Forums » Suggestions
A brief addendum:
A few hours after his last post on this thread, Greenwall was logged out by a failed CAPTCHA test, and then requested in a ticket that he not be "flagged" as a spybot. (To be clear, no one had touched his account: This was a purely automated and natural system response, an example of things operating and working as intended, as his behaviour was correctly detected as exhibiting an increasing threshold-of-suspicion).
Given his earlier public accusation about the system's efficacy, I think this is important information to add to this thread.
Yes, there is an automated system watching player activity for suspicious or problematic behaviour.
- Premium-subscribed accounts operating Player-shops are told to stay docked in a single sector, and they will have the greatest chance of avoiding being flagged. They lose their sensor awareness as a result.
- Free-to-play and Lite accounts are much more aggressively checked, because they are the primary vector for automated abuse, and because anyone who wants to run a player-shop (and keep a sector running) should at least be a Premium subscriber.
- CAPTCHAs can, and do happen to all classes of player account (and this is not a new thing). Because F2P is handled more aggressively, there are misconceptions that subscribers don't ever experience CAPTCHA checks. Greenwall can now attest that this is not true.
- There is no one measurement or factor that determines suspicious activity. No single "timer" that fires, no single check that can be avoided. We can measure and analyze a variety of passive activity, and we also have some active checks (like CAPTCHA). Additionally, the system is changing and evolving on a regular basis, based on player activity.
- We don't advertise our awareness ("how" we know, "when" we know, "what" we know), because that would make the system more exploitable. So, no, we don't explain exactly how it works. Also, not all "responses" are automatic, sometimes players are administratively contacted.
- Generally speaking, anyone who plays the game remotely normally, and logs off when they're finished, will never even be aware the system exists. THIS IS THE GOAL, because..
This is fundamentally a Social Game.
To quote some player feedback from the 2016 Suggestions discussion of limiting spy-bots..
Meridian made the comment:
In general, I am not in favor of any suggestion that reduces a player's ability to find other players. The game can feel empty enough as it is.
Skinwalker responded:
I have to agree that making people less visible in a social game is something that has to be considered.
And I followed up:
There is a sense of organic community, interest and awareness that comes from randomly running into people in the game (and being aware of that)
We have enough trouble showing new players that there are others in the game, given the sheer scale of the universe. I'm not nixing all sensor data after 10 minutes in a station. People will spend that long in a station buying a ship, or learning how to equip something, or reading some mission history. Or.. chatting.
The "solution" needs to not be worse for the game than the original problem.
Accusations and Paranoia are corrosive and unhealthy for the community. Don't accuse people of doing something bad, simply because you "feel" that they "might". The burden of proof is on the accuser, because in a civil society there is a presumption of innocence.
If you have a robust certainty that someone is exploiting the game, then open a ticket. Don't make a Suggestions thread with a lot of unfounded and confused accusations.
Automated abuse of the game is an evolving, moving target, and our response/detection system always will be as well. As I've said before in this thread, we do have more changes coming.
However, this is pretty complex stuff to engineer, and not all these changes are trivial. You do know that we're an independent studio with limited development resources.
You should have some reasonable faith in what I say, and patience with our on-going progress; otherwise it begs the question of whether our game is right for you at all.
A few hours after his last post on this thread, Greenwall was logged out by a failed CAPTCHA test, and then requested in a ticket that he not be "flagged" as a spybot. (To be clear, no one had touched his account: This was a purely automated and natural system response, an example of things operating and working as intended, as his behaviour was correctly detected as exhibiting an increasing threshold-of-suspicion).
Given his earlier public accusation about the system's efficacy, I think this is important information to add to this thread.
Yes, there is an automated system watching player activity for suspicious or problematic behaviour.
- Premium-subscribed accounts operating Player-shops are told to stay docked in a single sector, and they will have the greatest chance of avoiding being flagged. They lose their sensor awareness as a result.
- Free-to-play and Lite accounts are much more aggressively checked, because they are the primary vector for automated abuse, and because anyone who wants to run a player-shop (and keep a sector running) should at least be a Premium subscriber.
- CAPTCHAs can, and do happen to all classes of player account (and this is not a new thing). Because F2P is handled more aggressively, there are misconceptions that subscribers don't ever experience CAPTCHA checks. Greenwall can now attest that this is not true.
- There is no one measurement or factor that determines suspicious activity. No single "timer" that fires, no single check that can be avoided. We can measure and analyze a variety of passive activity, and we also have some active checks (like CAPTCHA). Additionally, the system is changing and evolving on a regular basis, based on player activity.
- We don't advertise our awareness ("how" we know, "when" we know, "what" we know), because that would make the system more exploitable. So, no, we don't explain exactly how it works. Also, not all "responses" are automatic, sometimes players are administratively contacted.
- Generally speaking, anyone who plays the game remotely normally, and logs off when they're finished, will never even be aware the system exists. THIS IS THE GOAL, because..
This is fundamentally a Social Game.
To quote some player feedback from the 2016 Suggestions discussion of limiting spy-bots..
Meridian made the comment:
In general, I am not in favor of any suggestion that reduces a player's ability to find other players. The game can feel empty enough as it is.
Skinwalker responded:
I have to agree that making people less visible in a social game is something that has to be considered.
And I followed up:
There is a sense of organic community, interest and awareness that comes from randomly running into people in the game (and being aware of that)
We have enough trouble showing new players that there are others in the game, given the sheer scale of the universe. I'm not nixing all sensor data after 10 minutes in a station. People will spend that long in a station buying a ship, or learning how to equip something, or reading some mission history. Or.. chatting.
The "solution" needs to not be worse for the game than the original problem.
Accusations and Paranoia are corrosive and unhealthy for the community. Don't accuse people of doing something bad, simply because you "feel" that they "might". The burden of proof is on the accuser, because in a civil society there is a presumption of innocence.
If you have a robust certainty that someone is exploiting the game, then open a ticket. Don't make a Suggestions thread with a lot of unfounded and confused accusations.
Automated abuse of the game is an evolving, moving target, and our response/detection system always will be as well. As I've said before in this thread, we do have more changes coming.
However, this is pretty complex stuff to engineer, and not all these changes are trivial. You do know that we're an independent studio with limited development resources.
You should have some reasonable faith in what I say, and patience with our on-going progress; otherwise it begs the question of whether our game is right for you at all.