I think I have a good idea to stop Spambots in Neverwinter or at least to slow them down a lot.
Characters can only write in chats if they reach level 10. They can only level up via quests which mean you implement an IF-Command that player below level 10 can’t earn XP from killing monsters and increase a bit of the XP reward of the quests to compensate the loss of the XP from Monsters in addition player below level 10 doesn’t get Bonus XP from double XP Events.
Then you implement in one of the quests a random trigger riddle to open a door. For example you make a field of 3x3 stone plates and simply say: if a player pushes all three stone plates with the lion head on it the door opens. In a small bag is a short description for players which say: The Lion leads the way.
The spawn of the lion heads is randomized in the grid and if you press a wrong stone plate the whole set will be reset.
The first 10 level can be accomplished in like 30-60 minutes (if I remember correct) and I think a regular player can endure this time without a chat function (he still can read) and a Spambot need to make all the quests to level 10 to unlock the chat and because profession is unlocked at 10 and invocation at 11 there is no other way of bypass the system. In addition the Bot can’t hardly solve the riddle and to proceed he needs to push all available combinations. To counter that you could randomize the number of lion heads as well (2-7) and it will slow them down a lot and someone must do the riddle manually.
The effect would be a lot less Spambots. Not because it is unsolvable (it isn’t) but most of the spammers wouldn’t want to do such a hassle for a simple advertising Spambot that will banned after a few minutes anyway and the best is, no big trouble for normal player only the inconvenient not to use the chat for like 30-60 minutes at the very beginning of the game and the most of them wouldn’t even notice it and the one noticing it would be like “Ah yeah, anti bot measurements, totally understandable.” And the best, no big deal to implement the whole stuff so it means: No big cost.
Platypus wielding a giant hammer, your argument is invalild!
Maybe i have wrote it wrong: Brute Force would work but it would take a lot of time because we are talking about stone plates or more like big stone tiles that are the ground so you walk to one plate, interact with it, walk to the next, interact with it. If you press a wrong plate your progress is reset and you need to start again. It would be solvable but would take a lot of time. Or you make it reset every time you press a wrong tile and by that it randomize again with place and numbers of the tiles. So you would increase the time a lot till it is brute forced and after like 3 wrong times the character get suspended.
Platypus wielding a giant hammer, your argument is invalild!
And time is exactly the issue. They have it. Even if it takes 5 hours to get through, they'll do it.
Not really. Time is money. To sink in 5 hours of time to get 1 bot to post three times the advertising in the chat before he gets automatically marked as spambot and banned is not really effective especially if you need 1 person to get every bot through a **** riddle.
Platypus wielding a giant hammer, your argument is invalild!
They should simply start with the obvious... give the players a working chat filter, which we can feed with keywords/phrases, and anything that goes against those rules will be sorted into another chat channel, that we then can activate in another chat window, if we want to.
Next thing on the to do list, give the CMs here limited GM rights ingame, and let them clean out the known bot hives.
They are farming at some points ingame in plain sight...
- check them
- remove them
End of story.
That should also put the fear into a few regular players using bots to let them do their farming.
As a player? Certainly. It's not our jobs to get rid of the bots. We can report them sure. But for every bot we report there's another 500 accounts waiting to be activated.
That's true, it is not our Job. But sometimes i think it is also "our" game. The Developers are only humans like us, maybe 20-50 in total working on this game at max. We player are like 10.000 to 100.000+ and the professional botters (which make money out of the game) are like what 100 individual at max? It is more likely some of the player came up with a idea because we constantly play the game and even most of us doesn't know how programming works it is only a logical and mathematical puzzle to solve such a problem.
As a publisher? Of course not. But I wouldn't have let a game get dragged this far into a botted economy either. Certain percautions were supposed to be made that weren't. Some mechanics in this game shouldn't even exist in an MMO and only make things worse, DHE's being one of them. The older PWE games have a pretty decent protection just by design alone. There's no professional bot to be found there. But did they inquire or ask for advice before launch? Well, obviously not I'd say. Now they reap what they failed to weed out before planting their crops. Weeding will have to be done manually now or you damage the crops.
There's only 1 way I see to eventually take out bots, other than actively pursuing and removing bots and their buyers from the game, either by hand or by monitoring the AH prices. And that's to remove all enchantment drops from the game and replace it with an RP currency (thank you Ironzerg for solving that part of the puzzle). DHEs could be restored to their original state, people would buy basic enchantments with RP and a small amount of AD (hello easy AD sink. It's not much, but every bit helps I think.) from the WB, which BtA upon pickup and people would play the game in order to refine and improve their enchantments and artifacts the way THEY please instead of RNGesus. Then remove all AD rewards from the daily quests (yes bots can do those too) and replace them with RP. Making AD should be done using hard things, mainly dungeons and the gear dropped in them, just like everywhere else in the MMO industry. Personally I'd say even leadership should play no part in AD generation, but I can already hear people howling from NW to Thay just at the thought of it, so that will remain. But I stand by my belief that AD should be generated through playing. I don't consider a few clicks on a website the same thing. Give that profession RP currency instead.
The entire RP market is a cancer in this game that needs to be cut out and while I think that should even include those sold by the zen store, I don't think that'll happen. But the result remains the same: No more income for bots, people would have a reason to actually play instead of grind.. nobody loses. Only when their income stops completely can you easily find buyer and seller and will the seller eventually run out of things to sell.
Oh, and for good measure, make every (zen) store purchase in this game BtA upon pickup. AD can be transferred, Gold can be transferred, only RP is character based, similar to glory. People will have no problems getting what they want for the actual zen price, the AH would be truly governed by supply and demand and the ZAx would flow freely. Bots would have nowhere to go but elsewhere.
I didn't say it would be easy. But that's the only way I see working without hurting players too badly.
That sounds like a nice solution too to make your personal progress again personal instead a social happening via AH.
Platypus wielding a giant hammer, your argument is invalild!
While a mute option would weed out the trolls for sure, since probably no one will bother to level up to 70 to just troll around... i think... this won't stop the bots at all.
It will delay the spam for sure, but it will not stop it. Even if you choose to ignore anything below level 70, they will just let their bots go through longer farming runs, and then send them into PE to spam again.
Take a look at Neverdeath Graveyard, you can see level 60+ bots in numbers farming Ghost Stories for the profession nodes, not a problem for them to get the spam bots to level 70 if necessary.
And i'm pretty sure that level 70 bots are still running around in New Sharandar for the Arcane Reservoir quest...
In the end, any kind of level restriction will not resolve this problem.
While a mute option would weed out the trolls for sure, since probably no one will bother to level up to 70 to just troll around... i think... this won't stop the bots at all.
It will delay the spam for sure, but it will not stop it. Even if you choose to ignore anything below level 70, they will just let their bots go through longer farming runs, and then send them into PE to spam again.
Take a look at Neverdeath Graveyard, you can see level 60+ bots in numbers farming Ghost Stories for the profession nodes, not a problem for them to get the spam bots to level 70 if necessary.
And i'm pretty sure that level 70 bots are still running around in New Sharandar for the Arcane Reservoir quest...
In the end, any kind of level restriction will not resolve this problem.
It will take them at least several days to lvl up to 70. That's long enough to make mute worth my time. I'll have to waste max 3s to mute them, while they will need like 3 weeks to hit lvl70 while botting.
They could "save" their highlevel spam bots for the "prime time", and let them then lose with even more spam through all possible channels.
And time is not really an issue for them, not sure how fast they will reach level 70, but i doubt that it will take them more then a few days.
And they can compensate this new obsticle by just cranking up the numbers of bots, which might result in even more lag/server problems for us regular players.
As stated, a level restriction will only slow them down, but not remove the spam.
I have no problem with this idea, just saying, that it is a pointless one, as the "you need level 15 to write in zone chat" restriction was.
Anyway, seeing how the Devs ignore this problem, it makes you wonder, if they even play their own game anymore... oh wait, they don't... or only for a short time and some specific testing scenario.
There is much easier solution which doesn't require much development.
I didn't invent this - i saw it in other games: Just have separate pre-lvl 70 zone chat and lvl 70 zone chat.
Comments
Not really. Time is money. To sink in 5 hours of time to get 1 bot to post three times the advertising in the chat before he gets automatically marked as spambot and banned is not really effective especially if you need 1 person to get every bot through a **** riddle.
Next thing on the to do list, give the CMs here limited GM rights ingame, and let them clean out the known bot hives.
They are farming at some points ingame in plain sight...
- check them
- remove them
End of story.
That should also put the fear into a few regular players using bots to let them do their farming.
Everything changed with this problem in mod4 and artifact gear...
Now we have lots of 3.5+ w/o any skill or knowledge of dungeons.
That's true, it is not our Job. But sometimes i think it is also "our" game. The Developers are only humans like us, maybe 20-50 in total working on this game at max. We player are like 10.000 to 100.000+ and the professional botters (which make money out of the game) are like what 100 individual at max? It is more likely some of the player came up with a idea because we constantly play the game and even most of us doesn't know how programming works it is only a logical and mathematical puzzle to solve such a problem.
That sounds like a nice solution too to make your personal progress again personal instead a social happening via AH.
It will delay the spam for sure, but it will not stop it. Even if you choose to ignore anything below level 70, they will just let their bots go through longer farming runs, and then send them into PE to spam again.
Take a look at Neverdeath Graveyard, you can see level 60+ bots in numbers farming Ghost Stories for the profession nodes, not a problem for them to get the spam bots to level 70 if necessary.
And i'm pretty sure that level 70 bots are still running around in New Sharandar for the Arcane Reservoir quest...
In the end, any kind of level restriction will not resolve this problem.
It will take them at least several days to lvl up to 70. That's long enough to make mute worth my time. I'll have to waste max 3s to mute them, while they will need like 3 weeks to hit lvl70 while botting.
And time is not really an issue for them, not sure how fast they will reach level 70, but i doubt that it will take them more then a few days.
And they can compensate this new obsticle by just cranking up the numbers of bots, which might result in even more lag/server problems for us regular players.
As stated, a level restriction will only slow them down, but not remove the spam.
I have no problem with this idea, just saying, that it is a pointless one, as the "you need level 15 to write in zone chat" restriction was.
Anyway, seeing how the Devs ignore this problem, it makes you wonder, if they even play their own game anymore... oh wait, they don't... or only for a short time and some specific testing scenario.
I didn't invent this - i saw it in other games: Just have separate pre-lvl 70 zone chat and lvl 70 zone chat.