[Lets have a talk]A more efficient way to ban bots, hackers etc

[c2gaming]

ANYTHING left in the hands of players will be open to abuse. ANYTHING!

Create new accounts for new bots? Create new accounts to make bot reporters, instant abuse to a “community bot hunting initiative”.

Have a skill to test a player for botting? Have a group spam the skill on a boss hunt or a solo mobber potentially killing a real player.

Credit/debit registration? Not everyone who plays (will play) the game will have those (specially if the target market is made up of kids).

Look at the source of the problem? That problem is BUILT into the game.
Why bot?

• Easy xp and money, plain and simple.
  Why do you want easy xp and money?
• Because more (and to that effect “easy”) xp lets you access more of the game (maps are level based).
• Because features in the game are increasingly expensive (repair, upgrading, attributes, pots).
• Because gear is design to be replaced, and that costs even more money.
  Why do you want to access the games features?
• Because they let you play more efficiently. Repairs and pots keep you in the field. Upgrading and attributes makes you stronger.
  Why do you want to access more of the game?
• Because that is the point of the game. Apparently the journey is more important than the destination since there is no “end game” to speak off.
  Why do you want to replace your gear?
• Because the gear in the game follows the tiered gear design where gear gets stronger as their level requirement gets higher.

I could go on. Bottom line, the developers built in the reason people want to bot. Lets look at a version of tos where these built in reasons don’t exist.
There are no levels therefore no reason to want (or even HAVE) xp at all.
Why go out of town?

• Because I wanna explore the game. I wanna see the story. I mean really, look at how the quests are designed. You are basically always “the same level” as the quest your are taking. If you’re not (basically too low lv) you either get your ass handed to you or you can’t take the quest at all. If you are basically ALWAYS the same level as your quest, why even have the quests gated by level? (To keep you from blowing through content too fast - which btw is just bad design)
• Because I wanna fight monsters. This ties in to monsters having loot (not xp) and imma talk about that later.

NPC’s don’t buy your sht because they don’t have infinite money to buy your sht
How would you pay for services?

• NPC’s could give you repeatable quests.
• NPC’s could “hire” you for some odd jobs that need not be specified (that would require being offline fo x amount of time much like buy in shops and merchant classes) for money.

Gear is not tiered
Where do you get the sense of progression?

• You don’t. What you get is a sense of value for your gear.
• You could upgrade you gear. Let’s look at the concept of gear score where the higher the level requirement, the higher the gear score (GS for short). The monster you wanna kill is another 5 GS stronger than you so you get 5 more GS by getting better gear. Repeat. If instead of replacing your gear for 5 more GS you could upgrade your gear for 5 more GS. It could be a quest.
• You could modify your gear. Gems already do this but the system could be more robust. Spend potential for a magnified version of gem stats. It SHOULD be a +1 - 1 effect so that gear basically stays equal.

See, it can be done. The devs just chose the design that attractive to bots.

Now what do bots affect anyway?
1. Economy
This mainly pertains to inflation. So long as NPC’s have infinite money to buy your sh*t, this is what botting will mostly destroy.
2. Player:objective ratio
The more players are around, the less objectives (monster’s and quest objectives like “harvest this plant”) there are for everyone.

Since tos has built in reasons to bot, how do we make measures to either eliminate or mitigate their effects?
I would say “tax the sh*t out of everything”. Give every single item in the game a tax value (fixed value + % value). Don’t prevent trading, just make it so “expensive” that you only do it when you really really have to (and the least amount of times). And by expensive I mean in relation to how much money the character has. You wanna be the richest bot in tos? You can, but trading is going to cost you the most. You wanna break up your fortune with multiple bot accounts? You can, but at some point you will need to trade with your main account. If you need money from multiple accounts, the fixed value tax is gonna eat you alive.

How would you avoid this “tax problem”? Consume your money. Don’t trade, consume.
"What do you mean?"
Use NPC pots, reagents and repair. These things make money disappear. Trading with an alchemist for better pots just circulates money. Buying from an NPC means that money is GONE and it can’t be taxed.
"Why don’t I just convert all/most of my money to consumables?"
Items will still have a tax. So long as they exist, you will be taxed for them when you trade with other accounts. There is also the risk of not having enough money for the next upgrade should you reach the level requirement.

[maoyugm001]

Before talking about the method, let’s see why there are bots, and exactly, what are they farming for.
It is clear that they are MAKING MONEY through RMT. Although the Korean Server prohibited 1:1 trade between players, there are still many bots, for they still can make RMT possible though market system by selling some items at a specific high price.
Banning does make a difference, but as long as they can get profit, they won’t stop creating and sending bots into the game.
Consequently, no buy, no bots. The best way to protect the game from bots is to stop RMT.

[VnZzz]

i know, thats why i’ve said drill bots and not auto drill pets

[c2gaming]

Yeah sure. And I say again “Tax the sh*t out of that!”. The higher the amount they sell in the market, the bigger the amount they lose. Every time money changes hands a portion of that disappears. If someone can come up with a formula for an increasing amount of tax the higher the amount of money traded, then all the better. If botters decide to make smaller transactions you can trace that too.

Btw, “trade” is not limited to 1:1 since potential can track trades via market.

[Huenato]

Even if a moderator bans a bot, or staff, or anyone, it’ll just be remade.

I would pay once $10 ~ $15 bucks to play this game.
Once you have to pay once to play, I doubt cheaters will pay twice to use bots again.

[Mirarara]

The higher the tax, the more expensive the silvers can be sold though.

[nizidr]

I would pay once $10 ~ $15 bucks to play this game.Once you have to pay once to play, I doubt cheaters will pay twice to use bots again.

B2P has never stopped botters/RMTers and never will as long as there is profit. A fine example of that is GW2.

[c2gaming]

Hopefully to the point nobody will buy.

Another idea would be to just murder the economy. Make money untradable. Remove the market. Wanna trade? Trade in kind.

[Mirarara]

The economy is already murdered when the silver is so expensive to be traded. In game money is usually sold with the same or lower price than how much effort you need to earn it.

When the value of traded silver is high, it means that the effort to earn silver from trading activity is high, thus no one will be bothered to trade, resulting in a single player game.

[c2gaming]

So long as silver can be traded, the economy is alive. See, this is what happens if you choose a design that caters to bots but don’t have the power to prevent bots. IMC can catch them, but not prevent them.

If the result of such anti bot measures is a single player game then so be it.

A less drastic (but still drastic) measure would be to have fixed trade values for EVERYTHING. Have IMC dictate the value of everything in the game. There would still be trade and market but you don’t get to decide how much your things would sell for. This would fix RMT via market, but it does NOTHING to prevent it via 1:1.

[Mirarara]

Bot can actually be prevented if the dev is having the appropriate skills regardless of game design. Too bad they don’t. The community usually outsmarted them.

Also, any popular games that requires grinding effort will attract bots. I’m not sure if you know about Kancolle, it’s a browser game without RMT and there are still plenty of botter in it. It doesn’t even has interaction between players in game.

A true quote from my friend, an indie game developer who had so many hack/mod in his game (it’s pretty popular) and gave up on preventing it. “Why the hell would I be a game dev if I have the skill to fix security loophole?”

[c2gaming]

If there are plenty of botters, then there must be other reasons than RMT to bot. IMC either embraces the bots (develop with them in mind) or they take away the reasons to bot (can’t do that because they chose a design that “caters” to bots). Look at the case for tos. Let’s say IMC makes it “single player”. No trading with FFA party looting. There’s still botting for xp.

Here’s something to think about. What if they made money untradable? How would you “cheat” the system? I would propose to trade with pots. I get to decide how many pots my item would be worth. I could still use my money for other npc services (upgrading, repairing, buying pots for my own consumption). I won’t be able to buy money via RMT, but I could buy pots via RMT.

Basically, the system enabling RMT is trading. Take that away and no more RMT. We all know what that would do to tos though.

[nizidr]

What if they made money untradable? How would you “cheat” the system?

Then some item/consumable will become money equivalent. That works with stat potions in RotMG.

Anyway, trying to fight bots is like trying to cure symptoms instead of illness. As long as there are players that want to buy something (and thus creating demand for such services) there will be RMTers ready to provide it.

[Mirarara]

RMT is only a part of the botting’s reason. Most people bot without the intention to sell the money though.

[nizidr]

RMT is only a part of the botting’s reason. Most people bot without the intention to sell the money though.

What i was trying to tell is: as long as there is demand there will be offer. And ToS was designed to be grindy so trying to combat bots would prove to be an exhausting endeavor.

[tehtar]

This:

As long as there are players that want to buy something (and thus creating demand for such services) there will be RMTers ready to provide it.

And that:

as long as there is demand there will be offer.

As simple as that. If there are ppl willing to buy, there always be ppl willing to sell. It’s not really botters fault, the fault goes to those lazy players that can not just play the game like everyone else but instead they search easier/faster way to progress. But there is nothing we can do about it.

[Mirarara]

And this kind of laziness is what made the human progress this far (and the main reason you get to play MMORPG).

[nizidr]

[quote=“Mirarara, post:99, topic:126544, full:true”]
And this kind of laziness is what made the human progress this far (and the main reason you get to play MMORPG).
[/quote]The only “progress” that laziness brought is… remote controls for wide variety of home devices. Everything else was based on time/material efficiency, safety and entertainment.

[Mirarara]

Don’t forget the most important quality for a good programmer is laziness. lol.

[Snivs]

The higher the tax, the more expensive the silvers can be sold though

That’s the point, to make it harder to sell/buy silver.

Yeah sure. And I say again “Tax the sh*t out of that!”. The higher the amount they sell in the market, the bigger the amount they lose. Every time money changes hands a portion of that disappears. If someone can come up with a formula for an increasing amount of tax the higher the amount of money traded, then all the better. If botters decide to make smaller transactions you can trace that too.

Btw, “trade” is not limited to 1:1 since potential can track trades via market.

I already have proposed a formula for this:

Continuing the discussion from Preparing for a Healthy Economy in the International Server:

Preparing for a Healthy Economy in the International Server

From this previous topic, Noticing how expensive everything was in the Korean Cash shop made me worry about the game economy, not just the quantities of silver in the server, but actually the revenue that the game could generate in terms of real life currencies.

Well, My last haircut was roughly $3, I could have about 10 real life haircuts for the same amount a kTOS haircut costs.

Due to the current exchange rates, I’d have to pay ONE FULL DAY OF WORK for a Token or a ToS Haircut, and I have an salary that is somewhat average for professionals in their 20-30’s here in Mexico, so… The average 10-20’s wouldn’t be purchasing much, and quickly falling behind, not turning into a potential customer once they reach a more productive age.

I have rambled a lot about it… but now, I want to offer a couple suggestions that I believe would help the game be more successful in the west, therefore, I suggest IMC as the sole publisher of iToS:

• Drop the prices about 85% for haircuts, these are just too expensive. Think of sales volume. Some players like to change haircuts every now and then, some of them even do it recurrently given the right price, it’s a long run shot. Edit: Haircuts seem to come in as pieces of gear for a special slot, think wig collection!
• Remove EXP Boosters, these are detrimental for the Western F2P experience and a frustrated F2P player is less likely to ever spend and more likely to leave the game or not take it seriously at all.
• Drop the price of the VIP Token by 66%, I’m talking to about 10 USD, so more people can afford it, the more, the merrier; and the merrier, the more likely to spend more again, think of sales volume and people purchasing over and over.
• Replace the +3 Movement Speed buff from the VIP token in kOBT with an additional simultaneous attribute. The movement speed attribute makes any potential PvP unbalanced beetween Free and Token players, and 3 simultaneous attributes makes the token more attractive.

In the ingame economy, I think silver is pretty worthless and easy to come by, and when everybody can be rich, nobody is really rich, these are my suggestions:

• Make silver drops scale based on level difference, like experience, so, botters can’t just slow-farm silver low level mobs, this doesn’t address bots farming loot.
• Make instanced dungeons reward silver, an incentive to run dungeons in a daily basis.
• Create daily quests that reward silver, an alternative to grinding for money in endgame.
• Make Tax a more complex and iterative formula, like this:
  – Base tax = 0.80% = 0.08
  – Define multiple silver limits, each 10k, 20k, 30k… up to 100k, 200k, 300k… each 100k up to 1m, each 1m, 2m, 3m… up to 10m, each 10m, 20m, 30m … up to 100m, 100m, 200m, 300m … up to 1000m and so on.
  – For each limit that a sale suprasses, add an iteration for the tax to be calculated with it.
  – So your tax formula becomes: (1-BASE_TAX)^(1+ITERATIONS) (This is the iterativity I’m talking about).
  – Your tax is recalculated every time you get raw income (market sales, npc sales, silver from trades), based on the total amount of income you’ve earned from previous sales/trades that day. This makes it so that the more you sell/trade during the same day, the more tax % you actually have to pay, even if you sell bunches of cheap items.
  – Your total income tax is reset periodically, maybe daily, weekly or during maintenances.
  – This system emphasizes on avoiding players from getting extremely rich, while helping players with less who handle less money (mostly during the earlier levels), pay a lot less taxes than rich players.
  Example:
• Your base tax: 0.8% (it does seem low, but it scales up).
• You sell an item for 50k, you have 1 base iteration and suprased 5 limits so far (10k,20k,30k,40k and 50k), so you’re getting 6 iteratinons. Your tax is
  1-(1-0.8%)^(6 iterations) = 1-0.92^6 = 0.0471 = 4.71%
  Your taxes will be 4.71%, so your item will be charged for it:
  50,000 - 4.71% = 50,000 - 2355 = 47,645.
• In this same scenario, you sell another item for 100k, accodring to this system, you have already sold 47,645, so your total income will be 147,645 you have 1 base iteration + 10 iterations (10k-100k, the next iteration not being until 200k), meaning you’re getting 11 iterations, your tax is
  1-(1-0.8%)^(11 iterations) = 1-0.92^11 = 0.0846 = 8.46%
  Your taxes will be 8.46%, so your total income will be charged for it:
  147,645*8.46%=12,491.
  But you’ve already paid 2,355, so only 12,491-2,355 = 10,136 are applicable taxes, meaning you will earn 100,000-10,136=89,864, by making these calculations, you pay the same when you sell a single item for 150k, or several items for 150k in the same period (day/week/maintenance).
• Daily Income should tracked account-wide.
• Any amount of Silvers spent with an NPC should be sustracted from your daily income, so the more silvers you spend with NPCs, the less taxes you have to pay in your future transactions with other players.
• I’ve made an estimation spreadsheet, so you could try fiddling with the base tax, daily income and sales amount.
• Notice that the higher amounts of silver you recieve in a small period of time, the higher the taxes you will be charged, towards 900m, you are charged the following (when base tax is 0.8%: you get charged 30.89% which I consider fair for earning that large sum in such a short time period, while, when base tax is 2%, you get chraged 60.89% for the same quantity, which I consider way too abusive).

Please, let me know what you think about my ideas, Like if you want to let IMC know we want a healthy economy both for the company and the server.

Edit: an amount was wrong in the example calculation.
Edit: Corrected some percentages I wrote wrong.

It is a complex formula, and a somewhat complex implementation compared to what we have seen so far, but I’m very positive it would work on keeping the riches distributed more evenly between players.

The main point is to tax the amount of silvers you earn as a whole, instead of a per-transaction tax.