The truth about RMT and Botting
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Im 100% OK for capcha
Banned if wasnt able to answer too much capcha; lets see... 1 capcha every 24 hours played average; banned if not answering to more than 50% of capcha after a week or so simple :) Else this game will be blasted by bots (if it's not already done). Pure hacks like duping/rollbacks is another story... |
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" RMT sites make MILLIONS of dollars... That's not coming from 0.3% of gamers there's alot more than you think. I have bets people In just this thread have done RMT. "I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity." - Edgar Allan Poe
IGN: DarkenedSoui | |
"This is a myth. Three things have to be true for an RMT machine to work: 1. An audience. 2. A profit. 3. A path. All gaves have players, not all games are profitable to bot, and not all games have a means to bot them in a way that gives wealth. There are two "counterstrikes" to RMT, the first is the elimination or management of rarity. The second is the elimination or management of rate of acquisition. They sound the same but they are not. Elimination of Rarity is essentially Inflation. If everyone and his brother had whatever is the most expensive type of currency then there's no competition for it. Cost drops to nothing. No profit so it costs more to create the program, play the game, and spend the time on the server than it does to do the same thing elsewhere. Management of Rarity is what we know as IIQ ( not IIR in this game ) where one can increase the odds substantially via their own gear and of course that gear is accessible, which it already is, so that means the drops rates are too extreme for this method to work in this game as it is. Elimination of Acquisition is hard-coded anti-farm codes. They purposefully drop rates for things you want straight to zero, do not revive these rates for a decent amount of time, but only effect the higher echelons of gear / currency in whatever game. In this game it would only need to be currency. The model is pretty simple to use and it makes it difficult enough with enough time behind the "ban" on good items to make it again not profitable. This is not diminishing returns which is how farmers get around the problem since diminishing returns generally never hits zero which is why it doesn't work. The resources allocated to the project can run FOREVER and still, even if it went from one in twenty to one in two-hundred and bottomed, make a profit. Why game devs haven't figured this one out I don't know. Management of Acquisition is the same thing except it's hard-coded anti-farm code that checks for player identity; we know one common way to overcome bots is to use Captcha for instance, failure to enter in a fair amount of time results in being booted. "So what keeps our botter from just beating the captcha?", timers that are random and shorten. "So the common rabble has to suffer. Great going. You're dumb." And that's a mistake as well; first off the timers can be applied to well-known zones only since it's hard-coded and it's unwise to make a universal timer. That's also kind of the irony behind the dev security concept; people are lazy so they'd slap it all over the game but 99% of the content in the game here doesn't at all require it. Limited space is a killer, inability to pick out only what you want by most bots is a killer, the fact that the place won't respawn as long as you are there is a killer, and the fact that the people playing the game take an average amount of time to complete a challenge, something that bots will always exceed due to poor pathing and some elements of random generation that they cannot inherently detect without hacking the servers looking for map IDs is a complete killer. It becomes, quite literally, professional cracking in order to bot the game and is much easier to steal accounts than it is to try and run an RMT operation. This and the player's that are new are unaffected unless they really need that 3 hours in the Fetid Pool at level 4. Anyway with specific timers dedicated to specific maps the system is sound to begin with. It's watching, knowing, and actually out-thinking your pests that humans are good at to begin with. That's why PoE exists, and there's absolutely no way you can't beat RMT. The fact that they already instituted "Can't trade until 25 for currency" means that they are aware the zones are lower-level to begin wtih but that's not a method to beat them because RMT dealers can just ( and this is the problem ) create multiple chars. on one account and play on ONE account to 25 then stash and rinse and repeat. They failed to understand that it isn't excessively difficult to get to lvl 25 and beat that system simply because you only need one node and you can have X number of other chars. working the farm. Then once it hits that node you can send it back to the farm! You can hit lvl 25 in one-to-two days and also one of my favorite misconceptions is that RMTs can't play games. They can. They have to be efficient at doing so because you can't program a robot to do it if you can't do it much like you can't instruct a person on how to do some form of academia if you don't know how to do it yourself. Hitting 25 is nothing. The way I see it is if I can't see a way around it as a commoner and it's general concensus no one else can then RMT won't bother with it because it's too complex and difficult to farm the game and therefore too complex and difficult to play the game for profit. However if I can IMMEDIATELY see around your "ban" or "countermeasures" then they've already seen around it the moment you threw it up. I'm not the one "breaking the law" so I'm not looking for it, that's the plotline, so if I see fault and I'm not looking then you're fucked and need to head back to the drawing board. "This is faulty for two reasons: 1. Generally speaking there is a "best" and a "worst" but in PoE there is a "need" and there is a "junk". To that end most players, casual or not, do not suffer your conundrum because even if you pick up some uberlegendaryveryrareawesome piece of whatever what you're wearing right there can be better than it for your causes. It undermines the concept. 2. "Hardcore" and "Casual" should not be based on play-time but dedication. I am a casual player; it doesn't mean I play a lot or I play a little but I play when I can and when I wish to. I would never spend money on this game or any other game for the purpose of "getting item X" simply because as I just said, I'm casual, it's not a job to me, and it has nothing to do with inherent competition. There's no incentive to spend case. Hardcore players however will and there's a few good reasons; some of them literally don't have the time but want to compete. Some lack the patience but want to compete. Some lack ability and believe that having item X will allow them to compete. These are real incentives. To that end casual players by mindset almost never buy the RMT thing and hardcore players by mindset are almost always the customers. This goes for anything ranging from GaiaOnline gold and that "gotta have it" pixel set to PoE's Exalted Orb because ... Well because it's shiny I guess ( never understood why people loved the shit out of that thing ... ) and does whatever. "This is one option. The option works but there's a major problem with it in an ARPG like this one and that it's crippling. I know I listed two options above but this is my least favored of the two. Making IIQ stronger is a much better option than increasing the drops of things. "Actually I covered that, it's easier to hard-code the no-go than to do the captcha and it cannot be consistent. I purposefully said "It cannot be consistent" because I knew it would come up before reading this far though I didn't expect it in the OP. I totally missed this line; I knew just it'd be in the thread. Last edited by blackkid on Jun 15, 2013, 8:49:57 AM
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" Sounds good. What harm could come from this? Bots would get raped. The community would thrive in a better economy. "I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity." - Edgar Allan Poe
IGN: DarkenedSoui | |
" knowing what lies behind organized RMT (shops, sites), I would rather kill myself before paying 1 cent to those bastards. it's not just about money for pixels. it's about fueling a whole industry of real-world crime and injustice. slavery for example. and if you think I'm exaggerating, go ahead and Google it. Alva: I'm sweating like a hog in heat
Shadow: That was fun | |
" Well if you're talking about the whole RMT industry, just keep in mind that probably about a billion people play online games regularly... there's a lot of money to make from the estimated 0.3% :) EDIT: For the record, I'm just pulling numbers out of my ass, but so are you :P GGG banning all political discussion shortly after getting acquired by China is a weird coincidence. Last edited by Xavderion on Jun 15, 2013, 9:03:51 AM
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"The economy gets worse. You guys are really not getting this. RMT people do not just abandon their computers. That doesn't happen. Little punks who download "a bot" abandon their computers. If there's a Captcha someone will fill it out. That's why it cannot be consistent! | |
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Atm you need too much farming for viability, not farming for over-gearing. This is an issue, because farm determines if your progress not how fast you will progress. Farm should be speed related and not a hurdle to take.
It would be nice to use the orbs what they are meant for which is crafting and not trading. Currently the top does the most crafting, than trade downwards to casuals to occasional players, who are better off trading their currency with the hand downs from the top. Occasionally RNG hits somewhere and you actually get good gear yourself to trade for orbs or to keep. Currently on onslaught I am stuck at cruel a bit. I will get past, but I am in a risky spot where I am still stuck with a weapon I found 20 levels ago (good weapon, but I need an upgrade). 1st it was like wooosh.... and now it feels like fighting in a tar pit, eventually you get fed up with the struggle and give up from fatigue, joining the other fossils. | |
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Bots are better at captcha than people are.
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" Depends on resources spent. Considering the level of pathing and the lack of high level bots in randomized zones farming for the really good shit I doubt it's that high. |
