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Competing against a bot

Bob Malone RJ: Bob Malone CO: Malone Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 341 Karma: 191 Joined: Apr 17, 2012	Posted on Jun 15, 2012 and/or easier coding : just a significant fee for switching shelves, proportionnal to store size.
Cian Kemp RJ: Cian Kemp CO: Cian Kemp Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 183 Karma: 58 Joined: Apr 9, 2012	Posted on Jun 15, 2012 That might work, but a fee could be kind of annoying if implemented poorly. What if I misclick and click the wrong category when swapping between them? (easy to do on a mobile device that some folks play with) Would I have to pay again? What if I sell all my current stock before the rollover to the next day and end up with 0 cash due to salaries/maintenance and don't have enough money to pay the fee to swap to my new products? Am I just SOL? An alternative might be to make an auto-stocker in game that can be set to automatically swap to the most profitable item in your inventory - so if you keep an inventory of goods in stock it would automatically sell whatever you have. It would also reduce the micromanagement of having to swap goods when you run out of one of them, since as long as you have the price set on the other goods it'll swap between them until both are sold out. Since it's done on a server wide scale it could come up with a list for every store type of the most profitable items (so it's not repeating it for every company), and then check for the stock in the companies and sell the top 8 items that are in stock. That might be too much overhead though, since the store shelf thing was done in the first place to reduce it - although it might not be if it was done efficiently. A way to set prices across the board based on a multiple of the quality adjusted wholesale value would be cool too. I personally would love to see the game get more macro-management tools like this so I felt more like I was running a company instead of playing a stock boy at Walmart.
Bob Malone RJ: Bob Malone CO: Malone Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 341 Karma: 191 Joined: Apr 17, 2012	Posted on Jun 15, 2012 maybe you can pay the fee once, and you can swap the shelve an unlimited of times before next tick.
Andrew Naples RJ: Clemen Salad CO: Clemen Post Rating: 2 + / - Total Posts: 214 Karma: 89 Joined: Apr 26, 2012	Posted on Jun 15, 2012 Or you know....we can do what pretty much every other multiplayer game has done and ban bots.
Bob Malone RJ: Bob Malone CO: Malone Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 341 Karma: 191 Joined: Apr 17, 2012	Posted on Jun 15, 2012 it would be wise... Not only for a fair competition, but also to be compatible with the possibility to hire managers and so on, which is a feature completely useless as soon as you allow bots.
Michael Tsui RJ: Reisen CO: Reisen Udongein Inaba Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 45 Karma: 30 Joined: Apr 26, 2012	Posted on Jun 16, 2012 bots isn't a problem. a system which makes bot-exclusive strategy too strong compared to human beings. high relative cost for shelf swapping to be charged next tick helps. In addition, I opt for some demand decay mechanism other than persisting for a day then poof. either linear degradation over a day, or exponential decaying.
eric scott RJ: Erik Scott CO: Sappo Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 130 Karma: 29 Joined: Apr 5, 2012	Posted on Jun 16, 2012 Posts he actively uses bots, after we were told bots would not be allowed on the new server. Also is thanked left and right for his contribution to the game as bug tester extrodonaire. Says he isn't banned yet for using bots, geeeeeeee I wonder why My 2c
A J RJ: amanbearpig CO: aManBearPig Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 54 Karma: 18 Joined: Mar 30, 2012	Posted on Jun 16, 2012 Bots also give an advantage in b2b, especially in the new server where there are frequent shortages of items.
eric scott RJ: Erik Scott CO: Sappo Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 130 Karma: 29 Joined: Apr 5, 2012	Posted on Jun 17, 2012 So if using a bot, on your only (primary) account... What is to stop you from running a bot at the same time you perform tasks manually? How is this not gaining an un-fair advantage over us humans who can only do one task at a time? I still don't see how bots can be considered 'legal' in any way shape or form, as it can make split second decisions that take all the "what ifs" out of the volitile nature of building a company.
Andrew Naples RJ: Clemen Salad CO: Clemen Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 214 Karma: 89 Joined: Apr 26, 2012	Posted on Jun 17, 2012 So ive taken a break from the game after selling my old server stuff and want to start fresh after my new server company got "killed", but this has been bothering me. If your bot is 10x more effective than any unemployed autistic, then theres probably a fairness issue here. As far as I can tell, his bot identifies markets with low demand/value of product, buys/imports product, and expands stores all instantaneously and it changes from tick to tick 24/7. Basically maximizing the profit a store can make in any capacity as if a 12 headed genius was watching all the markets at once 24/7. I think he has similar scripts on production runs but im not 100% on that. Comparing it to maintaining a spreadsheet is ridiculous. There was also the "you can just write a bot too" aspect of the argument that is particularly dumb. Not all of us are programmers (im a microbiologist) and it seems stupid to have to learn how to code to compete in a economic sim in my leisure time. It destroys any semblance of competition, turns off new people, and I thought the point of the game was for the player to make as much money as possible, not code the best bot. Theres a reason most of games dont allow this kind of bullshit, but we have to learn it the hard way apparently As a disclaimer, I got nothing against you BallC you seem like a cool guy and you're just taking advantage of whats been allowed.
Andrew Naples RJ: Clemen Salad CO: Clemen Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 214 Karma: 89 Joined: Apr 26, 2012	Posted on Jun 17, 2012 I didn't bring up the airplane stuff because thats not your fault and thats the way the game was set up (rightly or wrongly) That last paragraph is disingenuous, you own 4 companies, so some people will come close to one of those values with their own company. Your NW is 327 million with your closest competition being worth 207 million. come on man. You're miles ahead.
Cian Kemp RJ: Cian Kemp CO: Cian Kemp Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 183 Karma: 58 Joined: Apr 9, 2012	Posted on Jun 17, 2012 The ranking is pretty biased below him too actually. Me and Sourpuss are pretty close, then Ted Crisp is only 25% below us, but the next is less than half of Ted's NW. The next 5 (Peebles, Bruce Wayne, Huginn Stormhammer, Chris Engle, and Roland Burke) COMBINED is less than the NW of the #1 slot. Even all 6 of the remaining people (5-10) only comes up to 361.5m, not all that much higher. I'm not sure if Sourpuss or Ted Crisp use bots, but I don't. It's mostly industry bias - me, Sourpuss, and Ted Crisp are all in pretty profitable industries. Most of BallC's money is from being in the most profitable industry of all (aircraft) for a few days. Before that he was just keeping pace with us, even with the bot. I expect I'll probably fall behind Sourpuss and Ted Crisp soon, though - electronics is getting less and less profitable as competition heats up and prices plummet. Unless they're facing similar competition, which I guess is possible. That early time when the industry was mostly empty was where I got the money to take the #2 slot, my sales have been dropping daily even with expanding stores.
Michael Tsui RJ: Reisen CO: Reisen Udongein Inaba Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 45 Karma: 30 Joined: Apr 26, 2012	Posted on Jun 17, 2012 BallC your relative position has little bearing, though at pole position you should expect foul crying. regardless of the legal status of bots, there are a couple if thing that I can draw from this discussion. 1. BallC's game is bot heavy; 2. The botting strategy do bring forth non-trivial advantage to humans utilizing a similar strategy; 3. A good contingent of players feel this is being unfair and called the legitimacy of such strategy into question. It would then be a question of whether scott and the community decides: 1. whether the game is to be enjoyed by humans or a combination of humans and else; 2. whether the game not being enjoyed by such is acceptable. As a precautionary note, though, I think BallC should pull back a gear until the community arrives at a solution.
Aaron Barr RJ: Aaron CO: Aaron Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 81 Karma: 74 Joined: Apr 13, 2012	Posted on Jun 17, 2012 (Last edited on Jun 17, 2012) Using a bot simply applies the solutions that a human decides on at a more frequent time scale. All the decision making is still made by the programmer. The advantage simply relies on being able to continuously apply those decisions all day. So should we also penalize a person who can sit at the computer all day altering their sales plans? If I can only login once a day I'm at a disadvantage to many players. I would have to come up with a strategy where that works. Where do you draw the line? A lot of browser games limit actions per day by having each tick give you "action points" you then spend. Personally I don't like that solution because its just another time sink. Not everyone can be number 1, and it seems like an awful lot of whining is coming out. Exploiting the auction house mechanics was a legit complaint, but now we're getting to the point of complaining about some people having more time to spend on the game. Whether that time is spent designing a bot for strategy, or time spent manually carrying out actions. Just my opinion, but BallC and the other leaders are opening up more demand for everything. Overall the server is in much better shape than the opening few days. Those were real rough. As more people join/get bigger things will even out so that those little holes in the market are not present and bots will be of less importance. TL:DR - Don't forget that bots simply execute strategies devised by a person. Those strategies are most effective when the server is new with few players/competitors. Stick it out and it will equalize.
eric scott RJ: Erik Scott CO: Sappo Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 130 Karma: 29 Joined: Apr 5, 2012	Posted on Jun 17, 2012 Just as a note as well, I am not ragging on David himself... but for the use of a bot. As I understand it he has provided loads of bug testing etc in the game, and I'm sure the bot is discovering holes and back-doors Scott has never even though of before. Are we ever going to see parity across the net-worth, probably not... nor should it. This is supposed to emulate real life economics. The thing that burns me the most is when you have massive gains in NW when we are barely into the first few weeks of a new server... ramping up to production of something such as aircraft should be take months of work, not minutes (from a financial standpoint)

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