The problem with bots and how to fix them...

Dealing with botters is for the most part dealing with gold sellers. As I said before in a game like this the botters that run on singles accounts that are for personal use are I believe the "small fries" of the botter problem. I do not believe that they have a significant impact on game economy. Its only when its scaled up to the level of gold sellers that they become an issue. In this case 1 computer run by a gold seller is the equivalent of 10-12 single personal users.. and everyone knows that some of these gold sellers run in the neighborhood of 20+ servers easily.

As far as stoping them as said before its not a matter of making the one perfect catchall program/method. Its more of the shotgun approach.. the combination of many techniques each catching, flagging, and banning them to the point of making it not a feasible business for the gold sellers. Eve Online is a good example of what can happen with the shotgun approach. Gold sellers quickly stopped selling Eve "ISK" when their botter programs started getting caught and accounts banned in droves. Unholy Rage they called it. GGG could follow a similar implementation... catch the accounts and flag them.. then when you have a valid signature down ban thousands of bot accounts at once and push out a scanner that looks for that signature (what ever it may be.. UUIDs, background programs, memory injections..). This forces an arms war.. bot developers try to outsmart the signature... GGG trys to catch/ban the bot accounts. The trick is to not let the bot developer know that you have their signature... this can be accomplished a variety of ways... ban letters with misdirection for the reason of the ban, delaying the ban for 24-36 hours after being flagged so that botter has no idea what exactly the've done to get caught.

I've personally always favored the "time bomb" currency. Currency has a shelf life for usage. If not used within 4-5 days the currency expires and is deleted. Game term wise this would be a good way to start a currency "sink" which flushes currency and forces it to be used by true gamers. Currency would be good to trade for a short while but would be kept from stockpiling. In addition currency near the end of its shelf life would be less valuable as people would actually have to use it and could not keep it around to be used as further currency. This would make it extremely difficult for gold sellers to make a profit as bots would likely not be able to keep their supply high enough especially if combined with a decent ban policy.

Once you can drive the gold sellers away from your game botters becomes pretty much a maintenance issue... you just need to be aware of them and catch any mass usage before the gold sellers can start up a profitable business again.

--Bishop--

i like most your ideas, bishop, but changing game mechanics just to stop rmt is something im violently opposed to... and giving currency a shelf life is the sort of unfun idea that could only come out of an "economic" mind...

the proper solution is smart, efficient detection, investigation, and enforcement.... not changing the game itself...

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Dziz wrote:

Block MAC and problem done.U cant change that,there is software for changing MAC but it aint working it changes just the visuals.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfAWXuCfCqI

IT's actually quite easy. I figured it out and posted this about a year ago.

In a F2P there is absolutely no chance to get rid of bots. This is a fact.

- if you ban an account. guess: create a new one. it's free
- you cannot ban IP/MAC because there are many countries with dynamic IP. MAC is changeable

Come to think of it, I actually think GGG has one huge advantage that AAA games like D3 and WoW don't: it's small scale.


Think of it this way: For RMT organizations, the vast, vast, vast majority of their business comes from WoW and (I expect) D3. They can afford to dedicate man-hours to overcoming anti-RMT methods the devs develop, to recovering lost stock after banwaves, and to generally escalate an uphill battle that they are disadvantaged in. Why? Because the market is so huge that despite all these asset sinks the devs throw their way, RMT orgs are still capable of turning a tidy profit.

PoE? I'd imagine the reason why it's having so much trouble right now is because it's a relatively forgiving market for RMT orgs. The threshold for PoE to be unprofitable however is likely much lower due to the smaller scale of the game, so all GGG really needs to do is dedicate a tenth of the effort Blizzard does to mucking up RMT operations to make it unprofitable.

In fact, I'd probably say the tighter margins is probably a large reason why it seems the method of choice RMT sites use to stock up on orbs is account hijacking. WoW's RMT economy is robust enough to support numerous local gold farming and power leveling studios that pay rent, wages, and all those fees while still making a profit. In PoE the only way RMT sites could possibly make money is by utilizing a method with a relatively low upfront cost (buy a list of usernames/passwords, and if even one account is compromised, it likely paid off the initial cost and then some).


So I guess what I'm trying to say is, sure in large games there's a sort of back-and-forth arms race between RMT sites and the developers, but in PoE it's within the devs power to make the game unprofitable enough that RMT organizations won't want to touch the game. At least, until the game becomes popular enough to support a robust enough RMT economy to allow for said arms races.

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Bishop120 wrote:

Please feel free to post some of your ideas below and I would be willing to give my explanation of why it is or is not a good idea and if its not a good idea why/how botters would probably circumvent it (in broad enough terms that any good botter is probably already doing it but not specific enough to tell someone how to do it themselves).


--Bishop--

Loose identification requirements for account creation is the problem, and this is why ever MMO has a problem with botting and RMT. No game would ever require their users prove identification and acceptance for a background check so any discussion of a solution is pointless.

double post.........

showing op some love with dat bump action

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Zhatan wrote:

You are not so bright are you? There were a bunch of ppl(check youtube for some videos) who botted and made 10k $ in the first week of the d3 RMAH. Thats 7 days.

those botters did not buy a bot online, they made it, when they skimmed the market they started selling them... cuz no more profit was there to be made

you should watch less you tube and read more books

Randomly generated maps is already a good start to bot prevention, developing an anti-hack is the next step.

Also, HWID can be spoofed