How to handle botters

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sabertoothd3 wrote:

Runes of magic (think thats the game) is taking action against botters where they get to torture the bot character.

Tell me more. (who gets to torture, why, how does it prevent botting, how is the bot detected, etc.)

I have a story about an experience with Runes of Magic, but actually I can't remember, I'm starting to think it might have been Aika.

I played that game for a while but got fed up when I paid more attention one day, and realized that there was an equal or larger number of characters played by bots than by players in the area I was in.

It's a losing battle to fight bots as a player when the rules aren't strict enough against them. The game has/had an anti-PK system where you'll accumulate time where you're unable to farm/quest (or PK) if you kill enough players in a day, and when a character dies to PK you don't really lose much either. I had to attack the bots (with area of effect attacks or something? I don't remember) so that they'd be low health and then have a monster kill them (much harder and slower to do than it may seem considering that the bots would heal themselves and be facing very easy monsters). It was a lot of work to just hinder one fish in the pool for just a short period of time. I did manage to get some people's attention sometime though and they'd go on an alt to try to kill me (which I let them, at which point they racked up enough PK penalty to not play for a long time)

Easy reason to leave, and it's also a big reason why I wasn't interested much in Diablo 3 (because you could host private games, and even if they weren't private you can't PK or report bots)

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ionface wrote:

Rather than start an arms race with bot detection software and bot sophistication, we need to remove the reasons people use bots.

That's essentially not possible for games of this style. The closest you can get is in competitive games where it's mostly or entirely PvP and all players are in a pretty level playing field.

Proper software can do a lot to make botting extremely difficult, but it also adds problems in other ways. For instance, a game that heavy relies on server-side code and communication with client can make it really hard for a bot to know information; the coordinates of the character on the map/zone would not be known to the client, only to the server, and the server only divulges information regarding the immediate surroundings. This would be quite bandwidth-heavy though, and cost a lot of money.

Along with hidden information that only a server knows, using specific control schemes can also be useful, such as disallowing point-to-click, removing any ability to target lock/highlight (and have to manually target like in FPS games), since those things make it easier for programmers to program bots.

Obviously bot detection can improve and be worked on as well, but obviously it can't be the only thing in place.

Captchas and other Turing tests are another option — something I have yet to see in games (which I guess is understandable). I'm aware they aren't invincible, but they can always be modified if ever one is cracked.

Anyway, lastly, the biggest thing is the human factor. Players can and/or should be able to police themselves. Like Path of Exile is doing, a full-PvP-with-rewards system isn't necessarily directly aimed at bots, but it puts them in potentially huge disadvantage when small measures are put in place to prevent too private/defensive farming.
Other systems include a player report system, which could even [optionally] give a player a small reward for reporting a confirmed bot, or systems where staff is paid to spy on character actions and remove bots (obviously expensive, but doesn't mean impossible).

Aside from this, the botting/farming isn't even the actual big issue. The issue is with those who sell the virtual goods for money, and there are some pretty good ways to detect that sort of thing, and I'd say is easier deal with than botting.

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Xapti wrote:

Captchas and other Turing tests are another option — something I have yet to see in games (which I guess is understandable). I'm aware they aren't invincible, but they can always be modified if ever one is cracked.

There's an achilles heel to captchas, limiting their usefulness as a bot deterrent. One little dodge and botters circumvent them completely (at an added cost). You don't need image recognition to defeat the captcha, at all.

All you need is code to recognize when a captcha challenge occurs. With a clever screen capture and I/O redirect scheme, send the captcha to the controlling workstation. One real person sits at a desk, inputting captchas all day for a bank of 1000 active bots.

Kind of like those telemarketers that blanket calls across the country and connect a real salesperson only when they hear your voice.

Problem solved? Well, that depends. Botting might not be lucrative anymore. Nobody could make money on a bot bank anymore if you needed a real person to babysit. A kid at home with too much time on his hands could manage something like that, though.

Strong captchas are also a little frustrating for real players. How many subscribers do you lose? Adding a layer of (admittedly minor) annoyance to the game would have a measurable (although small) impact on the playerbase.