BOTS running rampant in your game?!
Dont have the staff to deal with all the reports on the forums?!
Want a solution that will work better than you imagine it could?!
RECRUIT Game Monitors’s and pay them with In-Game stuff!
They won’t get any game play advantage but instead play the game and police the world and/or forums. Give them special functions to deal with the problems. So your devs can deal with actual bugs. Here are some of those functions:
Trade lock: Temporarily disable an account to trade ANYTHING. No selling to vendors, no marketplace buying or selling, no buying skill points, no trading to other characters on team, no “dropping” of anything. NO NOTHING. their inventory will just have to fill up until the action is lifted and the scenario resolved. This will be useful in stopping the transfer of items when a player is suspected of botting or other crap.
Player Mute: GM will select Real Money Traders and other toxic players they find and remove their ability to communicate until further actions are decided upon. Locks use of every method of communication between that player and the rest of the player base with the exception of party chat.
Bot Buster Ver 1: Spawn a high level creature immune to all status affects, to include icewalls, temporarily that will instant kill anyone who attacks it for too long. The creature will have the name of normal monsters but appear to be something that a real player will see and know not to mess with like a giant floating Red “X” or a monster with a visual status like stun except instead of stars, the big ex or something that simply says Anti-Bot. you get the idea.
Bot Buster Ver 2: force a timed “captcha code” box to appear on the players screen that does NOT hinder other in game functions function until time runs out. If it is not completed successfully in time, log the account out and trade lock it. (the point of no hindering the player is so that if it is a bot, they won’t respond to the captcha and continue to do their automatons. Also, I assume the bots are hosted at a “bot farm” type place and have somebody monitoring them occasionally so we dont want to alert them that they have been caught before action can be taken)
Now you might be thinking, “what if the GMs abuse their power?” well, like any job, integrity and accountability are important to the employer and their customers. Just have the GM’s screenshot any actions they take and report in daily to a forum or some type of system where IMC staff can verify they aren’t doing anything dumb.
What do you pay the GM’s to keep them interested in doing it? TP? XP boosters. Silver? They get to keep the contraband they find lol?
I am sure this idea is not full proof but I think it is a step in the right direction. I am open to ideas and suggestion to improve this.