Prelude: World 13

[wonder-ass]

kinda funny how the most active and popular client was a botting client aka ardennes client.

[Salad]

kinda funny how the most active and popular client was a botting client aka ardennes client.

All the more reason we should have J&L appropriate the code and have botting be a Vanilla client feature, or at the very least something comparable.

Either ban it or make it so accessible that any smoothbrain hearthling could set up basic bots, that's my stance on the botting situation.

[jordancoles]

kinda funny how the most active and popular client was a botting client aka ardennes client.

All the more reason we should have J&L appropriate the code and have botting be a Vanilla client feature, or at the very least something comparable.

Either ban it or make it so accessible that any smoothbrain hearthling could set up basic bots, that's my stance on the botting situation.

Loftar would say it's impossible like recolouring the deep ocean tiles ingame

[Neon14]

Ban botting.

[VDZ]

kinda funny how the most active and popular client was a botting client aka ardennes client.

Wasn't Amber more popular back when it still worked?

Bruh, like your Dunning-Kruger leads you to conflate anti-botting measures and anti-cheat systems which is like comparing sail boats and cargo ships. Both share a few core attributes, but have vastly different purposes and methods to achieving those purposes. The former is proactive prevention, the latter is reactive punishment

Both can be either, and I hope you just mixed things up because they're generally the other way around - botting is very hard to prevent and it's more feasible to detect and ban afterwards, whereas anti-tamper mechanisms can to a certain degree prevent cheating from happening in the first place and it tends to be the main approach against cheating. But to a certain degree botting can be caught as it happens, even client-side (tamper detection exposes some types of botting), and while suboptimal cheating can be punished after retroactive inspection. Every measure against one can also be used against the other, to a certain degree.

Claiming that heuristic analysis doesn't work when even similar scope games like WURM have had pretty good success with it is completely disingenuous.

I'm not entirely familiar with the situation around WURM (though a quick search shows that it causes automatic bans for using simple macros made with software supplied by the mouse's manufacturer), but my point wasn't that it cannot possibly work, but rather that the costs to make it work are infeasible - it would cost Loftar more time to maintain such a system (to keep it effective) than it would cost users to circumvent it. WURM is not remotely similar in scope, having 11 developers and 23 GMs, compared to Haven's 2 devs and 0 GMs.

Even if it hasn't completely solved the problem, they are nowhere near the massive everyday problem for both devs and players like they are here

Frankly, I have barely been affected at all by the rampant botting in major factions. The only players actually affected by the rampant botting are other major faction players (who bot themselves) and high-level villages who get unreasonable economic competition - but there's still plenty of demand for goods that aren't bot-quality.

Instead of wasting my time forcing me to disprove your points, how about you provide any proof or documentation for anything you've said?

As I was mostly speaking from experience and personal expertise (and many of the things I said are commonly known) I did not have any citations immediately ready, but I did a quick search for examples backing up my initial statement, namely that

Every anti-cheat measure has an equivalent amount of collateral damage. At the very least, custom clients would have to be killed off entirely. But no matter how much you try to fight it, worst case botters can still just scan the screen and simulate keyboard/mouse input to mimic genuine play behavior.

Here's a bunch of random examples of people getting unfairly banned for happening to have the wrong programs running in the background or doing nothing at all:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/674020/d ... 137911377/

https://steamcommunity.com/app/374320/d ... 783582436/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Neverwinter/co ... r_botting/

https://github.com/Impostor/Impostor/issues/294

https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/s ... -positives

As for the latter part of the sentence, about ways to simulate input, again speaking from expertise (don't make me waste time building PoCs for this), but you can:

• Use one of the bazillion existing macro tools
• Build a program to send arbitrary window messages to be received by the game process
• Modify the game process itself to automatically trigger its game code input handling routines
• Modify the game code to pretend to receive arbitrary window messages
• Hook into game functions to do either of the former two
• Hook GetMessage in the game process to inject fake messages for the game process only
• Use a driver to serve as a simulated mouse
• Send window messages using driver code
• Use hardware that pretends to be a mouse but sends macro input (this gets around even kernel-level detection)

(If the game proactively polls for the mouse position, replace 'window messages' with tampering with the used functions and/or the mouse position tracked by Windows as appropriate.)
(This game running on Java also opens Java tampering as attack vector; you can pretty much duplicate the above list replacing 'process' and 'Windows' with 'module' (is the runtime instance still called a module?) and 'Java'.)

Also, here's some perspective from the people who actually bot and what they do to get around bot detection:

https://www.runemate.com/community/thre ... fely.1086/

https://rspeer.org/docs/tips-for-safe-osrs-botting/

If you read through them you'll find it supports some of the other points I've made in other posts.

I now expect full sourcing and appropriate elaboration for your counterarguments as well.

[Sevenless]

or make it so accessible that any smoothbrain hearthling could set up basic bots, that's my stance on the botting situation.

The devs have been doing this. Area plant/harvest and area mine are all features that were originally bots only, but have been migrated into official support as an action in the client.

[MagicManICT]

As an aside: Am I the only that thinks they should have waited to post this next week without a date, but actually set for a few weeks after that? They could have simply said "world reset coming, further information posted sometime Soon (tm)!"

[Schwarzvald]

Worlds would last significantly longer if you targeted botting instead of band-aiding around the problem with updates nerfing actual gameplay elements/features - that are only over-powered due to the bots. The largest botting factions will reach endgame within a month or two and the game will stagnate down toward 60-70 (50 bots) active players like it does every world. There's no real PVP at the moment - raids only happen to inactive bases or through subterfuge, and the only other aspect of the game - the quality/leveling grind - is heavily botted.

This game is a lot of fun the first month after world reset, and then for anyone with a life - job - school - etc, its unrealistic to expect them to compete with bots that run while you sleep and live.

[wolf1000wolf]

As an aside: Am I the only that thinks they should have waited to post this next week without a date, but actually set for a few weeks after that? They could have simply said "world reset coming, further information posted sometime Soon (tm)!"

Giving a date a week+ ahead of time does allow folks to learn about the upcoming reset and also plan?

Still waiting/hoping for some sorta email push to let all past players know there's a world reset.

[banok]

Worlds would last significantly longer if you targeted botting instead of band-aiding around the problem with updates nerfing actual gameplay elements/features - that are only over-powered due to the bots. The largest botting factions will reach endgame within a month or two and the game will stagnate down toward 60-70 (50 bots) active players like it does every world. There's no real PVP at the moment - raids only happen to inactive bases or through subterfuge, and the only other aspect of the game - the quality/leveling grind - is heavily botted.

This game is a lot of fun the first month after world reset, and then for anyone with a life - job - school - etc, its unrealistic to expect them to compete with bots that run while you sleep and live.

I think havens design flaws that you touch on go deeper than just bots. Even without bots casuls with jobs are not going to compete with gangs of teenagers/jobless nolifers. The same problems would still exist, ie the game only being fun after world reset. Bots probably just excelerate it but the game needs to have fun endgame that isnt infini-grinding.