My thoughts on bots and a plea to blanket ban all third party automation and develop the tools inhouse

[Mars]

Yes, i know, nobody asked for my opinion but i honestly think what im about say is in line with what at least a good chunk of the community thinks and will affect gameplay positively overall. 

Im also aware this will infuriate another chunk of it, but thats only because it makes things a bit harder and brings back a lot of the 'inconveniences' that automation did away with.

This is not about locutus alone, but bots at large and as a full disclaimer i dont know code or am very familiar with how bots work, except that they rely on api keys.

I feel we are at a bit of a crossroads right now with locutus being removed from the pnw discord and alex trying to weight in on the whole borg situation, so im thinking its probably the best time for the community and game admins to consider doing away or at least changing the limits on what automation can do outside the game, who develops it and how it affects gameplay at large.

I will go a bit into the different functionalities bots have, why a lot of them are harmful and how developing the game and its scope is the answer and not player controlled third party discord bots.

Raid finder: I have been an enthusiastic new player in arrgh looking to make a name for myself and stack the bank before locutus was a thing. We had a 'raid finder bot' around for ages and none of us even went through the trouble of fixing/using because it was not needed. It wasnt what we wanted to do and didnt appeal to us at all. Because it was fun without one and because having a knack for finding good targets and keeping up the grind was what differentiated the good raiders from the bad. This is back when top loot was 4b, and pushing for the leaderboards meant something, because you knew the trouble everyone went through to get there, you knew it was out of the scope of what the average player or alliance was willing to do and thats what made it meaningful. Ask anyone involved and competent with raiding from before locutus and after, they will tell you bots and specifically locutus is what killed the whole experience overall, coupled with nerfs to piracy of course. Suddenly years and hundred of raids experience didnt count at all, you could type in a command and that would be better than what you would be able to piece together on your own.

The total possible loot pool started to be shared with tons of those who were not willing to put any effort into finding targets, they would just type in a command and get targets fed to them. While this might not mean much on an individual basis, with a good raider being able to outperform a dude who only found targets through bot, if they both used the bot. But having a full alliance use it just means they constantly drain the total possible raid pool with zero effort. When borg started creating his long line of 'raiding alliances' that relied on locutus, he flooded the game with people who would otherwise not be willing to engage in the whole process. That heavily affected raiding and i feel was deeply unfair to all the people who did it manually, in the actual game for years.

I feel like having the game hidden behind a fog of war, with the player simply being unable to poll together and specifically extract the information he is looking for with a bot is a good thing, and would make raiding meaningful again, not just something all alliances do by default because they have a bot. The entry level of player engagement and effort required to raid in this game right now is simply non existent. It is zero effort, and while one nation wouldnt be a problem, whole alliances doing it just drains everything to where its all meaningless. 

The game will be better without it. You will have less overall people raiding but more actual raiders who get heavily invested in it, precisely because its not as easy as using a bot command.

If this raid finder thing is that important just add it to the game page, but honestly, it is not. Its arguably harmful and dilutes the whole experience.

Arrgh does not use locutus for instance, and started using a bot out of necessity, with a good chunk of people not using it at all.

Warfare: Pretty much all of those points made above echo in this category, with the distinction competence in this field is shared between membership and leadership, and setting up wars and helping people coordinate in them is what differentiates the good from the bad. Though in this section, there is no shared loot pool to drain so the effects are less apparent.

What i would like to point out is that KT does not use bots and i think thats part of why they constantly out perform everyone else. What im willing to bet is they will outperform people even more if they didnt have the bots to bridge some of the gap. That gap should be bridged by competence and experience, and theres little incentive for it if you can more or less 'get there' through bots. If suddenly everyone is as good as their own actions and organisation, there will be an incentive to get good, or die. The bot currently only serves as a life raft for the lazy and incompetent and should more or less be done away with as well.

Econ: I wont comment too much on this, econ bots have caused problems and issues time and time again and lead alex to situations where he cant know what happened because he has no oversight over 3rd party software and what commands they receive. Maybe some extra quality of life stuff is desperately needed but for the love of god, add it to the game, on the game page.

Would also like to point out Yarr does no automation and is arguably the biggest or one of the biggest offshores and banking services in the game.

Recruitment: only thing to say on this is IT IS CANCER. Every new player gets spammed 1000 ingame messages when they first join. Its pointless and an issue as its one of the first things you find out about this game. Bots are spamming you things you dont even understand and thats somehow fine.

 

Now for my suggestion, blanket ban ALL automations and spam bots and remove any links between discord and the game page that affect the meta in any capacity. 

Develop your own benign inhouse discord bot you have full oversight over, with no purpose other than helping manage the community and providing some admitelly needed game to discord information, but always keep it aimed at things that do not affect gameplay or the meta at large. 

From may layman understanding this could be as easy as a hardcap on api requests. 

One big downside from all of this would be losing wartrackers, so making a pnw wartracker on the page would be very useful.

Seriously analyze how the different functionalities of the bot affected gameplay and figure out what you want to add to the game and just add it to the game, on the game page, were the game should unfold for everyone.

In any case, discuss.

Edited February 10, 2022 by Mars

[Broke]

Pardon me for my language, but what the actual ɟnɔʞ?

[Vero]

You're right, no one asked

[Miller]

9 minutes ago, Mars said:

In any case, discuss

[Mars]

This is will be even more unpopular then i thought haha, guess people really love bots.

I am wondering though, why does the time and effort that go to making bots not go to making the actual game better. 

And why not have an Alex owned discord bot he can get different people to help with.

Edited February 10, 2022 by Mars

[-Nero-]

L take

[Magic]

@Solomon Ben-David It has been a fun ride my friend. See you on the other side o7

[Jacob Knox]

I've got a life outside of this browser game. I'm not "lazy" for wanting my job of managing milcom for a roughly 140 member alliance (Serpentis and Aurora combined) to be made moderately easier through minor automation of menial tasks. Furthermore, the fact that I don't constantly go in-game to check incoming and outgoing wars (for example) doesn't make me any less competent. I could understand your argument if the bots actually gave war commands or violated rules by doing attacks for members, but that's simply not the case.

 

As for the portion about raiding, finding targets via traditional means has become a moderately "lost art," but these alliances you're bemoaning at least have restrictions on who their members can and cannot raid (normally) while you, as a pirate, are free to raid whoever the hell you want—consequences aside. Regardless, I think "remove all automation and bots" is a naïve solution, at best.

 

I will cede the point that the recruitment scripts are kinda cancer spam, but that's a minor point here.

Edited February 10, 2022 by Jacob Knox

[christian2094]

Hilarious. I needed that laugh today, thanks

[Mars]

12 minutes ago, Nero Claudius said:

L take

taken

8 minutes ago, Jacob Knox said:

Regardless, I think "remove all automation and bots" is a naïve solution, at best.

Exact quote is 'remove all third party automation and bots' and develop the game and inhouse bots that are not player controlled.

I would like to humbly point out there is a pretty big distinction between the two, since one keeps your quality of life changes, just makes it so they can only be handled by authorized, alex controlled discord bots, or incorporated into the actual website.

Also would you please tell me if you would be against it just because the function you use would now be on the website or alex bot and why?

And is going 'ingame' to play a game an actual inconvenience?

If not, dont you think its important not to misrepresent what i say if youre gonna go through the trouble of typing a response?

Edited February 10, 2022 by Mars

[christian2094]

4 minutes ago, Jacob Knox said:

I will cede the point that the recruitment scripts are kinda cancer spam, but that's a minor point here.

While this is true, it's kind of necessary isn't it? Otherwise new players would only join the top alliances, and the others wouldn't really have much of a chance. Of course people could go out manually messaging everyone, but that would still be spam.

[Joe Schmo]

25 minutes ago, Mars said:

This is will be even more unpopular then i thought haha, guess people really love bots.

I am wondering though, why does the time and effort that go to making bots not go to making the actual game better. 

And why not have an Alex owned discord bot he can get different people to help with.

you do know doing all that stuff manually is a pain in the ass right?

[Jacob Knox]

13 minutes ago, Mars said:

Exact quote is 'remove all third party automation and bots' and develop the game and inhouse bots that are not player controlled.

I would like to humbly point out there is a pretty big distinction between the two, since one keeps your quality of life changes, just makes it so they can only be handled by authorized, alex controlled discord bots, or incorporated into the actual website.

Also would you please tell me if you would be against it just because the function you use would now be on the website or alex bot and why?

And is going 'ingame' to play a game an actual inconvenience?

If not, dont you think its important not to misrepresent what i say if youre gonna go through the trouble of typing a response?

When the game notifies me of all new declarations against my alliance (which technically includes Aurora too) and has an easy way to set up war rooms for members to communicate about any given war they're involved in all in-game, then I wouldn't have much of a point for the bot's milcom functions. Nothing the bot does for milcom really affects gameplay, but rather communication. Wars are still fought in-game. And no, going in-game isn't that much of an inconvenience for me (given that I do it at least once every single day), but my point is that having to almost constantly monitor the war tabs of Aurora and Serpentis to see if any of our 140 members are getting into trouble would be an absolute pain in the neck. I know, because I used to do it for Borealis' roughly 34 cadets before Space Puppy had the added offensive war alerts feature.

Now, I would not be opposed to an official PnW bot that has these functionalities to limit third-party intervention, but that would be a heavy burden on the already swamped dev team.

As for misrepresenting what you were saying, well that was likely just the result of me misinterpreting parts of what you were saying. And if that was the case, then I do apologize. Because the last thing I want is to put words in people's mouths.

[Mars]

2 minutes ago, Joe Schmo said:

you do know doing all that stuff manually is a pain in the ass right?

im not sure what stuff you are referring to?

Maybe not directed at you, but for everyone with reading disability.

Im not saying remove everything bots do, i just said remove third party bots and have one main pnw one thats controlled by the owner of the game, remove bot commands that affect the meta and start adding the positive different quality of life changes bots bring into the actual game on the game website.

Again, there is a huge difference between 'delete bots and everything related' and what i just typed above.

If anything its elegant.

[Jacob Knox]

1 minute ago, Mars said:

remove bot commands that affect the meta

I suppose a point of confusion for many may be arising from this part. It's evident from your initial post that commands for finding raid targets fall under this category for you. But the question is: what else do you mean by "commands that affect the meta"?

[Mars]

37 minutes ago, Jacob Knox said:

I suppose a point of confusion for many may be arising from this part. It's evident from your initial post that commands for finding raid targets fall under this category for you. But the question is: what else do you mean by "commands that affect the meta"?

i dont think commands 'for finding raid targets' fall under that category, im sure both the war system and the raiding meta could be improved in a number of ways, or that you can develop a fun system that has all of those commands but expands the gameplay in some other direction. What i think is that it is not in a good place right now, and i pointed at what i think works against the current setup. To simplify, what im arguing is the relationship between third party bots and the game needs to be revisited, why i think moving from third party to inhouse developed tools would be better and what i have been able to identify as issues with the current system.

I also believe development can go a million different good ways and a million bad ways. I think its a good moment to rethink the approach to development going forward and seriously consider the harder road of not outsourcing this development to third party code, but find ways to engage the community in the development of the actual game and an alex controlled universal and democratical bot that he can fully oversee.

to answer your question specifically, if i had to give an all encompasing defition of 'commands that affect the meta', though i dont think i can deliver on a definition that would do it justice for ALL the issues out there, i would say it comes down to it providing an unfair advantage to those who dont use it or eliminating key steps needed to achieve a goal.

Whats more important then the definition though are its effects, and i would more focus on that. If the effect is you can play the game by not playing the game, theres a problem. If the game involves you taking specific steps towards a goal and the software you are using enables you to skip those by having the bot compile large amounts of  information and extract what you need i would say that falls under commands that affect the meta as well. 

26 minutes ago, Thalmor said:

The dismissive, snarky response to Mars is interesting.

Cant take it that seriously when otherwise respectable and  long standing members of this community like adrienne downvote the post 5 seconds after me posting it. I doubt most of the initial downvotes had the time or will to comprehend and internalise what i typed out and thats fine, this post isnt directed at you.

I understand the knee jerk reaction though, and with the attention and reading comprehension deficit going on in the world these days i cant even blame them.

My hopes are after the initial fight or flight instinct wears off, they will calm down and really read what im saying, maybe we can have a meaningful discussion on it as a community, since i feel thats more important right now then however many downvotes i might or might not get in this thread.  

Main reason why i dont particularly care about downvotes and really wish i get 1000 of them but spark a discussion is because i feel its a good time for a hard reset on how alex handles the relationship between the game and discord, and i feel that with a little bit of inspiration and understanding and with the guts (of course to the extent his time/resources allow) to actually assume responsability over developing these tools under his own oversight, we could be in a better place 6months, year, two years down the line. 

The dev community would also have to change their approach from developing their own tools to helping with development of the game and alex controlled bot, which some might take more satisfaction in, others will not see the merits of working on something that benefits the game at large.

Edited February 10, 2022 by Mars

[Kosta]

@Mars I can see where you are coming from here.

I find it hard to accept that in order for an alliance to be successful in this game they need a full time programmer to run a bot that does almost every task for their alliance. 

Unfortunately, this is because there a lot of menial tasks involved in this game. Such tasks are protecting your bank, auditing members, and recruitment. 

I believe the only way to stop this would be to reduce the games reliance on bots. More in-game tools need to be given to leaders. With the pace that Alex updates this game, I don't see this happening for a long while (if at all).

[Mars]

20 minutes ago, Kosta said:

@Mars Unfortunately, this is because there a lot of menial tasks involved in this game. Such tasks are protecting your bank, auditing members, and recruitment. 

how do bots even help with any of those? Im just asking because funnily enough you mentioned 3 things i dont even know you could use bots to make them 'less menial'

like protecting bank for sure only requires having an offshore and im not sure how bots are related to that. would like to mention though that the whole offshore system is broken as well, but at least it doesnt rely on bots to work.

auditing members i assume the bot would just pull the nations build and different improvements and stuff? dont think thats even much of an issue, all of that information si already on their nation page. something that can easily be added to an alex bot im sure, though if it was me id remove it just so instead of typing out !audit 'nation id', you would go to pnw.com and simply have a look on their page. not gamebreaking at all though tbh

recruitment, is that recruitment bots? because those are objectively cancerous and should be done away with 100%. Spam is spam

 

As a side note, every game has tedious aspects people will do away with if given the chance, and i think if you let this process run its course it ends up with one guy one upping everyone by developing a button that does everything, and everyone else doing the same because doing any of the tedious tasks becomes meaningless since theres no stakes involved. 

Also i think im still being misunderstood, im all for making the unnecessary parts that end up being tedious just because of bad game design better through automation, im just against it being done on third party software and think more consideration needs to be given on how those affect the game at large.

Im also saying there needs to be serious reconsideration on whats not making up for bad game design and just automates what should be actual gameplay, which in a text game is a lot of times. going through text and having that inform your future actions.

 

Edited February 10, 2022 by Mars

[Indger]

I support upto a certain extent. Will try to detail it later.

Edited February 10, 2022 by Indger

[Charles Bolivar]

Bots basically penalise anyone trying to become good at the game because any ol average Joe can just input a few commands and achieve the same result.  It helps manage an alliance without a doubt, but the competency of the alliance itself does suffer for it.

[BlackBeard]

Gotta agree with Mars on this one. When I first joined the game there were no bots. I joined a micro and noticed straight from the off that the gov they had there were enthusiastic about the game and was happy to teach you everything you needed to know. You could also see them putting in multiple hours a day making sure the alliance ran properly. 

Then I decided to help out took a millcom role. Logging multiple times a day making sure we hadn't been declared on. Checking our members to see if they had enough mill, encouraging peeps to raid. Approving raids that fit our restrictions. It was time consuming yes but the game hasn't been that fun for a long time. 

And when irl got in the way a gov member would step down and be replaced by the dude he was training. Being gov actually meant something you were the few who were willing to put the time into the game. 

 

Then I started raiding and found the most fun part of the game. To be a good raider it was down to you to put in the time. I would then spend a few hours a day looking for targets or potential ones, save a certain link for next time. Check bank transactions and war activity of pretty much every nation in game. And felt a sense of achievement as I rose through the ranks as a early raider. The bots I feel have taken away the fun of the game plus the nerfs did't help, you succeeded on how much time you were willing to put in and you ahceived on your own merit. 

The bots have made the game lazy thats the real problem. 

 

[Jacob Knox]

34 minutes ago, Charles Bolivar said:

Bots basically penalise anyone trying to become good at the game because any ol average Joe can just input a few commands and achieve the same result.  It helps manage an alliance without a doubt, but the competency of the alliance itself does suffer for it.

I'm going to have to mildly disagree with you here, but qualify that this is simply from what I have seen in the cadets of Aurora (the main ones we have raiding) and with a specific bot (Aurora Space Puppy). I could name a handful of really competent cadets (some of which I have since taken into milcom gov) that I have seen in my time in our milcom department. What set them apart from the rest? The rest just ran the command to find targets, raided them, and often ended up just raiding empty targets or targets that weren't the best. Our most competent cadets, on the other hand, often looked in-game for their targets and spent the time to find good targets. The result? One of them has already achieved almost $1.4 billion looted and his nation is 182 days old. So to say that they can get the same results is not quite the entire truth, at least in my experience.

[Mars]

11 minutes ago, Jacob Knox said:

Our most competent cadets, on the other hand, often looked in-game for their targets and spent the time to find good targets. 

ive stated that one individual nation using the bot or not using it is not the issue, or at least it doesnt hint to a larger problem on its own.

but once you have full alliances using the raid bot, the situation is different. why i talked about the meta at large and how it is affected overall.

main idea is that theres a limited pool of potential targets that gets shared between everyone. once you artifically raise the succes rate and ease of access of a large group, competency is less rewarding overall as theres less incentive for it.

Edited February 10, 2022 by Mars

[Prefontaine]

3 hours ago, Bunyip said:

Bots, essentially, heighten the skill floor for bad players and lower the skill ceiling for good players. 

With the recent threads about a returning to the forums, nostalgia for how politics played out then and such... Perhaps bots contributing to laziness is the real enemy all along. 

[Charles Bolivar]

22 minutes ago, Jacob Knox said:

I'm going to have to mildly disagree with you here, but qualify that this is simply from what I have seen in the cadets of Aurora (the main ones we have raiding) and with a specific bot (Aurora Space Puppy). I could name a handful of really competent cadets (some of which I have since taken into milcom gov) that I have seen in my time in our milcom department. What set them apart from the rest? The rest just ran the command to find targets, raided them, and often ended up just raiding empty targets or targets that weren't the best. Our most competent cadets, on the other hand, often looked in-game for their targets and spent the time to find good targets. The result? One of them has already achieved almost $1.4 billion looted and his nation is 182 days old. So to say that they can get the same results is not quite the entire truth, at least in my experience.

This is true. I did perhaps over generalise, but again, you also somewhat confirm my point about good players not relying on bots versus average Joes who rely on bots. Take away the bots and these average members would be forced to raise their competency and engagement (or git gud as we used to label it).

Im not arguing for bots to be removed, far from it. I remember trying to run a milcom in the other game in a 900 member alliance with minimal bots and tools at my disposal. It wasn't fun in the slightest. The point I making though is you can notice a definite correlation across alliance memberships when we compare competency levels versus reliance upon bots. We all remember NPO after all whose average members barely knew anything about the various ingame mechanics including both nation building and warring.