If the game does not produce major profitable things than botters will stop. Not that developers/community are not contributing but botters also have judgement for “effort vs profit”…
I honestly thinking that given most bots come for in-game money, there should be limitation for drops/silver earning or how long a character staying in the same map. RO is obvious example to automatically kill monsters and get 10000 loots on same map after hours passed.
This is probably due to the small population of the game. I’ve never heard of it. Running bots is quite costly and unless you can make a marginally larger profit than what it costs, then it’s not really likely to run a lot of bots for a small population.
Mathematical equations would be a hundred times easier for a computer to solve than a normal person. Essentially computers were made to run numerical computations, so they excel at this.
This sort of limitation ruins a players experience of the game. I want to be able to farm for money and have no limits. There is no good way to determine what is a ‘realistic’ amount of time a normal person can spend. I can run a simple script that takes thousands of users input and output a mean, max, median, min time, but these are all estimates and the most hardcore people will surpass them.
computer programs can simulate anything, but has a difficult time simulating “intelligence” or “judgement”
you don’t have to be particularly smart to find out new ways to simulate gameplay. How online games work is that there is communication protocol between a client ( the game ) and the server. all the bot programmer needs to do understand that protocol and replace the game client with the bot program. the communication protocol often includes nearby players, enemies, chat, players positions, etc. heck the bot can even move the mouse to click on buttons and such.
Captchas are also annoying but once the bot programmers know what the questions or images that the capchas are going to ask, they can have a database of checksums and answers to break them a good percentage of times.
the only true way to counter bots is to make them useless to use to begin with. This is the reason why IMC only allowed trading on VIP accounts
or grinding on maps a less effective way to level.
All of this is correct. Although with this day in age, our computers are far more ‘intelligent’ than they ever have been. It’s really quite surprising. I don’t work in AI much, but I do a lot of machine learning and i’m always impressed by some of the things we are able to do.
Yea, but what if they’re implemented like those puzzle captchas… It’ll probably be far harder to create a bot for that since who knows how many images you’ll need to pass it at a decent rate
Nothing to do with you, when CookyKim gets going, that means thread is dead. Maybe he will be nice to this one.
Captchas are fine, they work to a degree. Developing difficult captchas are a pain, and its likely that after a few weeks / months the bot programmers will have enough information to circumvent them.
The main thing is captchas hurt the player, they are annoying, and bothersome to the legit players. If you don’t think you would mind spending the time to fill out 10 or so captchas (depending on the amount of time between each captcha) every single time you log in then you should really think about it this way:
Imagine that every time you were watching a tv show, it would stop every 5 minutes and ask you to input a captcha … (this is for a typical 30 minute show). My god that would be the worst thing ever, I just want to watch my damn show.
Actually I was about to ask a serious question:
@Sinji
On the other thread (Anti-Bot measures), the OP mentioned to use minigames as bot check. I brought the idea further a bit and though why not implement random side quest that will need to be completed to avoid getting a debilitating debuff. Completing side quests obviously grant in game benefits like exp card & silver. This would fit with the lore (fighting evil everywhere), and complicate botting programming. To make it even harder the sidequest should be complex problem solving that human excel & cannot be hard coded as a database.
How feasible do you think this as a bot deterrent method?
Not every single time you login, but rather when a player reports a bot, somewhat like a flagging system with cooldown. I hate captchas, but if they’re made more appealing and have benefits why not? Server logs only work to a certain extent and looking at other games it seems highly unlikely it’ll decrease bot population significantly. Easiest way to obliterate them is to disable 1:1 trading though…
Good bye economy. 
At least it’ll still be F2P and bot free/nearly bot free 
true, but bots also ruin the economy. its almost like pick your poison.
At least computers can’t solve this:
Gamers classify proteins - Project Discovery
The problem is, even real people can’t solve it half the time. lol.
Not really. Go look at Black Desert Online. Very stable economy.
I don’t agree though. It’s a big inconvenience to the player, but it’s a flat out lie that it harms the economy.
I actually think something like this was done by RuneScape, but eventually the bots were able to complete these mini-games quite easily.
The problem is to make them more appealing you will need to re-invent them. There’s a reason there isn’t appealing captchas, it’s because they haven’t been invented. If it were easy to make an appealing captcha that stopped botters, it’d probably be in every game.
I’m a programmer, but not a bot programmer. And in our company, saying “it can’t be done” can get you fired.
This is pretty cool. I actually work with protein discovery as part of my research.