It would be so helpful if captcha has some kind of countdown timer of when it will appear, because sometimes captcha appears during combat or any important moments when you can easily die. It happened to me few times. This countdown announcement could be added in chat log: "Captcha will appear in 5 minutes", like Serco/Itani CtC convoys has.

+1 and get a full sub, it's worth it! ;)

+1 But...

A better implementation would be to reset the captcha timer when a player:

-Kills a bot or player
-Takes damage
-Dies
-Docks or undocks
-Warps

There exists the possibility of abuse in the above, if someone really wanted to go through the trouble of writing a bot that performed the specific actions to avoid the captcha, but I would argue that the benefits of uninterrupted play for legitimate players justifies the risk of possible abuse.

I'd suggest adding a command so that players have a way to manually check the time remaining:

/captcha time

Then you could also have a command to trigger the captcha early so that the player can choose to have it run at a more convenient time, like while they are in a station:

/captcha now

-1 Savet as that defeats the purpose of having the captcha in the first place. Might as well just remove it entirely then.

Inc will correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember the captcha being added to prevent free and lite subs from putting bots in sectors, keeping them alive indefinitely. I don't believe the captcha was intended to make gameplay more annoying for legitimate players.

I think actions like warping, and killing hive already reset it? I dunno, I've only ever seen the captcha once, and even then I was AFK for about an hour while on lite of course. Never ever seen it during combat or while active.

I know grey shop DOES launch and /explode periodically to avoid the captcha.

+1

But isn't it ironic that Matwey Sub... does not have a sub? Haha!

I always wondered why I would see it undock and explode, but drop no goodies. If they're running a bot from a free or lite sub, we need to have a good ol' fashioned witch hunt and burn them at the stake.

If you want to run a bot, you should buy a subscription.
If you can't afford a bot, and it adds enough value to the game, take up a collection in community projects.

yoda: greyshop is subbed. check its licenses ;)

Probably the only one thing in Savet's list that you can't really automate is the killing of a bot or player. Everything else is super easy. It wouldn't solve the problem, but it might make it less prevalent.

I think the key is to have a captcha system that prevents basic abuse, but doesn't get in the way of a legitimate player. There will always be a technical means to bypass abuse restrictions, but the key is striking a balance between security and usability. If the captcha is popping up while players are performing legitimate play activity, then we need to shift a bit towards the usability end of the spectrum.