Anti Botting System

Pretty simple and straight to the point:

1. Every random x minutes ( between 5 and 30? ) A transparent scrambled ( captcha style ) letter pops up above your experience bar. Has to be clearly visable and directly noticable.

2. You get 30 seconds to press the right key on your keyboard ( the letter ofcourse )

3. To prevent bots from pressing every letter, you can only try 3 times before you get logged out and denied acces for 30 minutes or something?

4. Every time you fail the letter changes, you can also press F5 to refresh the letter if you can't decipher it.

5. Any keys that are in use like inventory are left out of thie letter list.


What you guys think about it? ( botter's don't reply please :D )

No

Too intrusive and wouldn't be effective.

Here is what would happen if any junk like that were to be implemented.

People would get pissed and stop playing.

Botters would easily find a way around it.

better idea add some charging mobs which could charge you out of the map and monsters ith damgerous abilitys that you have phaserun away to not get hit. a bot program possible wont notice that mob or woudnt jump out of its way just an idea it would be nice to have smth against boters

ps if you would have to tipe in a a letter to shpw the game there would be a way for programs to recognice the one letter through its pixels possible a question and that u have like 15 min time to answer but there must be better ways just have no idea which one or i would suggest them




here an interesting idea someone wrote in another thread

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)

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ionface wrote:

Here is what would happen if any junk like that were to be implemented.

People would get pissed and stop playing.

Botters would easily find a way around it.

If you get pissed because you have to press a single key then please admit right now that you are a botter. Also there should be no way to get around a captcha system, ofcourse you can watch your character bot and manually press the button but that kinda beats the point of botting lol ...

Captcha system in not hard to implement and it's hard to walk over as long as it's an image not a string :)

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sowus wrote:

Captcha system in not hard to implement and it's hard to walk over as long as it's an image not a string :)

Someone who understands, yay!
It should be randomly generated image or it wont work ofcourse..

Haven't you guys ever heard of OCR?
Captchas haven't been effective in years.
Even Google, with its massive resources at its back, can't keep spammers from using their email service.
Even if GGG did come up with some magical captcha that couldn't be read by computers, there are server farms in China/India/Bangladesh/etc where groups humans solve capchas in shifts as their job (for a tenth of a cent per captcha), and the images are just forwarded from wherever the bots are to these developing countries where they're solved and then forwarded back, taking only a few seconds for a round trip.
It literally only costs $1 per 1000 captchas solved, which is nothing for those massive botting/gold-selling companies that will dig their claws into PoE once it becomes popular.

Listen, if a human can do something, then so will a bot. If you put enough time into it you can make it replicate and even do things at a better rate than a real player. There is no way to stop botting completely without ruining the game experience. All GGG can do is make it hard enough so only a hand full of people are capable and passionated enough to bot. Patching often is the best way, frequent bans will render public bots impossible thus allowing only a very small private amount of people to function their bots properly.