Tree of Savior Forum

Anti-bot/macro suggestion that enhances gameplay

Suggestions
#1

The anti-bot/macro/hack suggestions I’ve seen so far, like captcha and random events, would only serve to annoy players while sufficiently advanced botters/hackers would be able to defeat those measures easily. A captcha solver program that uses real humans to solve captchas (100% success!) can be used for a price of less than 1 cent per captcha, almost nothing to a gold farmer site, let alone programmatically solving captchas, which can currently be done with a 70%+ success rate. Random events can be defeated very easily as well, as was seen in RuneScape.

What should be done instead? The addition of “elite” random spawn monsters that spawn after some time grinding would help combat botting and dispel the monotony of grinding for hours on end, enhancing gameplay instead of taking away from it like captcha/random events would. Elite monsters could have abilities/stats like:

-attract/knockback: Displaces and disrupts stationary botters (i.e. archers with the attack key taped down)
-higher damage/ground aoes like normal bosses have in this game: Kills botters, since they’re just standing in one spot and autoattacking
and many more interesting effects that haven’t been thought of

#2

There was one game that had something like that. A monster roaming around the maps which was nearly unkillable and was nearly 1hko-ing anyone who attacked it, but was otherwise passive. This stopped simple bots that just attack the nearest target right in their tracks. It also was a good challenge for high level players trying to bring it down (and you could bring it down with a few full parties).

#3

I dont think theres a simple solution to this problem, or that it could be even solved completely.
In my experience all those ingame automatic systems fail pretty hard, mostly due to the fact that the botters who actually do that for profit can easily program the bots so that you won’t “catch” them more than once by those tricks.

This topic has been discussed in some other topics already and the conclusion so far is that you can limit the amount of bots by some type of paywalls (which ToS wont do) and of course with active GMs and a community that keeps reporting suspected bots.

F2P system just makes it very difficult to handle any type of offenders: botters / gold sellers / spammers / ksers / scammers / etc etc. Due to the fact that most people who find enjoyment in destroying other players experience just keep making new accounts. Same problem is when you are trying to fight the wave of bots and gold sellers. This issue is in every f2p game where you can gain something with multi-accounting.

#4

It sure is impossible to solve it completely, that’s true. You mention F2P system making it very hard to punish offenders, but even P2P systems are not safe from this. As an example, FFXIV had gold seller spammers that were banned by the dozens, but still came back. Why? Because the cost of an account was nothing compared to the profits they got.

The only solution to gold sellers is people not buying gold. The only solution to people not botting is people not botting.

1 Like
#5

You are right, P2P does not protect the game from goldsellers or botters because they manage to make more money than they lose before getting banned. Goldsellers / buyers and botters will always be there, some people just are willing to do anything to get ahead compared to others.

Personally I can live with the fact that theres some botters and goldsellers as long as I see active efforts from the GMs and publisher to fight that wave. Also, severely punishing all accounts linked to bot and gold seller accounts helps in this issue. I understand it’s a lot of work to track where all that gold went from bot x and via how many accounts. However, catching the “main” account of a botter is the only true way to punish the offender. The way I see it, permanent ban is the only possible punishment for botting or gold selling / buying.