Maybe it's just me, but the number of captchas I have to submit has skyrocketed in the last few days. Basically from none to 4 or 5 per day. It's startling to have to deal with sometimes.

Were you sitting AFK and launched in flight, for long periods of time? That's basically asking to be flagged as a spybot, which has existed for a long time.

To recap what I wrote in 2018:

The current CAPTCHA flagging behaviour exists for a reason. I'm not going to explain all the reasons why we implemented things the way we did, but it is entirely by design, and not by accident.

Basically, if you want to sit AFK for long periods, do it within a single station. Your radar visibility will get zeroed in that sector (for awhile), but you'll be fine otherwise. It still isn't the greatest thing for the server (it keeps the sector online needlessly), but you won't have any negative ramifications.

If you experience frequent CAPTCHA requests, you can ask to have your account un-flagged. However, at that point it's on you to change your behaviour, so you stop behaving like a bot.

There's more detail in an update from 2022 here.

I've removed the flag from your account for the moment, but the advice today is the same as it was seven years ago:

- if you're a premium subscriber and want to "sit in-game", then do it in a single station (basically, like a shop-bot).

(To be clear, if there's some other greater purpose to this thread, in terms of a Suggestion, and the rules thereof, I'm open to on-going discussion. Thus far I'm just trying to explain what probably happened).

Thanks for changing that account.

My concern is not that this sort of thing exists, it's that it can sometimes be very aggressive. I was on a different account yesterday and after I jumped into a large deneb skirm and started to turn toward a target, a captcha screen popped up. Hurrying, I mistyped the captcha and was disconnected. Not the end of the world, but immersion-breaking.

I'm sure you are right that sometime previously I walked away from my game client for a long period of time with my ship in space. I have at times forgotten I was logged in and found it the next day.

My only suggestion is that it may need some refinement.

Thank you for all you do.

It happened again tonight, captcha popped up in combat. Should I submit tickets when this happens or just move on?

Today I got a captcha while docked in odia m14

So.. per our logs, you are not receiving any captchas on the stated account.

You are receiving captchas on completely different accounts (csgno2, csgno3, csgno4, csgno5).

Those are different accounts from what we discussed above, and I only removed the flag from your one account stated in this thread. All your other accounts are also flagged for questionable activity, and additionally, none of the rest of them are Premium subscribed accounts.

I linked to some threads above that explain how the system works, to the extent to which it is public. But to recap:

- Premium Subscribers get considerably more leeway than Freemium accounts (but will still be flagged eventually).
- If you don't behave like you're a person playing the game, that's going to eventually seem strange to the system.
- If you want to sit in a single sector for a long period of time, it's best to be docked to a station.

But, once your account has been flagged as suspicious, you will get captchas fairly frequently, and it won't matter if you're in a station or not.

Similarly, if you try to spend a lot of time online (and idle) with a freemium account, you're also likely to get captchas before long.

So, everything you're experiencing is happening as-intended.

I will go ahead and remove the flags from csgno2-5, but that will only be a temporary measure (especially because those are Freemium). If you leave those accounts sitting around online, or otherwise behaving in ways inconsistent with the behaviour of actual players, you're going to eventually have problems.

To put it simply: VO is for human beings to play and enjoy. It is not intended to be an environment for large-scale automated bot usage, and that kind of activity is likely to become more and more problematic as time goes on.

Thank you Incarnate.

After you un-flagged the first account, I stated that the problems that persisted were on a different account. I am not worried about the captcha at login or when Idle, I think those are completely fair. It's the captchas during combat that I thought were worth bringing up.

Like I wrote on the thread I linked in my first response:

"If you experience frequent CAPTCHA requests, you can ask to have your account un-flagged. However, at that point it's on you to change your behaviour, so you stop behaving like a bot."

I've never made any comment about "combat". That isn't a meaningful part of this discussion. Because, if we were to "exclude combat" then anyone who wants to write bots will simply engage in periodic combat.

We do not fire captchas purely at "idle", because people who write bots usually don't keep their characters idle.

If you are flagged for unusual activity, your account will be handled much more aggressively.

The only solution is the one posted in my initial response. Everything else here has been trying to clarify that to you.

Notably, this is not a wide-spread "problem". This kind of issue impacts only a very small cross-section of players.

Got it. Thank you.