sun Mar 24 22:38:20 2013] (guild) [Latos C-2] <Trader Jack> It can, yet it can't gather the same kind of info as when in space
[Sun Mar 24 22:41:15 2013] (guild) [Latos C-2] <Trader Jack> Yes, I did set up a Google Lite account just for that

- "hiding in roids"?

fact: None of the bots is hidden in a roid. The ones that are not docked are just hiding out in space.
They can be found and destroyed, Greenwall has done that several times. Learn from him.

- "These bots are all trial accounts being run on friend keys"
fact: this is a beta testing phase, once they expire these accounts will be paid for.

- "They are also at every UIT station"
fact: there are only 6 bots in UIT space.

Also this network is not running 24/7, it is turned off often enough.

If you're going to run bots, at least pay for them.

Well abortretryfail, I imagine rolling out this many accounts successfully is a difficult task. But just as every other account is entitled to a 2 week extended trial, so should these ones. As long as the accounts aren't remade and 're-friendkeyed' over and over like [Axe] DE-XXXX then I don't have an issue with it.

...you aren't the one running them?

Of course not I'm way too busy with other stuff, if I was running a bot network they would be disguised as TGFT bots so people were blaming them instead.

you just said on 100 like 20 minutes ago that you were expanding the bot network

Yeah I say a lot of things, a fun game is to try and guess which ones are true and which aren't.