Free to play = infinite bots

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MorriganGrey wrote:

A Blizzard Warden-style memory scanning algorithm is a better solution, though it hardly works as well as one would hope for Blizzard.

This will annoy a lot of players, just like capchas.
A great way to get rid of bots is to kill their market. Permanently and publicly ban anyone who knowingly trades with a bot. That will stop the sites that will sell currency items. Use the hidden bot detection to stop the rest.

There is no reason to treat the entire player base as criminals. I'm pretty sure the point of exiling us was to give us a chance at a new life. :3

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Charan wrote:

Given it is a free to play game, I think a Captcha now and then, on loading is a nice idea, is more than acceptable compared to some of the obtrusive elements I have seen in other free to play games.

terrible idea. unless you're trying to reduce the user base of "real" players.

"bot detection" only works if you know what they're using -- as in AutoIt or DemonBuddy. It will not detect truly custom EXE's, which the most hard-core botters use. why? because they call the same DLL functions that are called when you click your mouse with your hand -- it looks exactly the same on the system.

there is no solution to bots, except to make the game too difficult for them to work efficiently, which I think PoE a good job of, especially on higher difficulties. I can see bots creating new characters to farm low level terraces for currency items (since you can get the same currency items in act1 normal that you get in a2 ruthless!).. they could just farm terraces with sword and board and let the mobs kill themselves against their shield, then pick up currency items, put in stash, log out/delete the character, make a new one. this way they don't get hit with the level penalty after a while.

i think GCP's, Regals and other high-end orbs should not drop in normal at all, but w/e.. captcha = terrible idea.

Even with a modern, internally developed "strong" captcha implemented, someone dedicated to running a bot farm still can. All you need is someone willing to sit at a desk and punch in captcha answers as long as the bots are active. If you got more advanced with it, the person answering the captchas could be feeding a database. When the database became capable of answering even a third of the challenges in your captcha generator, you've got a fully automated bot farm again. Hell, as a real person I'm lucky if I can answer half. Some clever use of a VPN service / virtual machines, and it'll look much like 200 individual players on 200 different internet connections.

No reason to get melodramatic, though. Lots of people think this would actually accomplish something, so just explain the facts. Not like it would destroy the game, it'd just be annoying for real people and wouldn't actually solve the problem. Just makes start-up more difficult.


edit: one after thought, it does make mass-botting much more expensive and botting from a single machine not feasible. So in that sense it could really trim back a lot on how many bots we see.

The player base should get permissions to solve it themselves, by introducing the "cut throat anti-botting system", yeah!

The more hours you play in straight, the more commands you press per second (the smaller the reaction time), the more likely it is to get killed!

I'm only talking end game here. If the board in town showed people with a high count on those things, it would be awesome if you then got the permission join their instance and kill them. Or the hunter could join the instance without permissions to kill monsters or players, and if the player showed some strange moves (bottish moves), the player could go hostile and take the fight.

Making content that is diverse and difficult enough would do the trick. While it wouldn't spoof all farming, it'd create a great deal of difficulty in doing so.

The game's economy is super fragile. High end orbs are so rare that if a botter were to find just a few a day then they could quickly become the richest player in the game & control the market. If a botter were to run enough bots to find 1 mirror a week then they own the market aswell.

If POE gets popular after launch then we could well see an interest from people who are prepared to run several bots and in a short amount of time they could effectively take over the trading market.

I believe the currency system is too basic & I feel this will be a means of botting becoming more influential than if there were a more indepth system that didn't rely on a few super rare orbs being worth so much.

Blizzard have Warden but the way they tend to go about it is to have banning waves every so often & not on the spot bans. This I think is mainly due to the amount of players they have and that it would cost too much money for them to hire ppl specifically to ban ppl. But if the same were applied to POE then the economy could already be irreparable by the time the banning wave comes.

POE's community is nowhere near as big as D2 or D3's & with the best will in the world I don't think it ever will be, so with a smaller community the effect of bots has a bigger impact on individual players.

I hope GGG have some tricks up their sleeve but I fear if botters do decide to latch onto POE then it might be a case of "if you can't beat em, join em or gtfo". I guess we'll have to see how popular the game gets as I don't see anyone investing in many bots that has a community of less than 30k.

-You can not block people from running multiple copies of the game. Even if they code it that way, it can always be gotten around. Putting the block in only potentially screws over legitimate players.
-Capcha's or anything similar do not slow down botters at all. Again, it would only be detrimental to legitimate players.
-The difficulty of the game will not stop them. Expect to see them in HC if the game gets popular enough.
-This idea of "humiliating" people in game for botting is a pointless waste of time.

The only way to deal with botters is GGG developing code to detect them properly, and having people actually look for them in game. Its the only way you can do it without punishing the players.

They could make it so every item dropped/picked up has a unique identifier on it that tells GGG who the player was it dropped for. If you see someone selling/trading items for real money online you buy one yourself, ID the player and delete all their items/characters everything they farmed.

Pretty sure they already have this built in. So an individual doing it for themselves will probably go under the radar, but anyone doing it professionally/full time will get caught quickly enough.

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Magnicon2 wrote:

The only way to deal with botters is GGG developing code to detect them properly, and having people actually look for them in game. Its the only way you can do it without punishing the players.

This would of course be the best solution. Let's hope GGG earns enough money so that they can easily afford one or two game masters with the job of finding and banning botters. Come to think of it, why did Blizzard never employ anybody with this sole task in D2 or D3? Certainly they could afford the money.

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Trapperkeeper wrote:

They could make it so every item dropped/picked up has a unique identifier on it that tells GGG who the player was it dropped for. If you see someone selling/trading items for real money online you buy one yourself, ID the player and delete all their items/characters everything they farmed.

Pretty sure they already have this built in. So an individual doing it for themselves will probably go under the radar, but anyone doing it professionally/full time will get caught quickly enough.

I'm all for that. Tag every item with number and voila most of people who use farmbots won't use it for long.

Also extended statistics. How many monsters are killed per hour/day etc.

Also errasing MF and IQ from items and leaving it only on maps.