How banning in MMOs actually works

[Vanic]

A lot of people on these forums don’t seem to understand how banning in MMOs works. People expect every bot to just be vanish 30 seconds after it’s made it seems. I’d like to clear up a lot of the confusion that these people have, and explain why you aren’t just seeing bots disappearing left and right. What is described below is pretty much commonplace with other MMOs, and you can check in with them or ask some publishers or developers yourself to see if it’s true.

First, let’s start off with this. As long as there is profit to be had, there will always be bots. Every MMO has them. Let’s not pretend this is the first game to do it. It’s not going to get much worse when the game goes f2p as the bots are using illegal methods to obtain their accounts anyways. It’s already f2p for them. Trying to indefinitely eliminate all bots is absurd. The best you can do is to lessen the burden they pose to the average player, while not inconveniencing legitimate players with a lot of restrictions or buggy third party anti-cheat systems.

Next, when you ban a player, they know they did something wrong. They will try to fight it they were a legitimate player, but most bots will just make a new account and start fresh. The similarity between these two situations though is that they know that they were caught. How were they caught though? Well, if they were banned immediately after being caught, they know exactly how they were caught, and will just modify the software they are using to avoid detection.

What’s left to do then? Well, if you ban bots in waves, this leads to some ambiguity as to how they were caught. Were you caught botting today with modern software? Was it the program you used 3 weeks ago? Was it the false charge-back you had that finally got caught? It’s hard to say. This makes it more difficult to pinpoint what actually got you caught.

Now I know what you’re probably thinking - ‘but Vanic, you’re an idiot. they’re just going to change the botting software anyways you pleb’. You are right in some ways. As I said before, you can’t completely eliminate bots. That said, if you make it more difficult for them to know what got them banned, you are more likely to catch them off guard. They might not have had a chance to transfer their wealth to legitimate accounts. Also, as players continue to bot, especially legitimate players, the evidence piles up to undeniable amounts. It will allow players to accumulate more, and therefore have more to lose when they are caught again. Getting a level 60 character banned is annoying; getting a level 230 character banned is devastating.

In the end, wave banning is the most effective thing publishers can do to combat the problem. The most effective way to combat bots is actually the responsibility of the end user. Don’t buy from bots, and encourage your peers not to do so as well. It sounds like an anti-drug campaign; I know. These companies survive because they make a profit though.

tl;dr: Don’t RMT. Wave bans are more effective. Vanic is a pleb.

[nizidr]

Common sense is not so common nowdays.

[Vanic]

I don’t think it’s a matter of common sense. A lot of people just have very limited knowledge when it comes to this subject. I can see how people would misunderstand the situation until they are more well informed. I don’t blame them for that.

[Senpachie]

Nice work you have here. I hope all of them can absorb this

[Vanic]

I hope so, but many people will choose to ignore it and complain. People are so entitled these days.

[bokunokan]

I applaud you for trying to make sense into a subject that is very obscure at best in the Online Gaming Industry.

Sadly, the way thing work for most company, is far from being what you described.

Manpower is the number one reason why you don’t see bots being ban immediately.

Let’s make some speculation about TOS and assume there is currently 10,000 Active Bot running in the game.

1 manpower = enough employee to fill a 24 hours per day, 7 days per week or 168 hours of work per week.

Now let’s assume there is 5 manpower worth of employee in charge of reviewing those 10,000 Bots and let’s assume it take them roughly 30 minutes to bring enough evidence to ban a bots permanently.

That would mean 10 Bot get deleted every 1 hours. Or 240 Bots per day.

Now here is where the problem start.

IMC delete 240 Bots per day.

There is something call workload in the business industry.

10,000 Bots. 240 Deleted per day.

A little over 40 Days is what it would take to eliminate those 10,000 Bots. Assuming we have 5 manpower worth of employee working 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

This also mean that Bot number 10,000 will survive in the game world for a little over 40 day before being deleted.

The problem is, if there was never new bots being created we would have solved our problem in a little more then a months. But in reality we are just slowing the progress of bots.

Because each time a bots get deleted a new one is created.

You might wait 10 day and ban 2400 bots to make it sound you did a lot of work. But in reality while you banned 2400 Bots, 3000 new one were added into the game and are waiting being reviewed.

Let’s say there is 100 bots created every single hour.

We would need enough manpower to counter this in order to have zero bots in our game.

Problem is we cannot invest this much manpower in our game because then it would become unprofitable.

In the case of 100 new bot per hour we would need 10 time the manpower we had in our original plan or 50 manpower worth of employee.

With enough manpower it would become unprofitable for the bots to create new bots. So in the end we would solve the issue.

There has been many debate about botting in general in the Online Gaming Industry.

Sadly, until new systems are created to diminish the need for having more manpower we will continue to have bots in MMO.

There is many study that have been made on botting and I would argue that botting as a whole is not the issue. Cheaters are the one that are the issues.

Gold buyers.
Hackers.
Cheaters/Exploiters.

[i_Hub]

Good job putting this together

[Vanic]

One person could ban ten thousand bots in a week very easily. It would mostly be checking logs, which could be 90% automated once they found the trend for bots.

@i_Hub Thank you. I do hope it gets through to a few people. When most people say “IMC is doing nothing” they typically mean “IMC is not doing exactly what I think is best” though.

[bokunokan]

The reality is far from this.

Again, you throw number where they don’t exist.

One Person banning 10,000 Bots easily per week? If only this was close to reality. Sadly, you are very far from the truth.

Having worked in this line of work all I can say is this. You slow down botters, you don’t eliminate them. One Person is nowhere near going to delete 10,000 bots per week let alone 1,000 per week.

At best if one person delete 2 bots per hours of work, they met their quota.

If one person delete 100 Bots per week we consider it a success.

That’s how today’s industry work.

If one person would delete anywhere near 10,000 bots per week there would be zero bots in today’s games.

Study have shown that for a bot to become unprofitable they have to be taken care of within roughly 3 days of their creation.

In today’s market we have a 30 days ratio at best.

EDIT: I just want to add that I was being generous in all my post so far.

[UnLuckyCat]

If the ban response time is too quick, then botters can guess what got them banned and intentionally try obvious exploits on dummy accounts to see how fast they’re stopped.

But if the wave interval is too long, then they can make lots of uninterrupted profits with the most optimal setup they can manage that’s already known to be detectable. If they can farm silver and sell it off before getting banned, it makes no difference.

So megaphones are lv40+ and bots are banned every maintenance. Well, just get a couple obvious bots that are guaranteed to get banned every week and you’ll still have constant megaphone spam all weekend.

It does stop the long standing accounts that would be making the most money, and it introduces a lag time for new bot software to be fully implemented (deemed safe by botters) which gives devs time to make countermeasures, so that’s good. I just hope IMC is doing a good job of it.

[Vanic]

Well, like I said, you can check with other major developers/publishers to see how wrong you are. I very much said you can’t eliminate bots. If you could read, you would see this.

I’m not sure what awful company you worked for, but 100 bots per week is a major failure for any real company if that’s all they can possibly achieve. 2 bots per hour is hilarious. You could manually walk through the game and ban only the characters that are undeniably bots significantly faster than that. Even by the low standards of MMOs 10 years ago, that would be a joke.

[joaoalmeidarx]

Here some actions that can help manage the RMT/BOTs problems,

• IMC needs to sell their own silver/cash in game for real money, the biggest part of RMT Buyers will always prefer buy it legally (not need to wait 48 hours),

• Use one third party tools to block/log illegal softwares or modified clients, if you choose a serious one will help a lot, those tools have a lot of constantly updates, forcing the BOTs programmers to constantly update the BOTs softwares and increasing the price of it, and this also make some player to prefer not to risk their owns accounts.

• Change little things in gameplay that not affect honest players, like make the game only be viable for silver RMT after lv 120+ forcing some real quests to be done.

• And last, do some real manual work, if IMC managed to somehow ban 100 bots per day (reasonable amount), most of then in high level areas LV100+ (arde dagger, pardoner’s) probably will help.

As you can see, none of these actions individually solve all the problems, but joining all of them certainly will make the life of RMTs much more miserable.

What do you guys thing about it?

[Vanic]

I think we all need to wait until about a month after official launch to see anything happen. IMC has their hands incredibly full right now. I genuinely hope they don’t resort to 3rd party anti-cheat devices, as these programs are notorious for being buggy and difficult for the end-user, especially if said user uses antivirus software.