Basically this will not stop the bots, but it will add some other tasks to IMC to deal with those who abuse of the report feature.
Bots are already getting detected server side and they get reported by players. So this system would probably not add much to the already existing features. It would only stop them right away from farming silvers instead of waiting a few days for the enxt ban wave.
It will also add a lot of legit players in the list of players to check.
And it will annoy to crap of out everybody.
The only 100% working way to stop the gold sellers is to stop buying from them, giving them your credit card number, allowing them to buy more accounts with your money, to sell more gold, to steal more credit cards, etc.
Three things that will kill your idea right off the bat.
1.) IMC and the Tree of Savior Developers are two different people.
(Iâm sure youâre totally aware of that, you seem educated.)
So the two of them would have to work together and plan this out. A lot of devs will treat a game like their baby and are resistant to change. Not all. But some honestly donât want publishers to mess with their game, even if itâs great ideas. I have no idea how open to change the devs are.
2.) If a change happens to the original version (in our case the KToS) most likely it will happen to the other versions as well. Mostly likely they make changes and add to the original and most of it will be patched to every other their version (there are rare cases this doesnât happen.)However, if a non original wants to make a change that is expected to only affect the current version, (not sure if your intentions are to make it available on all versions or just ours, sorry! Lol) it has to be looked at by all versions. Again and there are rare cases but I like speaking about majority. Very rarely rarely will a version have itâs own special feature. So itâs almost basically an all or nothing feature.
3.) And again priorities. I have no idea what Tree of Savior (dev or publisher) has on their to-do-list. It would be cool to see their kind off back inner workings, haha.
Normally they have their next few months to years planned out on what to develop.
Even if this would be brought to their attention, I have no idea how long it would sit on the back burner before actually worked on. Most MMORPGs love a quick fix, compared to a long fix that could yield possibly the same result.
I didnât get into the mechanics yet. If youâd like that we can go deeper!
I brought snorkels.
Thats right >.> i totally forgot that they arnt the devs.
Mind you it seems that these guys are more open to ideas then a lotttt of korean devs are and allow more changes but i seriously doubt they would ever make this.
Some let them make their own events and items and such but this type of thing wouldnât fly simply because it would just add much more work for them for very little if any change.
So IMC as a developer are also publishing their own game?
To be honest if thatâs true thatâs also rare since I donât think any of the developers speak english as a primary. Again I could be wrong. ;3
How often do developers publish games? As far as Iâve seen not often. I could be wrong but it seems really weird xâD
Ha! Youâre right. I like you. Alright. Iâll put my dunce hat on.
They have a number of publishers for certain regions. For our version they are indeed self published through steam. I know dude, its really rareâŚour servers are EXTREMELY lucky not to have the dark shadow of nexon looming overhead, all things considered.
I was in a CBT when the publisher quit half way through and the developer stepped in.
The EA launch was so abysmal it had like a rating of 3 on steam from thousands of players. Now it has about an 8 and is near the top of Steams most popular f2p shooters.
Damn good game but the worst CBT Iâve ever been through and that includes WoT.
âEDIT: If it was me and I got wrongfully sent to BDA and the names of the 6 were up there. Screen shot 6 names, 2mins BDA, a new 6 enemy guild members does same thing, Screen shot another 6 names, use BDA token to leave BDA. Go make a support ticket and attach 2 screenshots with 12 names, wait for IMC to investigate and punish 12 players. All this will take around 5mins of your time (+time it takes for IMC to review them - which shouldnt take long because you probably donât have a history of being sent to BDA) and you now have 12 less people to âdramaâ with and fight against in the next guild war.â This is not viable at all. You overestimates IMC and underestimated players, and this â5 minutesâ is a lie⌠i will never do this HUGE task to send a ticketâŚ
There is a pokemon/tibia game (XPG) that there is no bots, cos the staff pays a salary for some GMS to stay online 24/7 and if u send a in-game ticket they literally apears in front of u, this is the only and aceptable thing to do.
The point is that itâll be a very short lived solution, which doesnât justify the costs involved.
Like I said, look up Runescape bots. The premium, closed source with private scripts ones. They could work around visual, pathing and NPC interaction challenges, many very similar to what you suggest. In a game like Tree of Savior where the client, its memory and its communication to the server are even more prone to tampering, itâs even easier to write scripts to detect and bypass this kind of challenge. In the end you just waste time and money to implement something that doesnât stop or even slow down bots after the first week, but still annoy legit players for no reason. Bad strategy, and if you do some quick research youâll notice most companies who have to deal with bots preferred to move on to behavior-based detection aided by a player report system, rather than pseudo-Turing testing them.
Firstly, even if I presented no solution, thatâd not make yours any better.
But in fact I do have an opinion that, like I said, the best strategy would be to continue investing in and improving automatic behavior-based detection aided by player reports to make it more accurate (which is what theyâre doing right now), and also very importantly: the early game should never allow a player (or a hundred of them) to impact a gameâs virtual economy. Itâs pointless to continue to ban bots every 24 hours if they manage to make millions of silver within those 24 hours. Thatâs just poor design in a game they already knew would be flooded with bots. If bots are canât produce any relevant amount of virtual goods within x hours and they all get banned within x hours, you donât have a botting problem in your game.
Also regarding captcha, no matter how hard you make it, itâs easily bypassable. Thatâs because bots who need to solve it wonât try to read it, but rather will relay the image to a server that will crowd source the solution (i.e.: have hundreds if not thousands of real humans constantly solving them) and then relay the solution back to the bot. Itâs extremely hard to prevent more than temporarily.
