Free to play = infinite bots

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ongZ wrote:

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Trapperkeeper wrote:

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ongZ wrote:

Deleting items isn't the best solution imo. I would be pretty sad, if I had bought an expensive weapon from a bot-farmer, without knowing it, just to lose the items a few days later.

Boo. This post makes me angry. Frankly, if you pay money for items in this game you are encouraging bot farmers. So I am going to give you mean looks and fart in your general direction and not be upset when/if items you bought get deleted.

I meant traded. I'm not going to use real money, although I do not have a problem with people doing it, as long as bots are being dealt with.

Okay, well I take back the farts then... and thats not easy to do.

There are more interesting solutions than banning.

privately tagging accounts that are run by botters is much more effective, since the "Im a botter" tag can be displayed prominently in the trade window of the other person, which does the most ethical thing: place the decision to deal with a botter in the hands of the player.

Stuff can be done with these tags on a more active note; like lowering or eliminating the chance to drop currency, >3S, Maps, Rares, ILvl penalties, Quality penalties (gems), and so on: now the botter gets lower and lower returns from an account. Couple that with Damage+/Defense+ for the monsters meaning time lost in dying/slower killrates and you can literally cut them off from their supply.

With this happening it would be easier to track botter activity via the trade system: since botters will inevitably drop of in effectiveness (assuming a hidden tag affecting droprates), it would be more efficient to offload currency to a mule and dump the account periodically. since mules will have very high trade rates they will be easy to spot.

Accounts that trade with a mule will be flagged and eventually tagged so it will be difficult to move currency and items from one flagged mule to an unflagged mule. Kind of like having the plague, really. Trade with a botter = lower droprates, in essence, and a simple move of items from one account to another wont break the chain of contact. The effects should increase over time so a one time trade doesnt interfere with normal players.

Through behind-the-scenes stuff like this you can make botting much more work than its worth, and the botter might not notice whats going on, since it could be RNG fucking with him. And most importantly legit players will never know its happening as they will never see the effects, wont be asked to do a Turing Test.

Additionally one could implement a random disconnect, or a deliberate desynch: really begin to fuck with the efficiency of marked accounts.

Do you think a bot will notice that 95% of the time it gets hit by lightning it gets the 'shocked' debuff? or ignited, or frozen, or that its auras are completely ineffective?


Next is client data; the server marks an account as a botter, and the client marks the computer running the bot with the same mark (on the first login into a botter account): now merely changing account will have no effect, and automatically mark the new account as a botter, as the mark is sent back to the server with every login, regardless of the account used.
More work for the botter as he now needs a clean install every account change: AND he doesnt know if/when hes been marked as a botter, so there will be efficiency loss by either reinstalling/account changes more or less than optimal.


You see, banning is just not fun... "I'd like to play a game"


B. (Ive got much more vicious sneaky ideas hidden away)

edit: TL;DR: dont ban botters, fuck with them.

Yes there will be people trying to use bots, however free DOES NOT mean INFINITE bots...D2 had unlimited accounts as well...

I think... there are so many games with pay to win. Some bots from freaks that lose his time in good bot, is a pessimistic view.

I dont want sound bad, my english is limited xD

Conclusion: WE ARE ALL DOOMED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It is inevitable...

i do like the tagging idea of items despite the fact that it's not workable because it is expensive for ggg stuff to buy these items from external websites. and the botter would lose no further items if he creates a new account for the one trade.

the idea of poisoning accounts when trading with a botter has the possible side effect of infecting your account when playing on a infected public computer in a club. many people still do that, especially young ones with no wn computer.

lastly, i wouldn't play a game which scans my whole computer and memory for other programs as f.e. the wow client did.
this is my first real online game for exactly this reason, because i don't accept the security measures other online games and game distribution sw like steam and origin have because i rather spend my money on good software than on a second good computer to only run games on it.

imho the only chance against botters in PoE are turing tests ingame which integrate into the game play.

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Trapperkeeper wrote:

Okay, well I take back the farts then... and thats not easy to do.

It's okay, I like Monty Python 8-)

I forgot one point.
Who would want make a bot on poe, if u can make a bot on d3 and sell items for real money?
Here u cant gain money, only fucking freaks items.
D3 is a bussiness to bots, but not poe.

I love the idea of playing around with bots and not specifically banning them.

For infecting the computer - don't just change something in the program, change the registry keys as well if possible. And don't just change 1, change a few. That way, botters need to do a clean re-instal of their OS to eliminate everything.