Eversince the “Report Bot” function was added, I thought that it’d be a part of some automated report, but it looks like it isn’t. In this topic, I’ll suggest a list of ways that could be implemented to improve the speed of which the bots are being banned.
I completly agree with this “Report Bot” feature, and also think that this is most likely the best method to minimize the RMT in this game if done correctly. Giving the “power” to players to report them is a really good measure, because they’re the ones that’s going to do the BOT Witch Hunt for you but I feel like it could be done better, and faster.
- Implementing a “Are you sure?” pop up once you choose to report a bot. This is, obviously, to prevent people from missclicking the button, and then being penalized for something they did without intention.
How to automate a Bot Report? Well, all BOT accounts have alot of common characteristics, and that’s what should be used to properly automate the Ban Hammer and to completly get over the idea of “Actual players may be caught in the fire”.
- The Steam account’s creation date. BOT accounts are created for the mere purpose of playing ToS, things like a steam account that has been created at the same day of the report should be converging to the Ban Hammer área
- Friends List; a BOT account, obviusly, doesn’t have any1 in the friends list, while for a common Player, it’d have atleast one friend there. (“Obviusly if they wanted to, they could add 200 friends in no time but… here’s the deal: How would they know if this is a feature to be considered or not? Obviusly IMC wouldn’t make it open to public what information is being considered by the system to properly ban the user as a BOT”).
- Amount of Games in the user’s Steam account library. A BOT account have no reason to have any other games than the game it’s going to BOT at, and also, only having ToS in it’s Library is a very unusual behavior for most players
- Amount of hours played at the date of the Report. A BOT would have 12:36 Hours played at 12:36am, which is a very specific issue that doesn’t happen for a regular Player 99% of the times.
- Class Choice: Oddly enough, 90% if not 100% of the BOTs currently are Priests, so yeah, I think this should be considered when narrowing down the chances of being a BOT.
- Amount of mobs killed: A BOT have a ■■■■ ton of mobs killed, like, imagine going from lv1 to 100 b doing nothing but grinding. I’d suggesting something similar to comparing the average amount of enemies slain with other players within the same lvl range. I think you could use the Adventure Journal to collect this type of information. I wouldn’t be surprised if a BOT have 10 times more enemies killed than a regular player.
Ofc, I’ll add more to this post once I think about more ways that could help with the implementation of an auto Bot Ban while also having close-to 0% false-positive Bans.
