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Boting talk


Exar Kun -George
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15 hours ago, Memph said:

I think any bots that perform in-game actions should be against the rules, whether that's moving banks, trading, sending out recruitment messages, declaring wars, attacking, etc. Notification bots are ok I suppose.

 

14 hours ago, Prefonteen said:

Any bot that automates in-game actions (such as war declarations, bank transfers, baseball etc.) should be prohibited. Any script that accumulates and/or parses data from the game should be fine. A hard line on this is probably necessary to prevent rules being bent.

I'm basically in agreement with these posts. 

Particularly in regard to transactions (bank/ trade) and exchanges (war/baseball) that require analog participation and rely on player activity.

The only thing that I'd leave the door open for is recruitment / mass messaging but even then something like that could be exploited and if an ingame alternative is provided (as mentioned) it would be unnecessary. 

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One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

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1 hour ago, Sisyphus said:

I'm basically in agreement with these posts. 

Particularly in regard to transactions (bank/ trade) and exchanges (war/baseball) that require analog participation and rely on player activity.

The only thing that I'd leave the door open for is recruitment / mass messaging but even then something like that could be exploited and if an ingame alternative is provided (as mentioned) it would be unnecessary. 

Excluding the recruitment bots, which have a role in improving the abysmal player retention that we're facing at the moment, I think the consensus of drawing a line between the input/output parts of the game is the most reasonable solution here. It keeps it relatively clear cut.

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Just pretty much echoing everyone else here at this point as I think my stance is clear. Automated in-game actions should be against the rules. I'm not even sure why we have to have this conversation, honestly.

The game is meant to be played by people, not scripts. I also agree with Zephyr about removing the API all together at this point.

 

The only part I'm willing to overlook scripting is with mass messages. I could care less if an alliance has a recruitment bot, that has been a mainstay of nationsims for years.

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i could have sworn we already went over this and agreed that bots preforming in game actions were against the rules and any future us of them would be harshly punished? is that not why this text was added to the captcha page?

 

" Your account has been randomly screened to verify your identity as a human. This measure is being taken due to the presence of "bots" and "scripts" that some players attempt to use to cheat. "Bots" or "scripts" which play the game for you are strictly against the Game Rules. We apologize for causing this inconvenience. Once you have verified your identity, you will be redirected back to your previous page. "

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Using bots creates a competitive edge for some, and not using them creates an edge for others. In this age of Python, the existence of bots is inevitable, and a total ban is unenforceable anyhow.

That said, the most common uses for bots demonstrate the gap between what P&W provides, and what the users demand. Simple economics - grow the feature set and charge credits for it. If not for bots, folks would do it manually anyhow.

A set of intel reports to track wars could be easily implemented, including filters, you know, so you can track Coalition C's metoric earth-graze, for example.

Transactions are an obvious no, else the game becomes a battle of the bots. Very few people realize that even scrapers...etc are a serious security risk as the coder always maintains a back door...

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Are you originally from Earth, too?

Proud owner of Harry's goat. It's mine now.

I now own MinesomeMC's goat, too. It's starting to look like a herd.

Yep, it is a herd. Aldwulf has added his goat, too, and it ain't Irish.

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7 hours ago, Redarmy said:

I would prefer banking made easier. I find it tedious. 

This. I think the issue is more solved by not making the game more tedious. It would be better to universalize the automated banking so anyone can have it. No one wants to play a game where it's tedious and people should be able to run alliances via mobile. The features the systems have should be available in-game. Right now this is pretty much trying to pull the rug under the people who put the effort to code the stuff 2 years+ after it was approved. Building it in-game would remove the potential hazards. Rather than ruining it for everyone making this game more playable is better.

Edited by Roquentin
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Guest Elijah Mikaelson
25 minutes ago, Roquentin said:

This. I think the issue is more solved by not making the game more tedious. It would be better to universalize the automated banking so anyone can have it. No one wants to play a game where it's tedious and people should be able to run alliances via mobile. The features the systems have should be available in-game. Right now this is pretty much trying to pull the rug under the people who put the effort to code the stuff 2 years+ after it was approved. Building it in-game would remove the potential hazards. Rather than ruining it for everyone making this game more playable is better.

Banking is not that tedious, just do not tax all your members 100/100 then the active ones can build their own nation, most alliances do not enforce 100/100 so they do not have this "tedious banking" WHY should the game be built around what BK/NPO find easier, the rest of the game is more than capable and have been doing it the way its meant to be 2+ years ago. Again Alex might have approved of it two years ago but that do not make it right.

 

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2 minutes ago, Bjorn Ironside said:

Banking is not that tedious, just do not tax all your members 100/100 then the active ones can build their own nation, most alliances do not enforce 100/100 so they do not have this "tedious banking" WHY should the game be built around what BK/NPO find easier, the rest of the game is more than capable and have been doing it the way its meant to be 2+ years ago. Again Alex might have approved of it two years ago but that do not make it right.

 

You do realize BK put it in before having high taxes at all? They did at 20/10. Just screw off with dictating how we should play. 

Centralized set ups make mass member alliances more viable and if you just want to hang around polishing your big nation, that's fine for you, but we're looking to make it easy for more people to play.

Edited by Roquentin
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Guest Frawley

I am entirely against this proposal, games like this are made by the community, and those community contributions come in many flavours.

I have been working on a stockmarket/bank management system with @Lord of Darkness throughout this war for public release alongside our stats platform. A key feature we want to offer is the management of loans amd share registers for the PW private business community that is both usable on mobile (unlike the actual bank transfer screen), extendable (automatic loan calc's, futures etc) and honestly better coded (no more alliance/nation mix ups, accepts commas and $ signs).

The baseball community was already aware and using tools we developed for them to manage tips and games.

These were/are not to be walled off functions for the NPO, they were trialled with NPO and released to the commumity.

Of course the same community decided that as soon as NPO plays baseball it's got to go.

All these functions as well as a variety of stats functions (which I spend over $1800/year hosting) are for the community, and rely on bots and crawlers that automate aspects of the game.

frick you if you want to kill what I find interesting about community games.

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If the problem is fairness, why not require to make bots at a certain point freely avaiable to the public? Prohibiting bots only makes sense when you can make money of them?

Else I do not see why we should prohibit game enhancers.

Opinions are my own.

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1: Bank automation should be allowed, albeit possibly with a delay between the request and the action just so stuff can't be instantly transferred when a war is declared etc. For a centralised alliance, being able to automate banking is critical. For our alliance, nations need X resources sent each day to keep them running and that should be able to be automated, be it ingame or through bots. 

 

2. Mass messaging - should be 3 ways of doing so, manual, API and credits. 

- Manual - so players can manually copy paste, to reward hard work.

- API - with a few mins limit between messages, but so it's still possible to send messages automatically for lists the game won't allow targetting for.

- Credits - Pay a credit for X mass messages, targetable for new nations, alliances etc. - basically a whole lot of presets for what most people use it for. Should be the preferred way to mass message.

 

3. HTML vs. API

Should have a rate limit for HTML of at least *10, so if you've got to wait 1 second between requests for the API, you have to wait at least 10 for the HTML site. Should still be possible to scrape, as the API will never have everything, but between the API and some sort of daily dump system of wars/cities/alliances/nations, that should cover most.

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Guest Elijah Mikaelson
10 hours ago, Roquentin said:

You do realize BK put it in before having high taxes at all? They did at 20/10. Just screw off with dictating how we should play. 

Centralized set ups make mass member alliances more viable and if you just want to hang around polishing your big nation, that's fine for you, but we're looking to make it easy for more people to play.

more people to play or easier  for you to control many nations using 3rd party programs? 

So you wish to dictate how others play but get butt hunt when someone says the way you play is wrong, how do you even sit down with such a sore ass?

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Guest Elijah Mikaelson
10 hours ago, Frawley said:

I am entirely against this proposal, games like this are made by the community, and those community contributions come in many flavours.

I have been working on a stockmarket/bank management system with @Lord of Darkness throughout this war for public release alongside our stats platform. A key feature we want to offer is the management of loans amd share registers for the PW private business community that is both usable on mobile (unlike the actual bank transfer screen), extendable (automatic loan calc's, futures etc) and honestly better coded (no more alliance/nation mix ups, accepts commas and $ signs).

The baseball community was already aware and using tools we developed for them to manage tips and games.

These were/are not to be walled off functions for the NPO, they were trialled with NPO and released to the commumity.

Of course the same community decided that as soon as NPO plays baseball it's got to go.

All these functions as well as a variety of stats functions (which I spend over $1800/year hosting) are for the community, and rely on bots and crawlers that automate aspects of the game.

frick you if you want to kill what I find interesting about community games.

On a personal level thank you for the effort and work you put in, however a bot owned and controlled by NPO put people at risk, the control gives you power over those who use them, such as changing % of loans when you feel fit, deleting things as you see fit, more to the point anyone using your system's will have all they do record.

on your last statement, your side wanted to kill what many others enjoyed about the game?

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To me, the answer to "How do we stop people from using external software to improve access to alliance banks?" is pretty clearly, "Improve the in-game access to banks so people don't have an advantage by using external software."  Otherwise, you're just going encourage people to build better and better scripts to try and evade whatever limits Alex sets up to counter the previous generation of automation.

One improvement would be to let an alliance set a daily allowed withdrawal amount from the bank from users that don't have full bank access.

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3 hours ago, Capfalcon said:

To me, the answer to "How do we stop people from using external software to improve access to alliance banks?" is pretty clearly, "Improve the in-game access to banks so people don't have an advantage by using external software."  Otherwise, you're just going encourage people to build better and better scripts to try and evade whatever limits Alex sets up to counter the previous generation of automation.

One improvement would be to let an alliance set a daily allowed withdrawal amount from the bank from users that don't have full bank access.

It would be intersting if alliances could have permissions tiers for banking. 

Alternatively it would be good if the alliance bank keeps track of how much you have put in. Then you can withdrawn what you have personally put in at any time.

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13 hours ago, Frawley said:

I am entirely against this proposal, games like this are made by the community, and those community contributions come in many flavours.

I have been working on a stockmarket/bank management system with @Lord of Darkness throughout this war for public release alongside our stats platform. A key feature we want to offer is the management of loans amd share registers for the PW private business community that is both usable on mobile (unlike the actual bank transfer screen), extendable (automatic loan calc's, futures etc) and honestly better coded (no more alliance/nation mix ups, accepts commas and $ signs).

The baseball community was already aware and using tools we developed for them to manage tips and games.

These were/are not to be walled off functions for the NPO, they were trialled with NPO and released to the commumity.

Of course the same community decided that as soon as NPO plays baseball it's got to go.

All these functions as well as a variety of stats functions (which I spend over $1800/year hosting) are for the community, and rely on bots and crawlers that automate aspects of the game.

frick you if you want to kill what I find interesting about community games.

Most of us don't want to see any bots in the game so your attempt at justifying their use because you released them to the public is unacceptable and the truth is your alliance is fully reliant on bots. Spending your own money hosting for a clear advantage over those who do not or do not want to is also no justification for them, this should give @Alex more reasons to ban them completely.

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10 hours ago, Micchan said:

When you realize that NPO defending bots is not a fight to automate more some aspect of the game but is a fight for their own life

PUW89K4.png

http://100photos.time.com/photos/jeff-widener-tank-man

 

So are we finally the heroes? And, FYI, the man was never crushed by the tank.


Pico Iyer's description of the original picture is also very succinct. Does that make Alex now a hero for refusing to ban bank bots? Or are NPO and Alex both villains in your eyes?


See: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,988169,00.html

Edited by Inst

.

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1 hour ago, Plo Koon said:

Most of us don't want to see any bots in the game so your attempt at justifying their use because you released them to the public is unacceptable and the truth is your alliance is fully reliant on bots. Spending your own money hosting for a clear advantage over those who do not or do not want to is also no justification for them, this should give @Alex more reasons to ban them completely.

I'd hazard a guess and say "most of us" doesn't actually refer to the majority of us. If you were truly against bots you wouldn't be in Rose, since your own alliance uses them. What stick do you plan on beating us with once bots are outlawed and we are still better than you?

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So, I am going to begin my comment with the following statements: "Captcha v2 sucks ass" and "The bank page sucks ass"

On a good day when google decides they will spare you from improving their image recognition programs, you will be given fairly straightforward images that you will spend no more than 15 seconds passing. On a bad day Google will throw out some absolute bullshit where you have to decide whether or not other people who saw the same image considered that little sliver of a car as a car or ignored it, and no matter what you choose it's wrong and you have to spend a minute or two trying to do a basic task that a captcha solving bot would actually have completed faster than you by utilizing Googles own image search service. On top of that, captcha also has issues sometimes where even if you prove your are a human every time it pops up, it will continually give you more difficult images that can take forever to get though. During the first two weeks of the war the captcha system went to shit and some people legitimately spent 5+ minutes trying to pass the god damned PoS just to launch a war because the system thought there was a DDOS in progress with the massive spike in access or something.

We already have to deal with slow load times and lag spikes constantly and how the bank page works only exacerbates that problem. If you end up needing to send out aid during a lag spike and get bored of watching the bank page load and try to do any other in game action concurrently, congratulations, you now have to reload the bank page again because it will fail. God forbid if you forget that fact and spend time trying to send stuff out and click withdraw only to get the error message.

Also, sending out bank aid and what not on mobile is frankly awful. On top of that, if you are trying to transfer your bank and you add a number that's too large it will fail the entire transaction forcing you to retype everything again. You can't copy/paste either since commas break everything for some dumb reason and it takes longer on mobile to copy -> paste -> trying to click behind every comma to backspace than it is to type out 14758329.43 two dozen times. UPN literally stopped taxing resources years ago just because it was such a pain to deal with interface wise.

 

tl;dr implement reCAPTCHA v3 and make the bank page better

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Orbis Wars   |   CSI: UPN   |   B I G O O F   |   PW Expert Has Nerve To Tell You How To Run Your Own Goddamn Alliance | Occupy Wall Street | Sheepy Sings

TheNG - My favorite part is when Steve suggests DEIC might have done something remotely successful, then gets massively shit on for proposing such a stupid idea.

On 1/4/2016 at 6:37 PM, Sheepy said:
Sheepy said:

I'm retarded, you win

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20 hours ago, Bjorn Ironside said:

Banking is not that tedious, just do not tax all your members 100/100 then the active ones can build their own nation, most alliances do not enforce 100/100 so they do not have this "tedious banking" WHY should the game be built around what BK/NPO find easier, the rest of the game is more than capable and have been doing it the way its meant to be 2+ years ago. Again Alex might have approved of it two years ago but that do not make it right.

I'm sorry, I beg to differ. Banking is tedious af for mass member alliances, regardless of the tax rate.

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Guest Elijah Mikaelson
33 minutes ago, Princess Adrienne said:

I'm sorry, I beg to differ. Banking is tedious af for mass member alliances, regardless of the tax rate.

Then do not take the job on lol.

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