Reporting bots is great, but these reports have to be handled by real human people. I don’t believe that the ToS developers have the money or the manpower to realistically do anything with these reports.
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Unfortunately, bots are extremely hard to stop, by nature of their creators being fellow humans. It also doesn’t help that most methods just aren’t that good
Manual reports - slow, prone to error
Mini-GM players - greifing
Minigame - can be scripted through (Wakfu’s Captain Atcha)
Captca - non-random -> image-answer pairs
- random by client -> read memory for answer
- random by server -> image recognition
- mathcha -> it’s a computer
- waitcha -> wait statement
- select all with X -> image-object pairs
The only way I can think of to possibly stop botting from hurting player experience is to make the game systems in such a way that bots are somehow a boon unto the human community.
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i like the minigame one bcuz of rewards and its fun compared to typing in numbers
Heres another suggestion.
If you had an dynamic image generator then ask the client a question every hour ( or random time duration ) i think would be pretty good idea. for example
how many pedals on this Popolion?
what color are the pedals on this Popolion?
if the user gets it wrong, another question will come in 10 mins. if they get 3 wrong in a row. They get a 2 hr debuff where drop rate and exp rate goes close to zero.
if the user gets it right, the they get an random unique buff for 30 mins or something like that
That way, if the regular user gets the question. they are happy because they get a buff. if they get it wrong by accident, they still get 2 more tries. after failing 3 times they might as well turn off the game and just go outside or read a book or something.
Convenience of reporting is also important.
Being able to right click a chara and having options like
Report Bot
Report
Block
For when you right click someone so that we have a much easier time to report these bots.
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So people are not allowed to afk?
So let’s say 10 people hate you. And decided to report you as botting, even if you didn’t. /gg
Its better than having to go to the support section of the website and manueling reporting them with some proof.
People are lazy. There’s going to be more people happy they have that option than not.
What’s the buff? Would the buff mean that the players lucky enough to get asked the question means they would ultimately be faster at gaining levels, or making money, etc than a player who was unlucky enough to not get the buff? Would this mess with PvP? Would this mean that it’s essential to get the buff before tackling a big boss if you want to be top DPS?
How do you implement the image generator? How does it appear to the player? Does it pop up automatically so that it disrupts whatever the player is doing? Does it just give a small message letting you know you must complete it? What happens if you don’t notice the message because you are AFK? What happens if you don’t answer it? What if you’re AFK and you decide to grab lunch and don’t come back for an hour or two? What happens if this message just pops up during a crucial moment in a boss fight, or pvp?
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Well I mean, the debuff activates while you are afk, u get no exp, etc, till u finish the captcha, which you can do when you get back. Did u even read the main post?
jesus, 21 questions. im sure IMC can give better answers if they decide to go with this option
here are some examples that you can get at random:
- 10% increase exp
- 10% increase drop rate
- 10% cool down decrease
- 10% increase in HP
- 10% increase in SP
- 10% increase in ATK
- 10% increase in MDEF
- 10% increase in BLOCK
- etc ( you get my drift)
i think you that you will get a buff, which one you get should be random. perhaps even a weighted randomness where you are more likely to get one buff over the other
They should not apply to pvp or gvg
it would definitely help but the randomness and duration will make it un reliable to try to get the buff you want.
the server would have to have a bank of images and questions that will show to the user based on total gameplay time, not session time. the image should show in a corner of the screen that doesnt distrupt the player if they are in the middle of something. but be designed so the that user will notice it. (big and red and flashing or something ) and will only occur on field maps. not in towns, dungeons or pvp maps. (bots dont pvp and i think the dungeon limit will stop the bots from abusing the dungeons)
if you didnt notice the first time, you have a total of 3 times over a span of 30 mins to get it right. if you didnt notice, then the pop up is not designed right ( in terms of flashing or color)
i believe they have an inactivity disconnect already implemented so you should be logged off if your logged in for like an hour with no activity. if its disabled in towns then you wouldn’t have to worry about it since it wont be in effect.
i think people should log off if your going to be afk for a long time on a field map. if you decide to do that your just going to do that then have to wait till the debuff is no longer in effect.
you can either ignore it until you have an opportune time, you have 3 tries over 30 mins. and its not in effect in pvp. ( bots arnt going to pvp)
DISCLAMER. this is just a rough idea, i think people can fine tune this system.
EDIT:
just tagging @STAFF_Ethan just fyi
Getting hit with a captcha every 40-60 minutes would be incredibly annoying and a big turnoff to new players. Other suggestions are better like triggering challenges only when the character engages in repetitive behavior and letting users flag suspected bots by right clicking to make them minigame candidates. (Add a command to manually volunteer for the minigame and mention it in the confirmation window so players don’t report themselves just to play the minigame for fun.)
The map events suggested above sound fun but are map-specific. More general ones could be like a ghost appears and tries to possess you. Randomly generated instructions appear on the screen telling you which skills and moves to use to kill the ghost and how to dodge its attacks, like the tutorial when you first appear in West Siauliai Woods or the hints that appear during boss fights. If you fail you get the no exp/loot debuff until you win, and repeated failures (while not being AFK) land you in jail. If bots script responses, change the instructions and the way they’re displayed slightly, and make a tool for that which non-programmer GMs can use easily. In before STAFF_John makes us act out famous anime scenes to defeat ghosts.
Botters use captcha-solving companies which employ humans to do captchas. They can take a screenshot and send it to the service, but making the minigame require in-game actions instead of typing in some text would complicate things because the solving services won’t be using the game client.
So what? You have to complete an anti-bot minigame and 3 days later a GM glances at the records for 5 seconds?
Reports can be automatically weighted based on how reliable the reporter has been, so dedicated anti-bot navy seals with over 300 confirmed kills put bots at the top of the list, and that guy who reports everyone he doesn’t like goes to the bottom of the list or his reports just stop doing anything.
Also, give users a score in their adventure journals listing how many of the bots they reported got banned and what percentage of their reports were confirmed to be valid or invalid. This would create a huge incentive for players to report bots, avoid reporting non-bots, and advertise the report system by bragging about it.
2 Likes
don’t mock us please, if you want to get ride of bot, you plenty method with log to capture a high and repetiv events. It’s not even hard to identify a bot with a high occurences of doing things.
Ragnarok on brazil server explained:
90.000 online players
Actually, 1000 players, each one have 9 bots!
I guess I’m pretty close
Like I just posted on the other bot topic…
As a long time user and (somewhat new) creator of bots… I can tell you guys there is absolutely no way to stop a bot.
There’s nothing a player can do that a bot can’t.
My favorite is how advanced the big game bots are. WoW/GW2/FFXIV. The
AI is amazing and surpasses a majority of normal players. I’d take a
bot in my party over normal players in any 3 of those games. Even in
raids.
I may or may not (COUGHCOUGHCOUGH) have a FFXIV bot running on my second monitor as I type this. Making crazy gil.
If you’ve ever played WoW/GW2/FFXIV I guarantee you that you’ve
partied with multiple bots for dungeon runs without ever knowing it
wasn’t a player.
Yes, there is even plugins to allow basic chatting for bots.
Including answering those basic math equations you give a player to
‘check if it’s a bot’.
Some random ideas for handling bots:
(@STAFF_Ethan I hope something below is useful.)
- Report system that keeps records and makes a score of suspicious and successful reports.
- Make reverse engineering the game really hard (maybe it’s too late).
- Manual (GM) checking based on reports and data collected.
- Create an internal document of possible ways of cheating so GMs have a database for each case.
- Keep some client/computer environment fingerprinting and try to match similar behavior. It’s possible, like, depending on the score of the player, to spawn monsters only in the same spot so that the player would end up doing the same actions based on the bot AI, so you could map a environment fingerprint to a repetitive behavior.
- Keep somehow to behavior of the players the GMs are checking. You don’t need only a banishment command. It would be nice to have something like a track command that collects info on that player.
- Allow the GMs to control the environment while the tracking mode is enabled on a player.
- Make false rewards/events possible. Like dropping an unpickable rare item on the ground. Or dropping something good that only a bot could detect (not visible on the screen/triggering a glitch but trackable by procedures, bots aren’t processing in-game screen images as far as I know, lol).
- Make anti-bot channels if the player changes from map to map so those suspects players gets moved to special anti-bot environment without knowing it. The anti-bot mode should be disabled once it’s certain the player isn’t a bot.
- Use the suspicious score in conjunction of trading history to check if the player trades resources between characters. Apply sanctions to all the accounts involved if it’s a confirmed cheat. Even if “I just helped a friend of mine, don’t ban him”.
- Map internally common bot cases, like, it’s more common to have Swordies Lv. 1~40 on X map as bots, so you have a scope to give more priority to spend the automatic checking resources.
- Don’t, really, give any second chance to anyone confirmed using in-game cheats or bots. Make people have fear to use cheats.
- Create something like a neural network or a simple checklist for automatic bot checking. It’s possible, like, to check if the character speed is unusually high. If the player is teleporting you can check if he have a high ping or low ping and collect information over time.
- Don’t punish the players as soon they are detected using cheats. Ban them when they are not online or from time to time. So they don’t know what was really detected.
- If the player have a really high suspicious score allow the GM to add a “annoying” mode that makes the character rubber band, miss more attacks and lose connection from time to time. Also keep in mind that connection issues or “unexpected” common scenarios can break bots AI.
- Force the player who are reporting to give enough information to report. Like, you can only report someone if you’re in the map for some minutes. The player would also have to answer like from 5 to 10 questions that can map if the report is trollish or good. Use the pattern of the answers and environment to create common good reports.
- Glitches! Abuse your own glitches as GMs, glitches that annoys the suspect player or make them fear you. Like the golden message glitch asking “stop botting or i report u” or some non-sense. Start ks’ing the bot and see the behavior. Is it always moving to other targets? Keeping the route? Changing the route? Whining?
- Make GMs able to fake the character name and outfit.
- Play with internal values that bots are detecting. Like, monsters are in a X place but make it possible to show it in a Y place on the screen or the server so that you can see if the bot is attacking a non-existing monster.
- Play with player’s behavior. If you see a shining monster you’re going to kill it asap, right? Spawn no-reward shining monsters if the player have a high suspicious score and check its behavior.
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I’d just like to throw this info in:
Movement hacks (Teleport, speed, etc) cannot be stopped by the game as, other than in scripted events that the server moves the player without player input, any sort of movement is controlled by the client and the server does not need to approve of it, only to adjust the location you display to others.
This is the same in WoW, FFXIV, or any other big online game.
That video showing the “aoe attack” hacks definitely needs looking into before it becomes common sight but the movement shenanigans will need manual observation to catch the players in the act.
It can be non-intrusive.
It shows up, you can minimize it (in style of programs that can be opened in tray) and it gives you 15 minutes to enter it.
This way, if you’re in a boss fight or whatever, you have some time.
Another way:
- Several trusted members of community can be given a “game sage” title, or whatever you want to call it. Given the power to start a vote to kick poll, serverwide, where everyone can vote on a kick. As long as 60%+ of the online community votes yes, the kick will happen.
OR, as every game should have. IMC should hire people that will watch over the server, investigate every bot report and kick it if it is in fact a bot. This of course costs money, so it’s only a dream to expect it from IMC.
I personally think that a captcha is the best solution, with 15 minutes to enter it, so it’s not very intrusive and you sort of have some time to do whatever you’re doing and then enter it.
You guys want to know the only method that has any form of impact on botters in any game?
A built in way to trade in-game money for cash shop currency.
And vice versa.
GW2 does it.
The only other option is to check when large amounts of money are being traded between people that have had little to no interaction before. And if one of the traders is a low level (which is common for gold sellers).
You can’t stop botting. You can only reduce the amount of people that buy in-game money.
Quite inefficient. /twentyfharacters