How are you going to prevent excessive botting in PoE?

I just realized that botting will most likely be a huge problem if this game becomes popular due to some simple facts:

Creating a new account costs zero dollar, so even if you do get banned, the only thing you will lose is your character and the items on this character. Nobody can prevent you from creating an absurd amount of accounts running bots. In addition, bot-users don't even necessarily lose anything valuable as you can farm places like dread thicket in cruel/ruthless for orbs without any equipment but some flasks with a magic user and leveling such a character to 40-50 does not take much time at all (and could probably be done by a bot, too).

So, how are you planning to prevent people from creating hundreds of accounts running orb- or even leveling-bots and then selling the items for real money when you have no effective way to punish them as your game is free?

Currently, the only way that I see to at laest mitigate the problem is charging a few dollars for the game and a rigorous zero-tolerance policy on botting, with a few people whose only job it is to find and ban bot users.

How I would do it, is that if the game recognizes a pattern in the instances you are running, or if you've been online for an excessive amount of time, it should prompt you with a general question, a CAPTCHA or something, just to make sure you're human.

This would require very(!) sophisticated algorithms, otherwise such a system would either just annoy real players or be ineffective. In addition, nowadays bots have no problem solving captchas and related verification-questions that would drive any human into despair (or at least a rage).

In addition, as you can have 5000 accounts, the bot could just run an instance one to two times, reset your IP, relog to the next account, and repeat. How do you tell this apart from a human player just clearing an instance for loot?

There are a few methods to stop bots but none of them is without their flaws and all of them can be bypassed that being said if someone really wants to make a bot for path of exile and they know what their doing the only thing GGG can do is patch it whenever it gets updated

Please no Chinese character captcha -.-

haha Ravi, syko here ;)

Our discussion about this was become a thread.

I have really no idea what poe can do against bots.
-Account costs nothing
-Progs thats emulating the mouse are hart to detect
-U can Farm Orbs everywhere
-there is absoluty no risk for ur main account
-The Areas are not so much random generatet

Really no idea ^^

Changing the data hooks and encrypting packets would be a very easy way. Multiple small patches a week. very unannoying to players. VERY annoying to botters.

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wickedhood wrote:

Changing the data hooks and encrypting packets would be a very easy way. Multiple small patches a week. very unannoying to players. VERY annoying to botters.

That wouldn't solve bots that automate or emulate mouse/keyboard inputs through the actual client tnough.

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dust7 wrote:

Currently, the only way that I see to at laest mitigate the problem is charging a few dollars for the game and a rigorous zero-tolerance policy on botting, with a few people whose only job it is to find and ban bot users.

They announced already another way to prevent users from creating thousands of accounts. Custom leagues. Invite only those you know and trust and you'll be saved from bots. At least it limits the number of bots that can be created even if you invite lot's of people you don't know. Depending on how much power and knowledge they plan to give to those running custom leagues the community could easily get rid themselfs of bots.

However this is rather hiding the problem than a solution for it.

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wickedhood wrote:

Changing the data hooks and encrypting packets would be a very easy way. Multiple small patches a week. very unannoying to players. VERY annoying to botters.

Fingerprinting solves this.

The best way is to put systems in place that discourage botting by making human decision necessary... even to the degree of providing a turing test of some sort once in a while.