It started with IRC, allowing players to chat while not logged in and monitoring who was online. Even now that the APL is gone players can still check and see if their enemies are on or offline.

then PA got a bot, then ONE then o'malley came along. then Phlegathrons one eyed get and now TGR has bots numerous worm hole sectors.

I cannot help but feel like I cannot travel through out the universe with out running into someone trying to monitor my actions while not actively being in game. What started as a nice tool to help rely information for everyone in a guild is turning into a data mining operation. Monitoring dangerous sectors so that all conflict can be avoided unless someone chooses to fight.

I would like guild to re-evaluate their stance on allowing such things to go unchecked. Perhaps even making it so the IRC bot is only able to be accessed by devs.

I want to be able to interact with people with out feeling like I'm at a disadvantage compared to those who choose to pay an extra 10 dollars a month or who use free trials to run an account with a free bus that records players movements in the most dangerous sectors.

Most of all I want the community to stop trying to side step every action the devs take to create a pvp game with non-consensual pvp.

I know this stance will be controversial seeing as how vendetta does have a lot of skilled programmers who play the game who want to utilize their skills. But I think we, as a community, need to take a step back and look at what is slowly happening.

bot-killer out.

Is your account really bot-killer, or is that simply a trial you made to express your opinion further? ;)

Perhaps instead of saying "screw bots, if I can't have one no one should", we should have a slightly more open network so everyone can be on a relatively even playing field. :p

The APL disappeared, someone apparently felt they needed it to be around still.

If they want to pay for an extra account AND use the amount of programming time they use on it, power to them. For me, just give me the APL back...

It is not possible for me to be logged in to VO 24 hours a day. I greatly appreciate IRC, allowing me to monitor channel 911 while working on other things. Without IRC, the alternative would be for me to have a VO window open in the background and spend a lot of time idle in stations. To me, that doesn't seem like a very good solution.

As for the other bots, I have no comment.

~Choco

I have no problem with relays , but have no real desire to be logged by Phleg every time I pass through H-2 or by other bots whereever they may be. Perhaps a mutual agreement to place all relays in Latos A-1 where they could slowly travel towards infinity without bothering anybody...

Rin Gaborro hereby declares war on all who excessively monitor his actions.

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As Pizzasgood, the human player, what I have a problem with isn't so much the bots as the fact that we can't REACH the bots to kill them. If they're going to sit around that far away, they should not have access to the sector list. There could still be a region where they're beyond radar but still have acccess to the list, but only far enough that they could reasonably be located by a determined and patient pilot. Ships that are hours away from the action should not be allowed to see what is going on in the sector anymore.

Hmm, but that doesn't address placing such bots inside stations instead of flying them around....

I have to agree with this. Without naming anyone, there is a guild which (according to their leader) has bots monitoring the most dangerous areas of Gray space and recording the data, with the intent of selling it to other guilds.

It seems a bit off.

I don't think selling it will work too well... :p

I think you should only appear on the sensor list if you are in radar range. You should not appear when occluded, 5km+, or docked.

This was implemented (at least partially) in fogged sectors. I'm not sure what's keeping it from being made universal but it was my understanding that it would happen eventually.

It would make hosting and participating in things like Nation War a lot harder, though. It'd be cool if they could turn it on and off for individual sectors.

How about keeping everyone in the sector list all the time, except, once you're out of radar range, have it list "unknown" instead of the name.

+1 DivisionByZero, except that I am reluctant to show anyone who is docked, nor should they be able anyone outside the station.

Another thing is, making it impossible to be unfindable in sector by just flying away for stupid distance.
Maybe it'd be less of an issue if those bots kept dying all the time? (tho possibly they'd just undock and head back to their spot, but still)

Making players not visible at all unless they are selectable will contribute to the sense of emptyness that the game already has. That is a Bad Thing.

True. But say, 8-10k is probably enough, no?

Downside is, miners will become invincible. Implement Smaug's idea (inside 15km or so) and make the PLAYER_ENTERED_SECTOR event (and all similar lua functions) use players entering radar view (like the proximity warning) instead of the sensor log player list.

And Sector chat should definitely only broadcast to players in radar view before sensor exclusivity is implemented. Not for realism reasons, but to prevent eavesdrop bots.

Btw, I don't think lua programmers would be excessively angry if these specific functions were taken out and replaced with radar view-required functions... sector relay bots are very easy to make, as far as I've fiddled with them (and I'm a lua newbie :P). I can easily call them the IEDs of the lua world.

Very much +1 to Smaug's idea.

I don't understand why everyone wants to create such a sense of loneliness. Sectors are huge, and so far objects only occupy a very tiny fraction of the available space, but it's my understanding that eventually sectors will be occupied with multiple stations (and similar objects), potentially very far away from each other, and ships will have intra-sector jump systems of some sort.

In my opinion most of these ideas are just knee-jerk reaction to the recent usage of mysterious bots with unknown intentions. The unknown tends to be the scariest thing one can encounter.

Intentions are known: keeping track of where people are.

I disagree with the OP. Bots were there long before IRC, and they provided valuable services to players (by this I do not mean to detract from FiReMaGe's work in any way). They are, in my opinion, an important part of VO, and banning them would not be a smart solution. In short, I echo slime73's comment.

If you want to be unnoticed by people (using IRC), do not use #100 and other well-known channels. Stealth is a two-way road.