Tree of Savior Forum

Suggestion: Countering Continuous Botting

Suggestions
#1

Hey guys, first post here. I just got this idea from the top of my head on how to counter botting. It doesn’t solve the problem but it punishes botters in a way.

  1. Make item pick not only automatic but you don’t have to “walk over the item to pick it up”. This will ensure bots get all the items the moment the items drop. AND the weight that comes with them.

  2. When weight reaches 100%, make players unable to attack, has ZERO stamina (so that they cannot run, just walk very slowly), and they cannot use teleport scrolls, goddess statues, quest finish teleport and any teleport function whatsoever and they also WILL NOT GAIN EXP; all unless they drop their items to be less than 100% weight.

  3. [Obsolete. Point 1 will nullify this Point] Make it so that players can still pick up items at 100% weight. With this, overextending botters will gather so much weight it’ll take time to sell the items or drop them.

  4. Occasionaly makes monsters drop a miscellaneous item with high weight, especially in maps near towns.

Got ideas 2 and 3 from Skyrim. WOOT!

2 Likes
[Klaipeda server] Guy macroing/botting
#2

Sounds okay for me

That’s a little extreme, but I guess I can agree with the walking slowly part. Maybe reduce movement speed by 75% or something so that people actually have to manage their inventory weight to not reach max. But having zero stamina and gaining no exp is a bit extreme for just having "overweight inventory. It’d be easier if it just reduced the player’s attack speed or something so that non-botters can last hit the monster more easily to “steal” it from the botter.

It’d be easier to just make it so that having an inventory weight go over the max decrease your movement speed by 75% and attack speed by 25%. Then if you reach over 150% of what you can currently carry you cannot move anymore and the attack speed debuff turns to 50% from 25%. This is slightly better because the point of the few botters is to collect things to sell or something. So it’d be easier to have the debuffs between 100-150% inventory weight, and then maybe they cannot pick up anything at all after 150%. Now if bots have 50% reduced attack speed, it’ll be easier for non-botters to last hit the monsters as well.

Plus I think the main point the Devs had in mind for inventory weight is to have a cap on the amount of things you can carry in the first place, which does stop “item collecting” bots. But there isn’t and probably never will be a clear way to stop afk auto attacking, but the attack speed debuff I suggested should help slightly for that.

That would kind of suck for us non-botters, unless those items can be sold for a good amount or something.

#3

That’s a little extreme, but I guess I can agree with the walking slowly part. Maybe reduce movement speed by 75% or something so that people actually have to manage their inventory weight to not reach max. But having zero stamina and gaining no exp is a bit extreme for just having "overweight inventory. It’d be easier if it just reduced the player’s attack speed or something so that non-botters can last hit the monster more easily to “steal” it from the botter.

The walking slowly is already there, you will walk slowly once you reach 100% regardless of stamina. Zero exp and inability to attack is non-effective if you’re a non botter. You will drop items when you hit 100% and go back to town and sell your items. You will manage your item weight because you are not a botter. It only hurts botters who keep farming. Reducing attack speed doesn’t help, botters can still attack and not everyone will always be there to steal last hits.

Plus I think the main point the Devs had in mind for inventory weight is to have a cap on the amount of things you can carry in the first place, which does stop “item collecting” bots. But there isn’t and probably never will be a clear way to stop afk auto attacking, but the attack speed debuff I suggested should help slightly for that.

Understood. Point 3 is now obsolete. I still disagree with the debuffs and stand for my applications in Point 2.

That would kind of suck for us non-botters, unless those items can be sold for a good amount or something.

I agree that this is a hassle, but if you’re a non-botter, you can manually drop the item from time to time. The item should not be able to be sold.

#4

Can’t edit post because I always get error.

New Notes:
Point 3 in OP is obsolete.

The not being able to attack and use skills was from the old Ragnarok Online.

1 Like
#5

I don’t think this would work since I believe that BOTS should have some features to counter this e.g. weight limit or pickup items like etc. I don’t know for sure because I hate bot since iRO era lol.

Still, in my opinion It shouldn’t be that difficult for Bot’s programmer to add that featuers :confused:

but who knows. nice works!! :wink:

PS. I believe that most work should be done on server side to eliminate this issue but it seems they don’t have time to take a look at it due to other game bugs :stuck_out_tongue:

#6

Agreed. This is why I originally suggested Point 3 and Point 4. It was a bit more elaborate that what I typed, though, so I made it simpler. Botting programs can be programmed to drop items automatically, so it might be useless, but it can hold back simple botting programs. Thanks.

#7

You have nice ideas that could be worked on by the IMC game staff. I, as a ordinary non-bot player, am always aware of my carry weight.

I guess it’s because of playing plenty of RPGs, including RO. If you’re heavy you’ll be dead quick.

#8

Great thing the stamina part, the character already walks slowly when with 100% weight, plus botters does not need it to farm.

So, monsters would drop Quarrel Shooter’s stones?

#9

By the time botting exist in the game, I don’t think any of your suggestion will bother them at all (anything that human can do without much thought, can be done by bot). What your suggestion will do is only to make things troublesome for non botter.

#10

Just Ro-like :

+90% overweight limit : Can’t attack and skill. / No recover Hp/SP
It’s enough.

#11

Bots in RO were so sophisticated that they would go to town, sell off all the crappy items and then go back to botting. Part of this was thanks to the source of the game being cracked very early in the history of the game which resulted in eAthena servers and such.

I don’t think I have seen a true ‘bot’ yet for this game, as I don’t consider auto-attack AFK to be botting just an exploit of the game’s mechanics. Setting up a macro or putting a wrench to my controller or keyboard so I spam auto-attack is not really botting.

Also I would not want auto-attackers to automatically collect items, I have gotten some rare stuff just by collecting the good items they leave on the floor :wink:

#12

There are always bots, bot dev are smart, there is no really fix of this matter.
but if imc could stop afk AA exploit because :

  • Everyone can do it, not just 1% of real bot
  • It’s not roleplayed (so ugly to see dumbass camping AA)
  • Random spawn for Miniboss (giant kepa), so AA or bots must move their fat ass and run and burn calories. You have also a chance to find the mini boss before them.
  • Fighting against AA afk should reduced servers lags.
#13

A person I know uses a 10 cent coin to make the Z key be stuck pressed.

#14

Some guys in this forum really need to start distinguishing those from each other:

  • AFK-autoattacking ppl (e.g. those with a stone on their ‘z’ button while sleeping)
  • actual botters (e.g. those with a programm that “plays” their character while they’re sleeping)
  • actual hackers (e.g. those who hack the database/servers to create or dupe items)

Actual Bots are not hindered by any restrictions, they will just get a feature to drop any loot worth less than e.g. 250 silver, or they could learn how to sell all loot at the npc and even repair their equip.

I think some suggestions against afk-guys that were made here make sense but could also affect legit players. The most interesting suggestion to me is something like getting heavy items dropped. This should only happen if you’re afk for a certain time, and only if you are actually holding down an attack-related button. IMHO any other form of actual botting needs to be dealt with in other ways; such as client protection software and anti-bot protocols on the server.

1 Like
#15

Any misc/unusable item really, with very heavy weight. Make custom items just for that. I’m not sure how much Quarrel Shooter stones weigh.

This is why I said put zero stamina and no TP skill/item use. Bots would have to walk slowly back to town. I initially also suggested that items should weigh heavier the nearer you are to town because bots need less steps to get back to town, but that could adversely affect new players.

Agreed, Initially I explained overly long on the items with high weight thing, such as generating random item ID, hiding the weight value yada yada yada, but figured it’s too much of a hassle to code so I just simplified it.

#16

Wouldn’t something as simple as using the weapon durability work? Just make it so that once a durability of a weapon reaches zero, it is automatically unequipped. All that’s left is to make sure we cant auto attack without a weapon equipped.

Granted, it’s not a sure fix but I’ve heard that auto attacking, even if you hit nothing still reduces a weapon’s durability. So if that is true (which I’m not 100% sure about) and if botters are constantly auto attacking then the durability should go down fast enough that for the most part, they’ll be standing there doing nothing.

Best thing I can think of anyways.

#17

Eh… This is not Terraria.
If remove the ability of attacking without a weapon, players who lose their weapons will be in real trouble.

#18

I don’t think you can hide that information from a program that can access the games RAM. You need anything to allow legit players to know which item they should throw away, and any bot could figure that out. Also, when programming the bot, it would be a no-brainer to only let the bot keep known items.

So after all, you would need a server-sided solution to this, and once we agreed on that, we don’t need some stuff like heavy items…

#19

One thing that could help fighting botters: Make normal monsters only drop mundane items that sells for little on the market. And make Strong Monsters - such as the World Bosses - have complex mechanics. That way, the market will be lead by people that actually made a true effort to kill a really hard monster whilst cooperating in a party. And/or import that complexity to monsters in the game. When every monster has little A.I, it gets easier to configure bots to kill them.

#20

That would make grinding for items worthless. All equipments are worth a lot in this game, and the NPC equips are weak compared to dropped equipments. Most bots I’ve seen is at Red Kepa, which can be considered a map boss rather than normal monster.