Anti Botting System

IMHO there is only one way to stop botting: Any content that's really worth farming should be too hard/complex/random for bots to do efficiently.
That is, create some nasty random mazes, puzzles, traps and really nasty mobs that require some thinking (which a bot isn't capable of, I presume). On the other hand, easily farmable content should be restricted in terms of possible drops or have a reduced efficiency if done repeatedly (like bosses).

or what a about an randomized capute only if u find rly good unique or the rly valuable item or orb that you have to click smth or ask a question when u pick it up that the system know ur not a bot who found that item ? and that u have some min time to do it. it also wont piss of the most players because u wont find a very good unique item or org all the day

Any from of ingame captcha (aside from being hopeless at preventing botting) is inherently immersion breaking and therefore a bad idea.


Why do botter bot?
Because its more efficiant than playing in terms of generating a revenue stream.

How to we deter botters in a game with unlimited free accounts?
Fuck with their efficiency.


As i mentioned in another thread, and someone helpfully quoted on the first page, the trade system is the best place to hunt for botters, since in order to function they MUST trade with each other and with the public, at higher volumes than a regular player would. Especially in context of networking: who trades with whom and with how much volume... botter profiles will be impossible to hide with just a couple of KPI's and rudimentary social networking (ie trading) connections. (some good can come out of facebook)

Having identified botter accounts then you fuck with their efficiency through droprate mechanics which, since they are tied to RNG, are very hard for the botter to track accurately, especially since a botter wont know what a normal distribution looks like to the player.


Any solution that attacks botting (or other unethical behaviour) must never cause inconvenience to legit players. Why treat these people as criminals when its not necessary to do so? Other companies have treated their customers like this and I believe have done so out of sheer laziness.

B.

means when i go on holiday next week and transfer all my items to my brothers account so he can have some fun before the open beta wipe i get an invisible botter tag?

that as well means i can't keep items in multiple accounts as explicitely encouraged by ggg devs to circumvent the limited item space and transfer my items to my playing char afterwards?

the only chance to fight bots completely is registered accounts by id card where a ban means a permanent ban and which is out of the question here.

> Any solution that attacks botting (or other unethical behaviour) must never cause inconvenience to legit players.
i agree with you on this one. but thinking of adapting my behaviour for not triggering any ingame defense mechanics makes me uncomfortable.

Nope.

It'll take more than one event to have such an effect.

it would cause a flag if you and a bunch of your mates dumped all your items into your brothers account continually over weeks. This would become a tag for you and your mates if other stuff occurred, also to do with trade flow.

The profiling is much more about high volumes going through followable networks.

do you think if an account continually has a high volume items going into it over a period of time, from from mainly the same sources that all play at the same time, and no appreciable item flow occurs in the opposite direction.... that might show up a botter network and is somewhat unlikely to be a solo player, or even a legit group?

This stuff is exactly how "inside traders" are tracked, btw: abnormal trade flows over time. key words are 'abnormal' and 'over time'.

I'll restate that you using a mule or five will not cause any problems since the item flow wont resemble a botting/harvesting network.

B.

So what about major guilds/really competitive players? They could get flagged. Besides, if the botter uses multiple accounts he/she/it will also sell items from these accounts separately. That is, the load is distributed and thus cannot be detected. Another question: Where would you put the threshold, and why?

I repeat, you have to see the difference in terms of dealing with randomness and in terms of adaptation/capability of dealing with complex encounters. You have to create a bot-unfriendly game. This is the only way to stop botting for a reasonable amount of time without harming players for trading with each other excessively (for whatever reason).

To prevent trolling: I hate botting and I don't want to see any bots in this game whatsoever.

Your idea was very good, but there is the annoying thing of every 30 mins clicking a letter. I would never stop playing bcz of this, but it would be annoying. But the idea was very good.

It could work if other palyers could make this letter window pop up on ones game as an petition like "make a group with this player". So if u find someone suspiciously upping, u could make this window pop up and he would click the letter or be disconected and perhaps banned as well. (add a status to players like "im AFK" could be good if this was implanted, for while in this status you couldnt do anything and nobody could send u this letter window; just in case uve had to run to the bathroom)

Ive writen that i didnt care about any kinda bot or multiple accounts, but i was wront in that thread.
You see? if u bot, ur doing the same thing "money" would do to any online game, witch is inflation bcz, this way (botting), you will be gathering the resources destinated to various accounts to a single account and that makes the inflation goes up once you (botters) will start selling thing at a way higher "price" then the items should be, and this (inflation) is the situation GGG is running away from as they sad in FAQ.

*Correct me if my interpretation of botting is wrong, witch, in this case, i would retake what i sad, but will add something, if u bot, everybody should bot, then what is the point after all?

"

LivingHell452 wrote:

So what about major guilds/really competitive players? They could get flagged. Besides, if the botter uses multiple accounts he/she/it will also sell items from these accounts separately. That is, the load is distributed and thus cannot be detected. Another question: Where would you put the threshold, and why?

I repeat, you have to see the difference in terms of dealing with randomness and in terms of adaptation/capability of dealing with complex encounters. You have to create a bot-unfriendly game. This is the only way to stop botting for a reasonable amount of time without harming players for trading with each other excessively (for whatever reason).

To prevent trolling: I hate botting and I don't want to see any bots in this game whatsoever.

Actually having guilds makes these things easier rather than harder to track, and competitive players will almost certainly have a different networking and trading profile. I reiterate that item flow will be very different for botter networks, just as financial transactions are different during fraud.

And I dont believe for a moment that botters will use a large number of accounts to trade with real players: its not efficient enough and multiple accounts from the same machine are very easily trackable.

The threshold? I wouldnt have one: it implies that there is a point where one more item transferred creates the flag.

Remember that profiles will come from trades, playtimes, logins, continuous activity, friend networks, machine information and so on. The things that make botting efficient are also the things that make them easy to trace.

A quick Case Study comes from Enron. The flag that popped up indicating accounting fraud on their part came from the abnormal distribution of leading digits in their financial records: to whit, there werent enough leading 1's in their numbers.

B.

You're right in that it would kind of work. But if it was that easy to differentiate between bots and real players (which/who have quite a range of behaviour), that would be frankly astonishing. Heck, there isn't even a fail-safe method to identify a chat bot.

Furthermore, you need a threshold. It need not be that simple, but there is a (multi-dimensional) set of "flagged" behaviour. These are separated by the "threshold function", i.e. if it's in the set or not. It just exists whatever you choose to do.

I suppose it would make botting a lot less efficient, but not kill it altogether. There needs to be an additional slap in the face that forces bots to show extreme behaviour (e.g. uptime) to be efficient - and then they are flagged.

As it is now, bots really could sacrifice a lot for being somewhat more "human" without making them ineffective.

It might appear to you that I am nitpicking, but it's mainly that I'm worried things aren't that easy and that there could still be bots.

no trading, no botting, simple.

Farm your own loot, I like that idea.