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Bots Bots and More Bots
krahct
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users Posts: 0 Arc User
Cryptic, you really need to address the bot problem in dominations. Tonight I experienced three consecutive matches with two plus bots on my team.
How do I know they're bots; well they run the exact same path after rezzing at the fire, one even kept dropping in and running circles into the wall. Some are a bit more advanced and will actually attack nearby enemy players, heck I even watched from the campfire as one bot even killed an actively playing player. I lol'd that was kind of funny actually.
Seriously though, this game is going live?...with the bot problem as rampant as it is? I have to believe your programmers are somewhat knowledgeable about how to detect bot programs. Do you not even care about this problem, or is PVP so low on the totem pole of issues that it will likely never get addressed?
How do I know they're bots; well they run the exact same path after rezzing at the fire, one even kept dropping in and running circles into the wall. Some are a bit more advanced and will actually attack nearby enemy players, heck I even watched from the campfire as one bot even killed an actively playing player. I lol'd that was kind of funny actually.
Seriously though, this game is going live?...with the bot problem as rampant as it is? I have to believe your programmers are somewhat knowledgeable about how to detect bot programs. Do you not even care about this problem, or is PVP so low on the totem pole of issues that it will likely never get addressed?
"I never make mistakes, I once thought I did but I was wrong"
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But the issue isn't being ignored. It's just nothing near as trivial as any player without programming experience realizes. If games which had bots within them didn't go live they would never go live.
It's an industry wide battle that has no easy solution. It plagues independent MMO's as well as the massive power-house MMO's. It's a fight Cryptic takes seriously and is going to continue to fight but the problems will not vanish overnight and frankly never will completely.
The better protection against bots any company makes the more advanced and complex to detect the bots become.
PvP gear=Bound to account and add a way to transfer stuff between characters (account bank), no reason to lower rewards and such when all you have to do is that, so they can't farm the sets to sell for AD or the gold.
"There's no reason to PvP Now!!!" and such.
Cryptic even decided to do it last week. Read the responses to that suggestion in this thread. Just look for the ones complaining about how PvP would no longer provide any worthwhile rewards.
Here's some advice I got when I took programming courses in college:
The simpler the idea the worse it is.
The bots and such are a plague MOSTLY pre-60.
After 60 i VERY RARELY see bots.
Just giving an observation.
U as a player think thers bots in everyway of the game correct!? lol u are just mad cuz u cant win in a PVP Come-on dude, the next thing your gonna say is OMG that guy is not pvping, he's just kicking back lol , Get real stop Crying man ..if u want a Vid i'll give u one ,your just mad cuz u cant win!!!
Occam's Razor makes the cutting clean.
A good start however is active 24/7 GMs/DMs (paid or volunteer) that deal aggressive suspensions on this behavior,coupled with an 24/7 experienced customer service team to deal with each or any appeal (if appealed at all,big time botters won't appeal,they'll make new accounts) on an individual basis.
While this won't eliminate bot/multibox farmers completely,it certainly does deter a good portion of them,sadly free to play accounts makes it less hassle to lose an account on a monetary basis.
While automation of combating bots/multibox has come a fair way,it will always need the backing of live DMs and vice versa.
Take for example Guild Wars 2.In an hours DMing work,it could have been quite reasonable to expect to ban/suspend a thousand bots by hand with little effort (by one DM alone) and have anyone willing to appeal their cause contact support.Instead Anet netted only 3k a month and made little difference to the bot numbers.
It will always be the case that without feet on the ground to combat the adaption of bots that automation by itself is always doomed to fail and the results of failure are nerfs to loot/xp/content to legitimate players and of coarse the load on servers which need to be maintained.
Just a suggestion..... =P
This is crazy, since when did pvpers need incentive to pvp? I swear pvpers got soft over the decade.
In fact the number one issue games face with volunteer moderating is skirting around the real world laws which are put in place to prevent abusing employees. There are actually sections of law which define the difference between what a volunteer can and can't do and such.
You guys may not realize it but there are active GM's. They're just so busy dealing with the actual issues they don't often get to make their presence known which is something which really frustrates them.
Before Pinpointerror and Sominator became the CM's of the Neverwinter Community the moderators actually had the pleasure of working with the Lead GM for Neverwinter, melanderi. She used to be quite active on the forums but since launch she hasn't even posted here which is something she frequently did both on and off duty even after she went back to her GM Duties.
And no matter how you cut it active GM's have never and will never be enough to handle bots on their own. Software is the only reliable means to prevent botting without blowing the entire budget on GM staff. That doesn't mean GM's can't and don't deal with cases they see but there's a lot of under the hood work which is much more effective.
I really can't say it enough, there is no simple solution.
No matter how much anybody would like there to be there isn't which is why bots plague the entire industry. Not one MMO doesn't spend large amounts of its resources preventing, detecting, and banning bots. Not a single MMO company is able to sit back and say 'well we have botting under control.'
That just shows you did not even bother to read this thread before posting.
I'm not sure if there's already a way to do this in-game, but allow people to report potential bots on forums with enough proof, a high-quality video or something. I haven't even tried it in-game because it's simply too sluggish for my taste for anything other than playing the game nor have I seen it being any effective.
Nor will you ever. Punishments are private between the company and the punished. It's actually mandatory for games to keep account issues, including punishments, private.
And for the same reason, plus it's just bad form that draw flame responses, we do not permit naming and shaming on the forums. The forums are not and never will be a way which reports can be handled. However you can contact support and include any proof you have.
But just because you don't see big news articles stating they banned ambisinisterr, aandrethegiant and zebular for botting and using racial slurs doesn't mean that it doesn't happen.
Man I forgot there is a pvp even.
GW might say has a pvp, WoW has a pvp, but this rofl.
Easy...
The Questions has to change every day though. China farmer? hoho... kiddies? hoho
You are wrong... I buy stuff from the Zen store with Money (not converted AD).. But I'm totally against Char and account binding.
Its ok for me if you bind the looted stuff, but not the one I have bought with money.
Im not giving away my pink pvp gear
But surely isn't that the issue? You're suggesting how difficult it is tracking bots via software methods, yet a human player can spot them easily within a PVP match. What is often difficult to trace via the client software and methods is so obvious to detect after a few moments of playing the match as a real player.
The reason why such a thing plagues the industry is because most MMORPGS don't employ enough GMs to do the job properly (due to financial constraints). I'm sure there is a break-even point where many companies feel the investment in more GMs isn't worth the effort and I imagine that break-even point is even lower in F2P games such as Neverwinter.
I'd suggest that the easiest method is to remove the incentive for bots in the first instance, which should see them vanish almost overnight. If, as you are suggesting, that would anger the player community then someone needs to make the decision which one they would rather have.
As it stands now; BOTS + AFK players make PVP worthless in most matches.
"Hah! You are doomed! You're only armed with that pathetic excuse for a musical instrument!!!" *the Savage Beast moments before Lonnehart the Bard used music to soothe him... then beat him to death with his Fat Lute*
Yes... They will...
The only method to stop bots from recognition is to make it completely random, which is very hard to do. Take CAPTCHAs for example... Some Bots are able to read them better than humans can do. If you use a database or a bunch of predefined words, numbers, pictures or whatever, Bots will recognize them all; sooner or later. That's why it has to be unique for the current day. That will only work for a period of time. Programmers will soon get an idea to recognize such random unique things also. Then again you will have the bot the problem.
There is no final-cure for this problem. Eve online for example has introduced a flagging system for bots. But that system will not work on a Free to play MMO, because you have no real loss like the monthly fee. Bots can simply create a new account.
The best thing you can do in Neverwinter against bots is to lesser the reward on loss... Like no Glory for the losing party or less reward for dying too much. Or something else.
So they are able to see each symbol, even though they're extremely faded on a black shield background to make them look nearly the same? And even if you rotate them randomly and replace them every so often?
I was thinking in the same way that currency is protected. Change it every few years and add in minute details that are hard to spot by nearly everyone but the ones with the sharpest eyes...
"Hah! You are doomed! You're only armed with that pathetic excuse for a musical instrument!!!" *the Savage Beast moments before Lonnehart the Bard used music to soothe him... then beat him to death with his Fat Lute*
Believe me.. If its a static picture, even if you rotate and recolor it.. You can still recognize it via software... What would be very hard to recognize are stretched and twirled images... But that has to be done server side.. not client side.. If its done client side, I could tamper with the memory and find out how it was twirled and stretched
That could be the way to go then. I was thinking of a system where you'd create a window where you pick a sequence of images. Upon enter PvP and each time you die the "keyboard" would then show up and if you solve it wrong too many times you're kicked out of the match and are replaced with someone who's been waiting in queue.
"Hah! You are doomed! You're only armed with that pathetic excuse for a musical instrument!!!" *the Savage Beast moments before Lonnehart the Bard used music to soothe him... then beat him to death with his Fat Lute*
How about instituting a Voight-Kampff test at the beginning of every play session / PvP encounter? :P