Anti Bot Captcha

Hello guys and girls,

I got an idea for the Bot Problem in PoE.

An ingame popup like the anoying Captcha but more human friendly.

For example 5 Colors showed up and you have to click on a specific one
(not ideal for color blind minority)

Or something PoE related, like Click on Picture of a PoE Character
(not so ideal for very New Players)

Or just Pictures like, click on the Axe, Sword, Armour, Currency.

It should just take 2-3 seconds to solve for a human, but pretty hard for a bot.

The captcha would pop up like once every hour for example.

If the captcha is wrong you would "exit to character selection",
so its not a real punishment for a human but for a bot its pretty painfull imho.

Please share your opinions.

Thx.

Hello,

I'm not very active in the forums, but I thought I drop my opinion here :)


I agree there should be done more against bots, but this might be the wrong direction, but ok, it depends on the way it would be implemented.

Once per HOUR I would certainly never touch PoE again.

Once per day or login or character switch would be annoying as hell already.

Once per character creation would be kinda ok for me, the question is if this would be very effective against bots, while still being mildly annoying.

If you can create bots that farm currency in PoE, you certainly can create tools to counter the captcha stuff, it's just a question of time. We have self-driving cars, face recognition software and KI that wins against extremely skilled human Starcraft and Go players etc. these days already :)

And don't forget, there are always freaks and communities of freaks trying to do something. Think of the software cracking community, bypassing cd/etc.-protection stuff, pc-viruses/malware, streaming sites, file-sharing, etc, etc.

They should try other methods/ideas first.

Everybody (except the abusers) is ranting about bots, it is a problem unfortunately. I wonder how other trading online games handle this bot thing.

I am curious how GGG will handle this in future.

Have a nice weekend!

(Edit: Grammar/Typos/Starcraft/Go/Freaks)

Well, I have no Intel about Botting in PoE, but the Captcha system (on the internet) is there to prevent bots so why shouldn't it work in this game too?

The AI in most games is terrible, they cheat to compete (Starcraft II, Civilization VI) etc.

An AI that beats Human Player like in Dota 2 is a Super Computer runed by Elon Musk imho its not a usually software implemented in a game.

I assume a bot in PoE is programmed to an macro which uses very limited input and isn't able to solve a kind of puzzle like a captcha.

More Opinios please.

Best ingame captcha we could ever get would be re-captcha from google and even that one is easily solvable by bots. So, pointless.

"

a_z0_9 wrote:

easily solvable by bots. So, pointless.

Pretty much, every solution you can come up with a bot can be made to bypass...same deal with spam filters.

It only inconveniences real players, and is at best a very minor "problem" for someone that uses bots.

Just be happy they are banning them (and they ARE banning a lot).
This year has been pretty high on the "i've been banned for no reason" posts...and to me that means they have been coming down HARD on cheats.

Agreed.

IA are advancing, we have now Machine Learning. Given enough time, or a big enough sample data pool, an IA can be pre-trained to recognize images quite quickly.
This approach may have worked years ago. But, not today.

I remember about a video where a player went into Act3 and witnessed 20-30 mobs entering the area and reaching for Clarissa. You could have told they were bot because they clearly followed the shortest path route, all together, in a row, and even overlapped in front of Clarissa. Best that player could have done would have been hover a cursor over that path, stream out a lot of names and report as botting to GGG.
But, to what end? Banning a bunch of bot accounts? They proliferate anyway.

I suggest to draw over something with your mouse.
This will not require reading or trivia's and be simple thing where you move mouse over shown symbol or some line, you can have multiple choices but require to draw over just one.

You get like a quest popup with a 20 min timer, when opened it will show 3 windows, draw over one line with your mouse but make it so that bad sectors reset the process.
In essence its some how similar to labyrinth path line but labyrinth walls are hidden so if you live path you are back to beginning ...

"

Aijendo wrote:

Well, I have no Intel about Botting in PoE, but the Captcha system (on the internet) is there to prevent bots so why shouldn't it work in this game too?

The AI in most games is terrible, they cheat to compete (Starcraft II, Civilization VI) etc.

An AI that beats Human Player like in Dota 2 is a Super Computer runed by Elon Musk imho its not a usually software implemented in a game.

I assume a bot in PoE is programmed to an macro which uses very limited input and isn't able to solve a kind of puzzle like a captcha.

More Opinios please.

I think without a fundamental knowledge of botting in general you really shouldn't be making any suggestions on how to combat it.

That's like me going to Yale University and trying to explain to everyone why I believe they should do X Y or Z to combat cancer. I know nothing about it.

An annoying popup that shows up in our game every hour or whatever it may be, would never fly, people would quit the game that would be extremely inconvenient and annoying.

@OP : did you know there are companies where you can pay for service where a person is to click on captchas? :)

btw I am one of the color blind people and yes, if I ever see a captcha with color recognition, I will either dig up my color clicker from 2000 I used for Ultima Online (yes, I mean to say your solution was breached 20 years ago by a high school kid), or politely ask for refund of all my supporter packs.

Heist league showed some advancement in effort on GGG side, not only detection but also clever way how to handle the issue with bots at large scale.
Any preventive measure that will bother players is just bad by design.

PoE is a game where you click hundret of times in a play session,
I realy don't get the point. where a pop up window, which will apear every hour or so with a little puzzle to solve, could annoy someone so hard.

On the internet I hate the captcha system, especially those like "mark pictures with a bus/car/traffic sign, train... " and you click on like 4 of them and a 2nd window poped up and you keep going.

Its annoying as hell, and if this getting bypassed by the majority of bots, like someone mentioned, than its really unclear why its kept used, maybe just to annoy us.

In Yale University I missed the class about Botting in a PC Game.