Rethinking the problem of bots
ReginoldJudd
✭✭✭
in Make It So!
So everyone already knows there are bots in this game, right? That is, especially during skirmish and galaxy events, people have automation set up to grind out top spots so they don't have to do it themselves.
I'd love for DB/TP to rethink their strategy for how to deal with this problem, and I'll do so by telling you a story... (I'll separate it with lines so if you don't want a whole story, you can skip it):
In many cities and towns across America, we've fallen in love with the wide traffic lane. In most places now, lanes are made 12 feet wide - 5 feet wider than the widest vehicles. This probably started thanks to the Interstate Highway System using such lanes, but they're also utilized in arterial streets and even neighborhood streets; and, because in neighborhoods people often park on the street instead of driveways, many neighborhood streets are built with 15-foot-wide lanes.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, traffic speeds increase as lane widths increase.
This might seem wonderful if you're in a hurry to get to your destination. Unfortunately, it's literal murder on your ability to use the street for other uses, such as pedestrian and bicycle traffic. When traffic speeds increase, people who aren't surrounded by a ton of steel usually feel less safe about being on the street, and so they are more likely to get where they need to go by car and less likely to use more traditional alternatives.
This isn't just a perception - people really do die more frequently in areas with higher speeds:
And of course, there are more vehicle accidents at higher speeds (although it's fair to point out that the speed itself is not usually the cause of these accidents, but rather it's lane changes, which I'll get to in a moment).
In order to try to keep people safe, cities increased the number of uniformed officers patrolling them, gave the officers radar guns, and told them to ticket speeders, and they installed speed bumps and road humps in neighborhood streets to make high speeds feel harder on the driver.
The result has not been a reduction in speed throughout the entire road, but rather a reduction in speed on the specific sections of road that have the new problem (officers or road humps).
But the problem that caused all of this originally was the widening of the lanes. When lanes were narrower, people didn't feel as comfortable driving fast. In cities that have realized this fact, they've started testing narrower streets in some places, and found that it really did improve survivability for both vehicle occupants and pedestrians, that it reduced the speed of traffic, and, oddly, didn't affect the average drive time at all!
That's because all those accidents were causing traffic to slow down to a near stand-still.
A similar thing occurs when we increase lanes. The Iowa Department of Transportation recently released a video explaining why 2 lanes with a center turning lane are far safer than 4 lanes, and why traffic times remain the same.
The problem of botting seems similar. The reason people use automation to power their performance in events is because those events take nearly-limitless investment of time from players. Top players in skirmishes routinely play every second of the time from the beginning of the skirmish until the end, including overnight when they should be sleeping. Galaxy events take well in excess of 60000 chron to win, with over 12000 supply missions run during the course of the event.
The traditional way to tackle this problem has been increased bot detection and strategies to try to prevent people from doing it (like the screen that pops up and requires you to choose a character). But the problem with these strategies is that they result in an arms race between developers and players for who can do better - the bot detectors or the bot creators. Spoiler alert: it's always the bot creators. There are a near limitless number of ways bots can be programmed, and doing so is faster than trying to figure out how they're botting in the first place and build tools to stop them.
Plus, from an economic point of view, it's not really in DB/TP's best interest TO stop them - a lot of botters are people who shovel money into the game. (I'm not saying they AREN'T fighting bots because of this; they most certainly are. I'm merely pointing out how doing so could impact them negatively.)
But the initial problem that caused people to bot was the fact that getting first place requires soooo much time investment. Like cities widening lanes and then expecting people to drive slow, you can't require 96 hours of a person's time and then complain when they create a program to do it for them.
That's why we need to fundamentally rethink how events (especially galaxy and skirmish events) are handled.
I suggest that DB/TP should apply the Normal/Elite/Epic hierarchy to these events in terms of cost and reward. For example:
Say you have a Skirmish event. Right now, Normal, Elite, and Epic all cost the same. The vast majority of skirmish runs a player will make are at the upper end of that cost: 1200 intel.
Aside: That 1200 intel costs them 90 chron to get (using boosters). They can expect to receive a chron reward after 11.45% of loot boxes, and our rough calculation of rewards shows the following drop rates:
88%: 76 chron
8%: 150 chron
4%: 300 chron
That means each time you spend 90 chron you receive back 41.6 chron (on average).
The costs don't change, but the rewards do - that is, someone running Epic receives far greater rewards than someone who runs Normal, despite the same cost of entry.
This is not how it should work; and, in fact, it isn't how this works in the rest of the game. An away team mission or space mission generally has different costs for each tier (normal, elite, and epic). It might cost 4 chron at normal, 12 at elite, and 24 at epic, for instance.
Instead, what if we vastly increased the rewards and the costs?
I suggest:
Skirmishes:
Normal: 1200 intel at top end per run, current chests, 125/250 VP plus bonus/event crew per run.
Elite: 4600 intel at top end per run; chests drop 4x loot. 600/1200 VP plus bonus/event crew per run.
Epic: 26000 intel at top end per run; chests drop 16x loot. 2400/4800 VP plus bonus/event crew per run.
Legendary (if needed): 100000 intel at top end per run; chests drop 64x loot. 9600/19200 VP plus bonus/event crew per run.
Galaxy (Provide a new window after selecting faction that lets people choose to run at different tiers):
Normal: As today
Elite: Requires either 4x each material to make an item (requiring little change other than adding the multiplier) or requires uncommon (green) materials to make items. Rewards 5x VP.
Epic: Requires either 16x each material or rare (blue) materials. Rewards 25x VP.
Legendary (if needed): Requires either 64x each material or super rare (purple) materials. Rewards 125x VP.
Note: either new crit items would need to be created or you'd receive 4/16/64x crit items. If using the 4/16/64 version, you'd also want to add new tiers for those turn-ins, so that people could turn in huge numbers of crit items en masse.
I'd love for DB/TP to rethink their strategy for how to deal with this problem, and I'll do so by telling you a story... (I'll separate it with lines so if you don't want a whole story, you can skip it):
In many cities and towns across America, we've fallen in love with the wide traffic lane. In most places now, lanes are made 12 feet wide - 5 feet wider than the widest vehicles. This probably started thanks to the Interstate Highway System using such lanes, but they're also utilized in arterial streets and even neighborhood streets; and, because in neighborhoods people often park on the street instead of driveways, many neighborhood streets are built with 15-foot-wide lanes.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, traffic speeds increase as lane widths increase.
This might seem wonderful if you're in a hurry to get to your destination. Unfortunately, it's literal murder on your ability to use the street for other uses, such as pedestrian and bicycle traffic. When traffic speeds increase, people who aren't surrounded by a ton of steel usually feel less safe about being on the street, and so they are more likely to get where they need to go by car and less likely to use more traditional alternatives.
This isn't just a perception - people really do die more frequently in areas with higher speeds:
And of course, there are more vehicle accidents at higher speeds (although it's fair to point out that the speed itself is not usually the cause of these accidents, but rather it's lane changes, which I'll get to in a moment).
In order to try to keep people safe, cities increased the number of uniformed officers patrolling them, gave the officers radar guns, and told them to ticket speeders, and they installed speed bumps and road humps in neighborhood streets to make high speeds feel harder on the driver.
The result has not been a reduction in speed throughout the entire road, but rather a reduction in speed on the specific sections of road that have the new problem (officers or road humps).
But the problem that caused all of this originally was the widening of the lanes. When lanes were narrower, people didn't feel as comfortable driving fast. In cities that have realized this fact, they've started testing narrower streets in some places, and found that it really did improve survivability for both vehicle occupants and pedestrians, that it reduced the speed of traffic, and, oddly, didn't affect the average drive time at all!
That's because all those accidents were causing traffic to slow down to a near stand-still.
A similar thing occurs when we increase lanes. The Iowa Department of Transportation recently released a video explaining why 2 lanes with a center turning lane are far safer than 4 lanes, and why traffic times remain the same.
The problem of botting seems similar. The reason people use automation to power their performance in events is because those events take nearly-limitless investment of time from players. Top players in skirmishes routinely play every second of the time from the beginning of the skirmish until the end, including overnight when they should be sleeping. Galaxy events take well in excess of 60000 chron to win, with over 12000 supply missions run during the course of the event.
The traditional way to tackle this problem has been increased bot detection and strategies to try to prevent people from doing it (like the screen that pops up and requires you to choose a character). But the problem with these strategies is that they result in an arms race between developers and players for who can do better - the bot detectors or the bot creators. Spoiler alert: it's always the bot creators. There are a near limitless number of ways bots can be programmed, and doing so is faster than trying to figure out how they're botting in the first place and build tools to stop them.
Plus, from an economic point of view, it's not really in DB/TP's best interest TO stop them - a lot of botters are people who shovel money into the game. (I'm not saying they AREN'T fighting bots because of this; they most certainly are. I'm merely pointing out how doing so could impact them negatively.)
But the initial problem that caused people to bot was the fact that getting first place requires soooo much time investment. Like cities widening lanes and then expecting people to drive slow, you can't require 96 hours of a person's time and then complain when they create a program to do it for them.
That's why we need to fundamentally rethink how events (especially galaxy and skirmish events) are handled.
I suggest that DB/TP should apply the Normal/Elite/Epic hierarchy to these events in terms of cost and reward. For example:
Say you have a Skirmish event. Right now, Normal, Elite, and Epic all cost the same. The vast majority of skirmish runs a player will make are at the upper end of that cost: 1200 intel.
Aside: That 1200 intel costs them 90 chron to get (using boosters). They can expect to receive a chron reward after 11.45% of loot boxes, and our rough calculation of rewards shows the following drop rates:
88%: 76 chron
8%: 150 chron
4%: 300 chron
That means each time you spend 90 chron you receive back 41.6 chron (on average).
The costs don't change, but the rewards do - that is, someone running Epic receives far greater rewards than someone who runs Normal, despite the same cost of entry.
This is not how it should work; and, in fact, it isn't how this works in the rest of the game. An away team mission or space mission generally has different costs for each tier (normal, elite, and epic). It might cost 4 chron at normal, 12 at elite, and 24 at epic, for instance.
Instead, what if we vastly increased the rewards and the costs?
I suggest:
Skirmishes:
Normal: 1200 intel at top end per run, current chests, 125/250 VP plus bonus/event crew per run.
Elite: 4600 intel at top end per run; chests drop 4x loot. 600/1200 VP plus bonus/event crew per run.
Epic: 26000 intel at top end per run; chests drop 16x loot. 2400/4800 VP plus bonus/event crew per run.
Legendary (if needed): 100000 intel at top end per run; chests drop 64x loot. 9600/19200 VP plus bonus/event crew per run.
Galaxy (Provide a new window after selecting faction that lets people choose to run at different tiers):
Normal: As today
Elite: Requires either 4x each material to make an item (requiring little change other than adding the multiplier) or requires uncommon (green) materials to make items. Rewards 5x VP.
Epic: Requires either 16x each material or rare (blue) materials. Rewards 25x VP.
Legendary (if needed): Requires either 64x each material or super rare (purple) materials. Rewards 125x VP.
Note: either new crit items would need to be created or you'd receive 4/16/64x crit items. If using the 4/16/64 version, you'd also want to add new tiers for those turn-ins, so that people could turn in huge numbers of crit items en masse.
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Comments
I will say if this was the case I would certainly run legendary every galaxy run. As someone who has built galaxy items like a madman several times over the course of several weekends, it gets to be like a championship fight. Who can last until the end. Should that be taken out of the equation? Work put in NOT equaling success? It takes strategy, planning, using your resources wisely, but it also takes work. And if the work I have put in has seen me defeat someone with a bot, which I will never know, than the victory is that much sweeter. Even if there are those who have bots, they still need to plan, strategize, and have the resources. If you don’t, your bot will have nothing left to work with and I still win. Data lost at Strategema to a living person.
2) Cyclists are the most obnoxious people in the known universe, worse than Gym Bros blitzed on preworkout, Instagram influencers, and anyone using the Illinois Tollway (Banjo can back me up on that one), and do not belong on the road.
3) There is a point to be made about the time and effort required to effectively compete in Galaxy and Skirmish events compared to Faction events. Balancing any modifications to the r DNR structure to make competition for rank more player-friendly against the ability to clear threshold rewards will be critical, however.
Understand that I regularly come in top 25 or even top 15 in skirmish. I do the work.
As for proof - I have spent every second from when I wake up to when I go to bed grinding skirmish, and even denying myself a full night's sleep sometimes, and still barely make top 15 (and I've verified that while I'm on, my score increases at roughly the same rate as theirs, so it's not a speed issue). That means they're either having someone else play their account overnight (which is also against the rules) or they're botting.
And should we really have events that people have to sacrifice every hour of sleep over 4 days to win, if someone is trying to do it "the right way"?
Someone here on the forum admitted they have their kids skirmish for them for a while. I have thought that too, that it’s likely two people go in on it together on one account. I wouldn’t doubt for a second that happens
Are people using bots? I really don't care if they are, I play my game to my standards. Do I cheat? No. I am reminded of a quote by Plato "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." Such is the way of life.
This is just a game, and if people have to cheat at it, they must have a really lonely, sad life. I feel bad for them, and I feel sad for them, to know that some people are hurting that much, or are so shallow in life that they have to cheat at a video game to feel good about themselves. Makes me sad
And if you think people are *not* using mouse recorders on skirmish events, then you just don't want to know....
...and if you don't believe some people are not using mouse recorders on skirmish events then you just don't want to know...
If you have items pre-farmed and don’t have to run missions that’s easily doable. I can get 500k in an hour. Whoever accused you of cheating has obviously not tried to get points in spurts. Or just doesn’t do it with a sense of urgency.
Did you have to use chrons and had to run missions the whole time? That will really slow you down. Also there are ways to run missions strategically to maximize what you get. To win a galaxy takes research, preparation, and homework in order to take full advantage of the four days you have
And yes, cyclists are the WORST, the problem with them I see as being two-fold:
First, they ride with a lack of empathy. They charge down pedestrians and basically force them to get out of their way, while at the same time pressing every advantage with cars basically daring the cars to hit them because at some point in our culture we stopped paying heed to common sense and have replaced it with a new system where the car is always at fault because it hit a bike. Cyclists know this, and more to the point, they know the driver knows this, and they press this "advantage" by riding recklessly and force drivers to avoid them.
Second, cyclists demonstrate a more general, strategic lack of empathy. Simply put, they are kind of cars, kind of pedestrians, kind of cyclists (with regard to laws) and they are wildly inconsistent with how they want to be treated, always to their benefit. They jump out into the road and ride with the cars when it suits them, they jump into the bike lane when it suits them, and they even plow onto sidewalks when it suits them (usually at crosswalks/intersections). It creates chaos for drivers, pedestrians, and even other cyclists, and on the roads chaos is directly represented by safety, or in this case a lack thereof.
Essentially, cyclists are mobile sociopaths getting all their transportation needs met at the expense of everyone else on the roads with them. I take comfort locally at least in the knowledge that they are getting rained on most of the time and will generally arrive at their destination soaked and miserable, that helps me cope
Sorry, what were we talking about again?!
Oh yeah, bots. I think it is healthy for the community to be aware of the possible existence of bots and the negative impacts they potentially represent, but without direct proof of both their existence and the harm they are causing, it is premature in my opinion to completely redesign the game all so a handful of people can possibly win an event, because the bottom line is that even IF bots are real and making it difficult/impossible for non-bot players to win an event, those people are still going to place top 25, win multiple copies of the ranked 5* crew, and get all the other goodies that go along with it, I think it is important to not lose sight of that reality. Besides, as a fellow skirmish enthusiast, I understand that the real value in a skirmish event is the event itself, not the leaderboard.
If we do decide that botting is a problem, I'd much rather have TP just monetize bots (ie let people pay to use 'state sanctioned' bots like supply kits) than radically change event structures. Pay 1K dilithium to rent a skirmish bot for 4 days? I wouldn't do it, but as long as everyone has the option, I'd be good losing to somebody who did. If anything, this bot red flag that has been raised here is more like the 2017 Houston Astros than it is about traffic; it isn't that the cheating is going on, we all understand that it probably is, the problem is that not everyone has equal access to the ability to cheat, and THAT is what creates the potentially un-tilted playing field.
yes, Yes, YES to everything you said about cyclists!!! Nailed it so well I can’t even add anything to it!
Red people walk faster than blue people. And green people need to stop driving where red people and blue people walk. I like this meme game!
I'm never going to hit rank 1 (unless every single one of you decide to sit out 1 event and tell me). So if I'm competing with bots, it is what it is. Like it was said, the creators are more cunning then the preventers. I'm not going to get bent out of shape. And I'm not going to devote everything to any single event. I'm here to have fun and enjoy my game.
Certainly looking at 96 hours will get some one thinking about how to get the reward without all the manual work. But the same would be true if the game limited play or constructed play to need only an hour a day. It might seem like the length of time and amount of effort are motivating factors, but the truth is, some people will always try to get the most reward for the least effort. If they could set the game to play itself, some people would choose to do that to give them more time to do other online or real life things. There is no point at which you can fundamentally remove the motivation to use bots, friends, or kids.
So you need to qualify the issue. Are you trying to get rid of people relying on assistive methods? Or do you want the game to be constructed so that if other people choose to assist their play, other people don't loose out? Is your issue cheating, or that you have to compete with cheaters?
High level people and spenders competing for the same limited 1500 rank spots don't just raise the bar for those spots. Everyone that falls short or gives up takes up all the spots between 1500 and 5000. This rank structure that makes everyone from the first player to the most recent, f2p and pay, casual to full time, play in the same ranking and for the same prizes, puts certain ways and limits of play at a disadvantage. It's those disadvantaged groups that tend to choose or find methods to help them.
I don't believe you can fix the problem of bots existing. And I don't think you really care if they do exist. The real question for some people is if they think it's fair to compete with them. Exhausting resources faster won't remove the utility of bots. And neither will limiting play time needs. The same bots (if they exist) will just run out of things to do sooner.
You need to be clear about what the issue really is. And I don't think anyone would care about players getting assisted by bots, friends, or money if at the end of the day all the rewards were in the threshold and the only thing between you and them was the amount of effort you put in personally. To be clear, I'm not advancing that as a suggestion. Only a compative set of reward examples to provide context.
But as mentioned "you run out of Chronitons" Game over.
So save up, spend some $ if you want and invest your time if you can. Eventually you can become a Big dog.
5 days and 4 nights with maybe 6hours total sleep... I've proven all I need for myself 🙂
Yes, I have to exit the event and re-enter quite often
Mine does as well. I've long assumed that has more to do with how many people are playing than a bug in the skirmish code, as I've seen less-played events work fine
I got the bot check 5 or 6 times this past skirmish
My Captain Idol's
My DataCore page
My Spreadsheet
The effort doesn't proof anything. 9M CP are more than feasible on a weekend (in skirmish) - I was idle most of the time and made ~1.5M in the last event (#293).
Your concept actually promotes bot-play.
1200 intel / 750CP = 1.6 Intel / CP
4600 / 3600 = 1.27 intel/cp (actually better)
26k / 14400 = 1.8 intel/cp way worse
100k / 57600 = 1.73 intel/cp 2nd to worst...
next time you might want to check your math - especially when you write such a long post with an intro longer than the point your trying to make...
If you are seriously arguing that bots don’t exist, you have either not played many video games in your life, or you are a bot user yourself, or you are a troll who argues for the sake of arguing.
There is no question that people will find ways to cheat and get an edge in competitive events. This is a universal truth about the human condition.
As things are now, you CANNOT get 1st place in a faction event without spending thousands of dollars in dilithium, or cheating. Prove me wrong.
I can't even begin to imagine what you think "CP" means. I can't find anything in my numbers remotely resembling what you're talking about.