Bots in the game [concern]

[Venombrew]

I mean botted miners and player controlled miners are not very different when it comes to capability.

dude what are you talking about about? do you even know what bot farming is? It is designed to run all day or for so many hours directed by the player while he or she is at school, work, or w/e. Thats the casual botter, he truly isn't going to effect the market price with his 1 bot account. The bot farmers looking to make real world currency and enough to support the buy of multiple accounts aren't even gonna take consideration into this game for years. Why dedicate all this real money and time into a game that won't even have a knowable market value of goods until a certain descent gamer population is established to even have a market to sell to. And that won't even happen til much time has passed after the actual full launch when we got player factions establishing their dominant areas of the moon and space around the farming fields. And if you been paying attention to the dev videos, the first moon won't even happen for at least a couple of months, and thats just to get there not even build anything once gotten there. The idea here is to make money not waste it on a game that doesn't yet have a large enough player base to make back all the money and time spent to even do so.

Bots might actually have the advantage for knowing that someone is coming by looking at memory data.

well in most cases this isn't just unfair but also illegal. not saying botting in general isn't illegal, but this is far more. most addons in games that will notify you of a player is usually done through zone or even global combat logs that are not considered exploitable to use with an addon. bounty hunter for wow is a great example. now if no one is engaged in combat than tracking would be done by looking in areas of data that isn't open for grabs such as a node locations. if this game cost 40 usd and constantly getting accounts ban could become extremely costly when you consider the money needed to replace accounts and time lost dealing with it all.

If one out of 30 miners are attacked, the botter can have 30 accounts and manually deal with attacks.

if one guy is doing this, good luck this isn't a follow hack n slash rpg that allows a macro chain. 1 guy trying to control 30 accounts at once while under attack is doubtful of any success on his part. the system requirements for this game is gonna prevent people from running to many clients on one pc if they will even be able to, they stopped it in Archeage. But even if you do, 1 pc is not gonna run 30 clients of this game, therefore 1 guy is gonna have to have multiple pcs, how is he gonna micro manage all this? and for all the stuff you said who the hell is gonna write that advanced of a script for this game with no idea what its future holds, and for how many years, not to mention all the games out right now they gonna put their effort into and finances to see results. Not to mention how quick and severe Frozenbyte is gonna be towards botters, so if they are throwing out bans left in right who is gonna keep up multiple accounts at a 40 usd cost, if it is around that?

There might be whole factions of bots and players using bots.

again if FB are cracking down hard and the cost of game is a factor i doubt so, what you will see is players with multiple accounts(1-3) to help with their own form of farming and building. Which goes on in most games and nothing wrong with that, u pay the sub, u buy the game, and your not breaking rules no big deal.
Truthfully this isn't even close to being on the radar as a problem if ever for a very long time. Until their is a descent and i mean descent player base to sell to with the point in the game that players would even consider the need to pay for mats with real money, we will be fine. Plus we dont even know how easy the mats are to come by, if they are easy to come by and fuel can be bypasses through devices to not be an issue, who is gonna pay real money for mats that are cheap with in game currency?
Also new game, its gonna take some scripters time to even write a working farm bot for this game if its even possible, doubt they gonna put effort into something they dont even know if its bankable for some time.

 

[FranklinZ]

dude what are you talking about about? do you even know what bot farming is? It is designed to run all day or for so many hours directed by the player while he or she is at school, work, or w/e. Thats the casual botter, he truly isn't going to effect the market price with his 1 bot account. The bot farmers looking to make real world currency and enough to support the buy of multiple accounts aren't even gonna take consideration into this game for years. Why dedicate all this real money and time into a game that won't even have a knowable market value of goods until a certain descent gamer population is established to even have a market to sell to. And that won't even happen til much time has passed after the actual full launch when we got player factions establishing their dominant areas of the moon and space around the farming fields. And if you been paying attention to the dev videos, the first moon won't even happen for at least a couple of months, and thats just to get there not even build anything once gotten there. The idea here is to make money not waste it on a game that doesn't yet have a large enough player base to make back all the money and time spent to even do so.

well in most cases this isn't just unfair but also illegal. not saying botting in general isn't illegal, but this is far more. most addons in games that will notify you of a player is usually done through zone or even global combat logs that are not considered exploitable to use with an addon. bounty hunter for wow is a great example. now if no one is engaged in combat than tracking would be done by looking in areas of data that isn't open for grabs such as a node locations. if this game cost 40 usd and constantly getting accounts ban could become extremely costly when you consider the money needed to replace accounts and time lost dealing with it all.

if one guy is doing this, good luck this isn't a follow hack n slash rpg that allows a macro chain. 1 guy trying to control 30 accounts at once while under attack is doubtful of any success on his part. the system requirements for this game is gonna prevent people from running to many clients on one pc if they will even be able to, they stopped it in Archeage. But even if you do, 1 pc is not gonna run 30 clients of this game, therefore 1 guy is gonna have to have multiple pcs, how is he gonna micro manage all this? and for all the stuff you said who the hell is gonna write that advanced of a script for this game with no idea what its future holds, and for how many years, not to mention all the games out right now they gonna put their effort into and finances to see results. Not to mention how quick and severe Frozenbyte is gonna be towards botters, so if they are throwing out bans left in right who is gonna keep up multiple accounts at a 40 usd cost, if it is around that?

again if FB are cracking down hard and the cost of game is a factor i doubt so, what you will see is players with multiple accounts(1-3) to help with their own form of farming and building. Which goes on in most games and nothing wrong with that, u pay the sub, u buy the game, and your not breaking rules no big deal.
Truthfully this isn't even close to being on the radar as a problem if ever for a very long time. Until their is a descent and i mean descent player base to sell to with the point in the game that players would even consider the need to pay for mats with real money, we will be fine. Plus we dont even know how easy the mats are to come by, if they are easy to come by and fuel can be bypasses through devices to not be an issue, who is gonna pay real money for mats that are cheap with in game currency?
Also new game, its gonna take some scripters time to even write a working farm bot for this game if its even possible, doubt they gonna put effort into something they dont even know if its bankable for some time.

It all depends on the game's popularity.

Starbase is a game with revolutionary ideas. Maybe it won't be everyone's game like wow or minecraft, but it sure will pick up a decent player base. We don't know how many exactly, but Starbase has potential.

If Starbase got lucky and gained a fairly large player base, we will have to worry about botting (also cheating) real soon. It's not uncommon for the first simple scripts to come out in the first month of the game. Worse case the script will exist before the release because some bot maker sneaked into alpha. Banning the bots and hackers will also become exponentially harder with more players in the game.

The two thing that does effectively suppress botting is banning and price. If on average a bot was banned before they can break even with the price of the game, there will be no bots.

 

[FranklinZ]

how easy the mats are to come by, if they are easy to come by and fuel can be bypasses through devices to not be an issue, who is gonna pay real money for mats that are cheap with in game currency?

In the case of Crossout the bots crashed the market with hyper inflation. Players have no choice but to buy the equiptment with real money. Then the botters sell them at a cheaper price than the game company.
Although that is a bit of an extreme case. There are more bots than players in that game.

 

[FranklinZ]

Some companies make extremely stupid decisions to keep the bots in the game, because "active player count" is an important stat of the game, and removing bots will decrease that number, likely making the guy who runs the department loose their job, so they just kept the bots.

Really hope FB does not end up like that.

 

[Venombrew]

Although that is a bit of an extreme case. There are more bots than players in that game.

than how are they making money with no real consumer base? sure they get people to buy things but how much money could they be making. and crossout is a pay2win game right out of the gate with free account access, nothing even remotely close to starbase for comparison. u can freely make multiple accounts with zero restrictions, and pay a minimum to be a preferred account to open other avenues. since its p2w, the players that do play that pay for features already could careless about the ingame market.

what players will most likely do to make real world currency wont be through unrealistic bot scripting and trying to farm for players what they can easily obtain themselves. it will be through ship blueprint designs since they can be traded and sold between players, ship themselves, different yolo chip programming(from ships, weapons to factories), advanced weaponry, etc. Chances of accounts getting banned very low, no scripting, and payment can be made easily outside of the game without anyone's knowledge.

 

[Burnside]

Given there's no RL currency transactions going on and competition is almost totally emergent, the prevalence of bot swarms will be extremely amusing, all that time, effort, and watthours for pixels in a pseudo-engineering game. Griefing is one thing, that stuff transcends physics, but ah- people are so weird, I just don't get it.

 

[Dante]

It may be difficult to create an automatic combat ship with YL, but players can use scripts to collect and make money on-line 24 hours a day, or even automatically aim and shoot.

How to make non studio players happy is still a very big problem.

Maybe it is difficult, but not impossible. It would be a nice benefit

 

[Cannon Machine Ballista]

than how are they making money with no real consumer base? sure they get people to buy things but how much money could they be making. and crossout is a pay2win game right out of the gate with free account access, nothing even remotely close to starbase for comparison. u can freely make multiple accounts with zero restrictions, and pay a minimum to be a preferred account to open other avenues. since its p2w, the players that do play that pay for features already could careless about the ingame market.

what players will most likely do to make real world currency wont be through unrealistic bot scripting and trying to farm for players what they can easily obtain themselves. it will be through ship blueprint designs since they can be traded and sold between players, ship themselves, different yolo chip programming(from ships, weapons to factories), advanced weaponry, etc. Chances of accounts getting banned very low, no scripting, and payment can be made easily outside of the game without anyone's knowledge.

SB is not a P2W game, but some players hope so, they will spend real money, hire others to earn game currency for him, or design super powerful ships for him.

This is the space where the script studio lives. They use virtual machines such as VMs to perform multiple operations, and use program scripts to control the game characters to repeatedly hammer stones in the space station. They are often operated as a gang, a group of 30-50 computers, which may run Hundreds of accounts.

These accounts may be leased or bought at a low price from the player who left, running different scripts to imitate the operation of real human forces.

They can quickly obtain huge amounts of game coins and sell them to the lone wolf players squeezed by the forces in real money. They can also raise funds to hire famous designers to design ships for them, and then they will resell them with reselling profits.

 

[FranklinZ]

This is what the bot farmers' work space look like.
If you think its one guy with three computers in a basement, you think wrong.

 

[Cannon Machine Ballista]

View attachment 1031 View attachment 1032 View attachment 1033

This is what the bot farmers' work space look like.
If you think its one guy with three computers in a basement, you think wrong.

This is what I want to say, this is the real "script farm".

 

[roix]

it does not seem realistic to me, the game is in many aspects not attractive for this kind of problem.

a greater risk would be to have means to obtain a view in the third person for example.

--- original ---


ça ne me paraît pas réaliste, le jeu est dans bien des aspects non attractifs pour ce genre de problème.

un risque + grand serait d'avoir des moyens pour obtenir une vue à la troisième personne par exemple.

 

[Cannon Machine Ballista]

it does not seem realistic to me, the game is in many aspects not attractive for this kind of problem.

a greater risk would be to have means to obtain a view in the third person for example.

--- original ---


ça ne me paraît pas réaliste, le jeu est dans bien des aspects non attractifs pour ce genre de problème.

un risque + grand serait d'avoir des moyens pour obtenir une vue à la troisième personne par exemple.

From the perspective of the third person perspective, I agree with you. This is really dangerous.

 

[FranklinZ]

it does not seem realistic to me, the game is in many aspects not attractive for this kind of problem.

a greater risk would be to have means to obtain a view in the third person for example.

--- original ---


ça ne me paraît pas réaliste, le jeu est dans bien des aspects non attractifs pour ce genre de problème.

un risque + grand serait d'avoir des moyens pour obtenir une vue à la troisième personne par exemple.

From the perspective of the third person perspective, I agree with you. This is really dangerous.

Might as well just give third person to everyone. Cheat players will have it anyway.

 

[Sven Drunken Heart]

Might as well just give third person to everyone. Cheat players will have it anyway.

Why would a third person view be more dangerous than a first person view in terms of getting bot farmers an advantage?

Also, my own personal fear of farming for this game would actually have nothing to do with mining. Given that players will be able to make YOLOL operated factories that can produce parts with minimal interaction from the player, this would already allow for people to theoretically make credits while logged out(I think someone mentioned this earlier). I think that if you combine this with simple scripted commands to a bot, you could easily fully automate manufacturing of fully assembled parts. This would get worse if the majority of players decide it's easier to sell ore and buy parts than it is to refine and assemble for themselves, because then the markets would be flooded with cheaper ore for farmers to gobble up. In addition, if war is a very prominent thing (which I sincerely hope it is), then the demand for finished parts will be all the greater.

The silver lining to this is that I don't see a real world money market that could be made from this. And with players making their own stations/factories/micro-economies, I think that it'd be difficult for this scenario to end up being the market status quo. Players who want war will leave the safe zone, and will most likely only come back if the need for supplies is drastically increased. Ex: EVE players who live in null sec space tend to stay there more often than not.

Actually, I think the mindset of most folks who will play and stick with this game will be of the mindset that they will eventually want to be able to not rely on the economy to do what they want. This is a game that inspires that sort of thought, and will make it possible for everyone to eventually strike out on their own or with their friends.

 

[Venombrew]

SB is not a P2W game, but some players hope so, they will spend real money, hire others to earn game currency for him, or design super powerful ships for him.

i know its not but people keep comparing it to games that are p2w like crossout. thats a p2w game from the start. when people play games that are pretty much pay2win they got little cares towards bot farmers anyways and its not a fair comparison to a game like this as an example.