How are you going to prevent excessive botting in PoE?

all future skills will deal damage depending on how many capcha's you can solve within 3 seconds

It also depends how PoE is designed. Bots are sophisticated these days, yes, but you have to remember that it's someone sitting there working on it, and they don't manifest themselves. Diablo II was only bottable for well geared people, and even then bots would die miserably to many spawns, because they were unintelligent, BUT many players outgeared the content to allow bots to MF. If PoE keeps the difficulty level up, bots will never be able to MF at the same level as players (this has been discussed to death in D3 forums and Inferno difficulty). All I know is that a bot needs to be able to read the zone to choose a path, dodge obstacles, and how to interact with large groups of mobs, etc. This isn't WoW where a bot has a ton of room to mess up. Bots in HC will probably be few and far between, also.

I have a feeling no one will be botting (at least in hardcore) due to the risks involved with it.

It would be near impossible to make a bot reliable enough to outweigh the risks involved with fighting unattended.

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Cajual wrote:

It also depends how PoE is designed. Bots are sophisticated these days, yes, but you have to remember that it's someone sitting there working on it, and they don't manifest themselves. Diablo II was only bottable for well geared people, and even then bots would die miserably to many spawns, because they were unintelligent, BUT many players outgeared the content to allow bots to MF. If PoE keeps the difficulty level up, bots will never be able to MF at the same level as players.

Ah but this is not the point. When everything is automated, the effectivity of the bot compared to a normal player is irrelevant. You can still run dozens of bots farming low level areas (lets say cruel dread thicket) at the same time without maintanence and only check them for orbs every 24 hours.

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Darkfyre wrote:

I have a feeling no one will be botting (at least in hardcore) due to the risks involved with it.

It would be near impossible to make a bot reliable enough to outweigh the risks involved with fighting unattended.

There are bots in any other hardcore game. The only thing keeping the majority of players from running bots is that they paid for the game and therefore dont want to get banned. HC bots auto-log off or auto-TP faster than any human could when at low life. Bots could do that in D2 HC 10 years ago, nowadays they are even better. Besides, what would you lose other than a medium level character with crappy equipment on a seperate account? As I said, when you can run dozens, bots dont need to be effective or even able to farm the highest level or most dangerous areas.

The hacking/botting community is huge. Check this:

http://www.blizzhackers.cc/

They are already on to PoE:

http://www.blizzhackers.cc/viewtopic.php?f=183&t=483280

It's like I said, the only way to catch bots is to turing test them... at which point you can attempt to purge all related accounts, but that sometimes requires other heuristic database techniques.