Quote:
Originally Posted by Zh|l
Even if it is proven some elements of BF HC cheated, I am not the internet police. Resigning from my post would only done nothing at all and my obligation is to the many members of Black Flag which as others have pointed out are definitely not cheating.
Should I abandon them just because of other people wishes? If I had resigned straight away this round would have been over long ago and you'd all be moaning right now about stagnation instead.
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I feel players have an informal responsibility to assist PA Team with catching cheaters. If at any point you were aware of actions that you believe were illegal, then you should've contacted the MHs. If not, then not. That said, I'd guess about half the active playerbase in PA has benefitted from a scanner bot (as opposed to a scans bot) at one point or another, including me, so singling you out for public scrutiny is unreasonable. Glass houses.
As for what to do, now that a public statement by Appoco has (seemingly) contradicted statements by BF representatives, that's a tough one. BF members (and everyone else) were told by BF HCs that the bot was legal. While that statement on its own may be a bit hard to believe, the common trope for people using bots like this has been 'the MHs approved it'. Being vigilant for cheating is one thing; accusing people of outright lying is quite another. I see no reason for an alliance-wide crackdown as Butcher the Holy Crusader is proposing. What does remain is two options:
1) The bot owners either flat out lied about speaking to the MHs, or they misrepresented how the bot works and what it does, or they accurately represented one version of a bot, then expanded it after the fact. I've heard people claim their bot wasn't really a bot because it consisted of three distinct pieces. Hilarious, but you can see how that kind of convoluted thinking might cause an MH to draw the wrong conclusion. Simple: Close the bot(s), the bot owner(s), and the HCs that organized systemic cheating. Since providing scans is one of the main functions of alliances (attacks, defense, politics, scans), it is ultimately the HCs who are responsible for a scanner bot. In lieu of accurate information about who's in charge of what, that's the person who signed up the tag, as the 'owner' of the alliance.
2) The bot owners really did describe the bot's functions to the MHs and accurately explained what actions the bot could take without human intervention and which it couldn't. Despite the clear bothood, the MHs really did approve. If that's the case, no one's guitly of anything (except the MHs, of gross stupidity). Close this bot immediately (because the EULA allows Ranul Tech to change its mind about its contents, let alone how it's to be interpreted), but do not close or even warn the bot owner. Inform the community that this type of bot is no longer allowed and will be treated as willful botting (rather that unintentional) botting starting 72 hours from now, and that existing bots must be deleted by that point. 72 hours later, treat all remaining bots as instances of option 1 and go on a MH spree.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zh|l
I would also like to point out that a portion of Spore High Council, especially Bashar, was very suspicious of CT's tools and the addon that they use to update it with information. Bashar was very critical of it and thought it was cheating for a long time, regardless of what PA Team decided. Obviously I can't speak for Bashar's opinions now on it - afterall, Spore did consider using CT tools and it's "status" wasn't the key decision to why it wasn't used in the end, but my example is merely to prove a point that when we saw it, elements of us believed it was cheating. I'm not in ANY SHAPE OR FORM accusing CT of cheating - just to point out that grey areas can be seen by people
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For people who may not be aware: CT members are required to run a Greasemonkey script that takes all the scans they see ingame and posts them to the CT webbie. My first thought was that this is not a bot, because it takes no actions in the game, but a closer reading of the ters and conditions requires only 'access' to the game, for example 'using browser plugins that make it easier for you to play the game'. If that's not the definition of Greasemonkey scripts then I don't know what is. I am therefore now inclined to agree with Bashar, though the absence of in-game
actions make this a minor offense at worst.
And for the sake of completeness: Merlin and Munin have long had functionality that allowed it to retrieve scans. However, it can only do so when the URLs are pasted on IRC (or into the webbie), and it uses an PA API designed specifically for bots to access them (
this one). It is possible for a scanner bot to feed scan URLs into Merlin/Munin, but M*in on their own cannot.