On the topic of open source code bases
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I'll throw in my two cents here-
--- On The Topic Of K-Bot ---
Of all the options, simply minifying and uglifying the codebase is probably the worst, because it discourages modification of the bot. The full code base, while still problematic, at least allows players to "personalize it".
I think the idea here is that you have to avoid handing script kiddies full code capabilities. How you achieve this is moot. You either need to limit the bot's capabilities inherently but not implementing some features into it (I.e. Boosts), or you limit it by deliberately introducing flaws into your bot.
Of those two, I'd also suggest favoring the bonzai approach- create a framework that can be easily used to make one's own AI, without handing one the tools to necessarily be dangerous without having a good understanding of their own codebase.
Simply locking the codebase, or even including trapdoors, have the issues that they can typically be fixed relatively easily, which leaves you back at the whole "Releasing a superweapon" problem. This could potentially be mitigated by obfuscation, minification, uglification, etc., but in my humble opinion that's like dealing with the risk of someone stealing your Death Star by printing the instruction manual for how to the parking brakes on your giant death laser with every second word in Hebrew, every third word in Gallic, every fifth word in Mandarin, and the rest in Arabic.
It's worth noting, however, that K-Bot isn't really threatening, so...
--- Regarding Open Source Codebases ---
I think of them as open-source malware. It's a really, really mixed bag. On one hand, some players having open-source code has given me an opportunity to look at others handle garbage collection, memory management, etc. (think of designing an antivirus or patches against the malware) but on the other hand the risk of plug-and-play is considerable (i.e. someone recompiling the open-source malware themselves, maybe after a few small tweaks).
The ideal middle ground is enough of an open source codebase to allow others to look at, examine, compare, etc., but neutered so that it isn't dangerous. Without the help of players like Bonzai and Ags who have open-source codebases available, my own development would have been considerably more difficult, but even as someone who insists on developing their own everything, if someone handed me a full blown BonzAI with full combat capabilities, I'd be really, really tempted to use it.
Strive for balance.
EDIT: Some Closing thoughts- While I agree with Tedivm's conclusion that the best solution to NCPs are
ATTACKparts, that solution is much more difficult for new players, and will be made more difficult as the bot develops additional functionality.I do appreciate bots signing controllers with the fact that they're running a bot.
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I'm going to tell you the future, and there is no other way it will turn out: in a couple of years there will be 10 - 20 bots available on github for people to choose from. Some will be better than others. I see no way to change this. Its like entropy - you cannot resist the heat death of the universe. You can put a finger in the dike and slow down the preponderance of bots. But if @kasami sacrifices the popularity and utility of his bot, other bots will spring up and people will use those instead. Kasami may not want the bot to be used on the public server, but this is unavoidable and there is nothing but futility in trying to hinder this. Even if kasami chooses not to release his bot, or stops all further development, other bots are out there and other bots will continue to be released by other players.
As a consequence of this, the trajectory that the metagame will follow will be one with increasingly competitive bots available for anybody to use. When the game started you could probably write any old rubbish and be quite successful. As the game continues, the bar will raise and more and more bots will become super-effective at various tasks. This will happen due to the spread of effective techniques, the copying of code fragments, and the copying of bots in their entirety, but it will also happen just because people will be up against stronger opponents in respawn areas and will have to write correspondingly more effective code.
A small light?
The one thing that can work against the existence of bots is for the game to constantly be changing, so that bots require constant adjustment to continue to function well. For example, the changed rules about downgrading rooms need to be coded into every existing bot that wishes to remain competitive and provide new attack strategies to bots that choose to take advantage of the rules. Bots that are not updated will fall behind. Players who do not have the ability to update their bots will fall behind. This will apply even more so when power creeps eventually enter the game.
Could there be problems with continuous changes to the rules of the game? This could create constant busy-work for players, and it could even end up favouring groups of players that collaborate on bots (ccc, quorum, &c.) over individual players.
TL;DR the existence of NCP is unavoidable, and attempts to prevent them are futile, but if they're paying their subscriptions its probably healthy for the continued existence of the game.
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Heya guys,
I've got a few really blunt opinions
on this topic, as they're the reason I've lost interest in the game. 
: Their consequence varies from person to person.- Running someone elses code as your mainstay on the official servers is complete ass. I don't have a solution for this. Just know that deep down I think you're feeble-garbage if you do.
- I firmly believe Screeps has an incidence of this at well over 50% (rounded waay down!!!) of the player base on the official server. Tiny tweaks are NOT personalisation. You're a fraud.
- Any claim that you're "learning" on the official server from using a pre-built bot is a complete and undeniable lie. You're a liar, a fraud, and a bit crap. You own an iPhone and an xBox. I'm going to go full VW Peter Stormare on your tricked-out-ride. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6Dx9MhrqcE
- This is a personal challenge game. Sure, that's not explicit, nor enforceable, you can join guilds, do as you please etc... but using someone elses code is a flag that indicates you're not qualified MENTALLY or SOCIALLY for the game. Have some pride...The simple fact that you're not to run multiple accounts is a dev-enforcement of this personal-challenge-theme, which I highly approve of.
- NCP ?? That political correctness gone mad. Yes, I believe there is no place for such a player. No, I don't care if it's for your kids, your wife, your friend, or what-not. Don't care. Not everything has to be, nor is, accessible by everyone in the MENTAL REALM. Get out of my playground, I'm here because I want to get AWAY from those who don't have the capacity to DO THIS.
Well with that vote-downiness being said, I've abandoned the game purely because my observation was that it seemed 90% of the surrounding players at any given location I spawned were using code they didn't build. For me, that's not good enough. They're not challenging opponents, or if they are, it's because of brute-force-GCL or numbers (guild attacks etc ).
My code never matured beyond what I'd consider "intermediate entry level" (holy smoke it's garbage code!!) , but I lost interest at such a low level because what I'd accomplished seemed to be waaaayyy above-average. Understand that average is really low quality bot garbage.
Sharing your hard work is FUN, and you should be proud. There is sharing, and there's spoon-feeding. Here's a great example of SHARING: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=937040772 This guy has shown what he's coded, and explained how it works. It's up to the player to duplicate, modify, or improve on the concept. Simply releasing the code would have sucked..
Post videos of your hard work guys. They're super cool.
Code is not. 
G/luck
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My 2 cents.
Although I dont feel as strongly about this as Mashee. I do feel this shared codebases on the public server or in private server competitions devalue the game.
So I would say do not publish the more advanced parts of your code base.
For me the fun and challenge of this game is writing your own code, downloading a bot of github and then running it is in the same vain as using cheat codes to beat a single player game. I am not saying its cheating because ironically using cheat codes is not cheating but IMHO it devalues from the experience.
My code is almost entirely my own work. (there is a little bit of my defence code that my alliance shared with me, but that accounts for 61 lines of the 1000's in my codebase.
Although we arent there yet, at some point in the future I can see that there could be a really powerful aggressive bot, if a number of players installed that bot it could start to dominate and that would spoil the game.
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I don't think the intentions behind the players matter.
The fact is there is a bunch of code running on screeps.com and some of it is better than others. It doesn't matter who wrote it.
The best way to solve the issue of people with homebrew codebases getting stomped by people using public codebases is by creating an overall system that allows players to be matched against bots of similar skill.
There are many ways to do this that range from simple to complex. Here is a simple one: if there were more resources in the center of the map vs. the edges, competent AIs would naturally migrate towards the middle and fight each other. Another simple one is to have a shard missing some of the upper-tier features like chemistry and power for newbies to mess around in.
The real problem right now is I'm incentivized (as any established player with 5+ rooms) to wipe out any newbie that spawns within striking distance of me (because they might get big later), while at the same time agreeing not to fight anyone my size nearby (because it would be a waste of resources for both of us, even in the case where there is a winner, because they don't have enough GCL to take all my land). So the risk/reward is skewed the wrong way on each side.
My 2c
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Thanks for everyones feedback. It is greatly appreciated. What I have concluded is to discontinue the releases of KasamiBot in its current state.
My view on screeps has always been that it is a game about developing an automated AI, and hearing about coders who develop their own bot is discouraged by open source code bases like KasamiBot seals the deal.
My intentions where good, I wanted to allow players to have some competitive bots on private servers where they just downloaded the bot from steam workshop and added it to the game. As the current system is set up, it is just not possible to release such a bot without the risk of it being used on the public server.
The currently released KasamiBot is not very competitive combatwise, but will be challenging for beginners. I will be releasing an overview over weaknesses that can be used to take out KasamiBots, to help bridge this gap. My personal codebase has been rewritten and improved since the bot-release, so I'm not worried about releasing such weaknesses. That will at least force users to understand and further develop the current code base if they want it to be useful.
I also want to encourage beginners to write their own code, and I will write an tutorial based on top of the official tutorial to introduce more advanced techniques like remote mining, basic defense and pathfinding. It will focus on structure of the code, and hopefully teach new players some design patterns I've found useful. The end of this tutorial will be released as KasamiBot 2.0, but will basically be a framework to further develop a bot in.
As for bots on private servers, I encourage the developers to come up with a way to release a closed source bot. I don't know how this should be done, or if it is even possible, but if there is a way to release a bot without disclosing the source, I'm happy to once again release KasamiBot as it's intended usage, a private server competitor.
Again, thanks for all feedback!
I encourage everyone to check out #botarena (slack) if you are interested in developing automated bots, we have an very active community of botwriters who focus on non-interactive bots. It's a great place to learn, and the botarena starts are probably the most exciting thing to watch in the screeps world.
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The way JS works there really is no way to have closed source bots, the best you could get is maybe a wasm based bot,
I personally don't mind people using prebuilt bots, although, IMO it does take some of the fun and challenge out of the game. I personally run my own codebase on Shard0 and a slightly modified BonzAi on Shard1 to build GCL while I'm working on ZeSwarm.
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Hey all,
Thanks for erecting this question, I really think it's important because open-sourced code bases clearly give players using them an advantage over other novice players on early stages of the game.
I discussed that with dev team, and here is what I have to say.
Screeps is a sandbox game. This means that everyone is free to play as they want (unless they violate ToS, of course), so setting limits on using open-sourced code bases would be wrong. Devs created this world for us, and that was done not for them to dictate us how to play and how not to play (again, obvious ToS restrictions doesn't count).
So dealing with open-sourced code bases and NCPs is up to the community.
As I'm asked explicitly (what CMs feel about this), I think it's appropriate to word my position as a player. I personally dislike NCPs who try to play Screeps without writing a single line of code. I admit that they have right to do so because, again, it's a sandbox game. But I also feel that I have right to dislike them for using bots, and I have right to send dismantlers as soon as I see NCP in range. I think it's fair because if they get advantage from using someone else's code at early stages, they should also feel disadvantage of that at mid/late game.
I don't call up other players to follow my example, sandbox game means that this question is up to everyone to decide.
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I know I'm really late to the party, but I'm in a commenting mood and this topic interests me so I'm going to add my 2Cents. Bots are unavoidable but ultimately unimportant because at this point every player is already competing against lots of other players of varying skills and bots are just the same. Sure it would suck to start side by side with a friend and have them do way better than you because they install a bot and you write your own code, but if not your friend then someone next to you will do a lot better than you because they already have an established code base or rooms/resources that were already built up and this will happen with both bots and existing (non-boting) players.
I think the argument is that bots ruin the new player experience, but its actually just players ruining other players experiences and it doesn't matter if that player is running a bot or not. I'll admit that I have ruined lots of new players experiences, slaughtering so many players for territory that I didn't really care about and couldn't use. It didn't matter that I was running my own code, what mattered is that players felt they were being killed and helpless to do anything about it. Sometimes its because I had better code, lots of times it was because I had more resources, rooms, time, experience. At the same time I'd like to believe that I've also enhanced lots of new and established players experiences as well, through forming an alliance and cooperation.
In the end I don't think its bots that are ruining new players experiences, I think it is other players and the solution to that is the community. As a community we have the opportunity of molding the experience of those around us and if you want to create an experience then the best way to do that is to team up with others who feel the same and work together to create that experience.
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@mashee I'm sorry to hear that you quit because of bots. They can hurt the diversity of the codebases out there. Your struggle has inclined me even more so to target NCP's. Perhaps I'll make a post asking about how to identify NCP's in this thread.
Edit: Apparently this forum doesn't embed replies. Any advice on identifying NCP's outside of obvious controller signing, and hearing about them through the community?
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@trepidimous http://www.leagueofautomatednations.com/map/shard2/bots is helpful, if not 100% accurate.
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@todpunk if you have examples of it not being accurate please let me know so I can look into it.
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@tedivm I noticed that the original authors of the bots also show up on the clone map. For example bonzaiferroni shows up as a bonzai bot user. The author of a code base certainly wouldn't count as a script kiddie but perhaps they are benefiting form collaborative efforts amongst their users.
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The
voight-kampffAPI provides a list of users and identifies the author in the json-http://www.leagueofautomatednations.com/vk/bots/league.json
The
primaryfield for each "bot" is the author (where applicable- bots without a lead developer, such as CCC, don't have this field filled).
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Keep bashing on people running bots. You say maybe half the people you see in game are NCP or using others code.
Guess what, they are paying their dollars every month also. When a mmo starts offering lifetime subs, thats not a good thing.
Yes, I ran k-bot, I liked watching my ant farm, and trying to understand the code. I ran it passive and avoided conflict. Last time I coded was 20 years ago in college. I did it on the main servers because I work for a living and needed someplace for it to run 24/7, I wasnt a threat to anyone near me. None of the bots are a real threat to any of you "real" coders. So what are so many of you butt hurt over?
I logged over 400 hours on steam enjoying this game using and reading others code.
I'm gone now, I'm sure many like me are.
Enjoy your "lifetime" sub.