Leechers, end game?

I know people that played multiple accts in D2 just to level up the characters and sell them. There is a program that allows you to control multiple people with one mouse click. It runs multiple copies of window like a tabbed web browser. Play on one copy. Then have the others like together and move one and the rest move and stay in the cluster.

IMO that sort of design won't get far, because faking activity is very easy ( in this case a very very simple mouse macro ). IIRC not even blizzard found a reasonable fix for this for their battlegrounds, where people joined battlegrounds to stand idle by the entrance in the hopes that their comrades won while they contributed nothing.

Overall I believe any system which tries to distinguish between a legitimate party and a leecher party is doomed to failure. Besides, if GGG were to fix it the people who already decimates 6 people chaos would get an even less enjoyable experience, running around 1 shotting 1 man chaos mobs isn't that fun.

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Gafgarion wrote:

I know people that played multiple accts in D2 just to level up the characters and sell them. There is a program that allows you to control multiple people with one mouse click. It runs multiple copies of window like a tabbed web browser. Play on one copy. Then have the others like together and move one and the rest move and stay in the cluster.

Yeah, D2 was easy to cheat with a variety of systems. The Redvex proxy had dozens of scripts for this very thing, follow-bots and the like.

I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to develop a system that checks if characters in an instance are doing the exact same things at the exact same times. GGG is very serious about preventing cheats, so they would likely prevent such actions if they became a problem. Other ways to automatically follow could surely be detected somehow.

First and foremost I am all for preventing cheating. Here are some thoughts I have on the matter.

I don't think simple checks will do it. In Diablo 2 you at least had to get multiple CD keys. On a F2P platform, passive conputer controlled leech bots have little to loose. Make some fake email accts and use one acct to get them to end game.

If people know that the game checks for identical moves, then random timers will be put in. I feel that checking for leechers and kicking them is the wrong approach. Dealing with the issue of why they exist will prove to be more benfitial.

I think someone already said this, but leeching exists because it helps both people. If it were a more parasitic relationship, or if End Game content/difficulty matched End Game gear, you would see less of it.

The real issue to address, I think, is the sense of safety on a map. At no time should you feel safe to just sit and do nothing. At no time should you feel safe in an area 5+ levels above yours. The thought of having monsters respawn I think had merit. I would also work to have smarter monsters. Ones that would flank a group, or monsters that were better at roaming. Make them so that you wouldn't have a chance of running into all of the roaming monsters at once.

High level people want more drops and as long as the leechers are ninjaing their exalted orbs they really don't care. Low level people just want EXP and possibly some lower end gear. If you made dying for the lower level people more likely, they the EXP wouldn't be free. They would have to spend all their time running from monsters and probably lose more EXP to death than they would gain.

Seriously, any effort to try to avoid botting, leeching etc by auto detection is going to be a massive fail. Way to much development time which could be better spent on making the game better. Instead solve it from a game design perspective, once again, /players is a band aid fix which totally solves this. Long term the best solution is anything which makes it sub optimal to have 5 people in a group which does absolutely nothing, which is simply solved by letting the end game content be challenging to solo ( and rewards of course scaled according to the level of challenge ).