How to Really Fight the Bots

tripsofthrymr · September 2015

You have volunteer Community Moderators already.

Identify volunteer Game Masters, and empower them to ban bots. I'm sure the CM's can help identify honest, non-exploiting players to nominate as fair GMs.

If three Game Masters tag an account as a bot, issue an automatic 3 day ban. If ten Game Masters tag an account as a bot, issue an automatic permanent ban.

A few hours of volunteer GM's standing in PE and tagging

\/\/\/.I*am*A**Gold**$eller.com

and a few hours of standing outside hot spots like Ghost Stories and Blackdagger Ruins

would put quite the dent in the ability of bots to generate RP for sale, and to sell those ill-gotten goods. While bots have automation and numbers on their side, it takes far longer to level up enough to begin exploiting than to right-click, mark as bot.

Please, show us that you actually are interested in the bot problem.

dandare · September 2015

This proposition is something I of yet did not think about. Sad thing is that many of players which would make good Volunteer Game Masters actually just quit.

The experienced player I believe would be able to issue a good and much more daunting fight against bots or nearly eliminate problem. Especially since no 3 days ban would hurt anyone as change we're facing even if it hit in 'friendly fire' some good player by accident. But I still have my doubts about whole issue as with time more and more things convince me that bots were just used as scapegoats

tripsofthrymr · September 2015

I like your signature line :-)

dufisto · September 2015

simple fix warn anyone anyone who loots the same skill node more than 3 times in a 15 minute window. second offence 24 hour ban, 3rd offence, perm ban.
there's 90% of your bots gone.

and all you would need is a simple log parser.

tripsofthrymr · September 2015

dufisto said:
simple fix warn anyone anyone who loots the same skill node more than 3 times in a 15 minute window. second offence 24 hour ban, 3rd offence, perm ban.
there's 90% of your bots gone.

It's not actually the same exact skill node. They take quite some time to respawn for a given instance. Unfortunately bots will learn and evolve. They will rotate accounts through the various available skill nodes so as to avoid the ban.

Stopping them without advanced machine learning or banning innocent people requires a human touch.

kreatyve · September 2015

I like this idea, though it would need a few changes. I don't think that the players should have banning powers. More along the lines of "Mute and flag for customer service" powers might be better.

Us moderators can't even ban people on the forums. Andy has to do that.

kvet · September 2015

I proposed this many times over the years - Cryptic has to care about the quality of the game and, more importantly, whether players enjoy their games in order to implement this sort of feature. They don't seem to care about either... it's a great idea though.

dandare · September 2015

kreatyve said:
I like this idea, though it would need a few changes. I don't think that the players should have banning powers. More along the lines of "Mute and flag for customer service" powers might be better.

Us moderators can't even ban people on the forums. Andy has to do that.

I imagine it would require an additional wages to be put since customer service seems busy as it is, right?

Well, still it would be maybe good idea. It solves problem of many possible player candidates already being outside the game and the paid employee is always more controlled in terms of how much potential damage he can do. Volunteers are more free lance and main team never gets as much tools of control over them as on fellow worker.

Good to see actually some Mod response to the one of numerous ideas which appeared through forum even before patch was issued

instynctive · September 2015

d21e4 said:
Good to see actually some Mod response to the one of numerous ideas which appeared through forum even before patch was issued

We've got a couple of great new mods in @kreatyve and @ironzerg79.

walk2k · September 2015

kvet said:
I proposed this many times over the years - Cryptic has to care about the quality of the game and, more importantly, whether players enjoy their games in order to implement this sort of feature. They don't seem to care about either... it's a great idea though.

actually all they need to do is ban all accounts that have more than 2-3 stacks of 99 enchants on the AH and then make enchants from skill nodes BOP

kreatyve · September 2015

instynctive said:

d21e4 said:
Good to see actually some Mod response to the one of numerous ideas which appeared through forum even before patch was issued
We've got a couple of great new mods in @kreatyve and @ironzerg79.

Awww, thank you!

It's not always an easy job, but I do try my best to be fair.

Unknown · September 2015

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ghoulz66 · September 2015

They left sharandar and moved to ghost stories...

Getting em out of sharandar toke months of constant reporting. The hell do they do up there that's keeping them so busy? It's only like a 5 minute fix. Find the hole in there and plug it up. No more botters flooding there...

nimandiir · September 2015

The "bots" are scape goats, pure and simple. They want people to buy AD.

juleadream · September 2015

Simplest solution: skill nodes (and treasure chests) respawn in a random spot within, say, 15 feet of its "main" respawn point. Won't affect players too much, as they will still be in the same general area we are used to them being, but a lot harder for bots to be able to locate, since they are not in the exact same spot each time.

tripsofthrymr · September 2015

kreatyve said:
I like this idea, though it would need a few changes. I don't think that the players should have banning powers. More along the lines of "Mute and flag for customer service" powers might be better.

Us moderators can't even ban people on the forums. Andy has to do that.

I'm all in favor of Cryptic staff banning the bots. It just seems that they, well, don't. If Customer Service would just camp out at the gate to Ghost Stories, they could mass-ban dozens of bots. Same for the beginning of Blackdagger Ruins, where the bots are apparently leveling up.

Giving a player the ability to single-handedly ban a player is rife for abuse, no doubt. That's why I suggested the need for substantial consensus before a ban is triggered. A banned player could certainly appeal the ban to customer service. The idea would only work if volunteer GM's are carefully selected (prominent members of NW_Legit_Community is one good place to start).

If the idea is implemented as "volunteer GMs can flag accounts, and customer service will actually follow up and ban as appropriate" it would be a big win.

If banning is triggered by having multiple, trusted members of the community agree to the ban, I think it would work just fine as well.

tripsofthrymr · September 2015

juleadream said:
Simplest solution: skill nodes (and treasure chests) respawn in a random spot within, say, 15 feet of its "main" respawn point. Won't affect players too much, as they will still be in the same general area we are used to them being, but a lot harder for bots to be able to locate, since they are not in the exact same spot each time.

Bots have the patience to do a grid search for the skill node.

ghoulz66 · September 2015

Maybe you can poke Strum with a stick enough times that he starts to poke his superiors with a stick.

regenerde · September 2015

tripsofthrymr said:

juleadream said:
Simplest solution: skill nodes (and treasure chests) respawn in a random spot within, say, 15 feet of its "main" respawn point. Won't affect players too much, as they will still be in the same general area we are used to them being, but a lot harder for bots to be able to locate, since they are not in the exact same spot each time.
Bots have the patience to do a grid search for the skill node.

And they may even find a way to telport beneath the map and still farm those skill nodes without getting attacked by any guards/npcs around.

Unknown · September 2015

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mentinmindmaker · September 2015

What it comes down to is it should not be difficult to identify and ban botting accounts if you extract sufficient log data from the game.

Cryptic seems to just not be interested - that is the core of the problem.

fdsakhfduewhfiuf · September 2015

I hope this will never happen. Giving someone power always leads to abuse - sooner or later.

Stopping bots is simple btw. Just remove the auction house ;-)

dwarf75 · September 2015

Lol company can just recruit 3 GM with 8 hours shift so there can be 7/24 GM in game it costs just 3k usd monthly. and bot problem will be over but the problem is bots are the excuse of them to do whatever they want

suxip01111 · September 2015

In another MMO, I noticed a lot of bots spawning around mining nodes out in the world, they would use level 1 chars and would often be in high level zones. So I would pull large mobs with powerful AoE attacks over to the nodes and tank them there, then when a bot spawned-in it would get killed by the mobs almost instantly. I spent hours doing this, it was a lot of fun.

I tried doing the same in this game (in Neverdeath), a few of the nearby mobs have AoE attacks, but obviously aren't powerful enough to kill the higher level botters. Also many of the botters there have companions enabled, so the mobs end up dying to those. But I did notice that it seemed to break/confuse the macro on a couple of the bots from time to time.

If Cryptic were to adjust companions so that they won't attack a mob until the player attacks it first, it could make this little trick possible. Obviously though, botters are smart and would think of a workaround soon enough, also this relies on players doing the policing so it isn't ideal. Still fun though.

tripsofthrymr · September 2015

suxip01111 said:
In another MMO, I noticed a lot of bots spawning around mining nodes out in the world, they would use level 1 chars and would often be in high level zones. So I would pull large mobs with powerful AoE attacks over to the nodes and tank them there, then when a bot spawned-in it would get killed by the mobs almost instantly. I spent hours doing this, it was a lot of fun.

Sounds repetitive. Why didn't you write a bot for that? :-) A bot-killer-bot.

Unknown · September 2015

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theycallmetomu · September 2015

What's "account accesses any instance more than 2 times a minute" mean in this context? What precise behavior are we targeting?

Unknown · September 2015

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theycallmetomu · September 2015

Okay, so this specifically targets those bots that farm r4s from skill nodes?

tripsofthrymr · September 2015

theycallmetomu said:
What's "account accesses any instance more than 2 times a minute" mean in this context? What precise behavior are we targeting?

It is targeting this behavior.

Unknown · September 2015

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How to Really Fight the Bots

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