Prelude: World 12

[Quariator]

Imagine not knowing so much of what the fuck you're talking about and yet being so confident.

Alt spam is an issue countless MMOs have solved. Prevent concurrent logins from the same IP. Force new accounts to verify with email and disallow usage of all the common temp email generators. There's literally dozens of NPM modules that solve this issue.

Bots are more complicated, but similarly pretty curveable (again, plenty of cheat detection software exists).

It's not going to get everyone, but that doesn't matter. Even if it makes it enough of a pain/remove 90% of botters and altspammers the game will still be massively more enjoyable.

Delusions.
What if two people in the same house want to play at the same time and they have one IP to share. On the other hand there are VPN connections and remote desktops. So you are going to screw legit users while dedicated alt spammers will operate with a minor difficulties.
There are literally thousands mail services. One can have own shared server at 15 bucks a year without much effort and own domain at similar price plus bazillion free shitty domains. That effectively gives unlimited number of mail accounts with a bit of skill.

Bot detecctors can be cheated too. First step is to identify repetitive patterns and add some randomness and deliberate misclicks to make it more human-alike.

The only ones who are delusional are devs and people who for some reason keep on defending bot/alt abusers in this game by saying that the issue is unsolvable. Truth is that the way of how worlds play out will never change unless bots and alts are being dealt with. People want unsiegable bases because they know they can't compete with bots/alts. Just because declaring a war on bot/alt abusers would take immense amount of time and resources from the devs doesn't mean that the fight is not worth it.

[pppp]

You can do MAC address checks for people on the same network.

How do you tell MAC of a machine behind NAT?

VPN connections and remote desktops won't help unless you're doing a bunch of per app connections

How do you tell it is the same person behind different IPs ?

takes forever to setup and is incredibly expensive
...
no fucking idea of what you're talking about. So why do you keep speaking?

That actually tells me how much idea you have.

The fact that you think all bot detectors work by input detection

Sure, new telepatic servers connect directly to the player's mind and completely bypass network protocol.

[MarcusXDead]

Made me laugh so hard when I read what kabuto wrote. You, good sir, seem to have no idea what are you talking about. Such problems were, indeed, solved in another mmos by making alt use not worth it by ballancing the game, encouraging players to play 1 character, removing the reason to use alts by making it easier / more profitable to do smthing with main rather then log in 4+ windows to be “competitive”, OR they encourage alt use by making the game around subscription payment like in Eve, where majority of people have minimum 2 active windows and it doesn’t ruin the game ballance.
There is a protection that disallows logging in more than 1 free account, but you can always just take some old notebook and no one can blame anything on you - you’re completly legit. Aside from that, there’re always options to bypass any similar protection with having only 1 machine. Ever played a dota ranked match against yourself, kappa?

P.S. on the topic you’ll whine to a point where Jorbtar starts making mini-games and captchas, lol. I honestly don’t believe they really care putting much effort into preventing botting, not even mentioning disencouraging people not using alts. They’re chill with it as long as there’s no huge problem caused by it. Small decisions that make botting less convinient - that’s what they go for, as I see it. Side reason for it is a decision to release open client. Like, don’t tell me they didn’t think about what will it lead to when they were releasing it.

[pppp]

they encourage alt use by making the game around subscription payment like in Eve, where majority of people have minimum 2 active windows and it doesn’t ruin the game ballance.

Indeed, there was even a promotional campaign offering significant discounts for second account. "Play properly"

whine to a point where Jorbtar starts making mini-games and captchas.

I probably would not mind tic-tac-toe level minigames when doing quest upteenth time in a day, except winning strategy for tic-tac-toe is already known and can be coded. Checkers would take too long .
It would be quite cool: "The old tree is tired by the monotony of the passing time and wants to play a round of <x> with a young being like you."
"Come later you loser"

Thinking of self-learning paper-rock-scissors with simple per account state memory. For example 3x3 table with entries like player <p> has <c> chance to show rock after me showing paper and him showing scissors. Updated by a small amount after every round.

[vatas]

Problem with many anti-bot measures is that these days bots are starting to be better at them than people. Or at least the traditional "type the letters in this captcha" is done better by AI than human these days.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/1/18205 ... telligence

[vnsmirnov]

I probably would not mind tic-tac-toe level minigames when doing quest upteenth time in a day, except winning strategy for tic-tac-toe is already known and can be coded. Checkers would take too long .

Devil's bones!

[borka]

Made me laugh so hard when I read what kabuto wrote. You, good sir, seem to have no idea what are you talking about.

I`m laughing with you

NCSoft had 12 ppl (analysts and programmers) just for bot detection in Aion in 2016 ...

this NetEase paper from 2018 shows a bit how much efforts are done
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3219 ... nload=true

and there are loads of tech papers just about bot detection from numerous conferences ...

Besides wanting a 2 man dev team to do such consider the legal side to all this just by reading some of the legal EULA terms of MMOs that do such bot detection -i.e.

https://us.ncsoft.com/en/legal/
https://us.ncsoft.com/en/legal/user-agr ... eement.php
https://us.ncsoft.com/en/legal/user-agr ... onduct.php
https://us.ncsoft.com/en/legal/ncsoft/p ... policy.php

what subscription fee are you accepting so Seatribe can pay some lawyers ?!?

just saying

[noseelol1]

I lol'd at, you could just install some NPM modules.

[MarcusXDead]

But I never said bot detection and alt usage prevention is easy, why are you quotting me on this? I said that fighting it usually comes much efficient if you make it not worth using it, rather than fight people via hard restrictions. The thing is, if devs optimise bots functions and add them in vanilla clients so everyone could use them easily, larger pp boys will be the first ones to cry about it, cuz they won't be able to have effort-imput advantage. If every sprucecap will just click "autofarming" and go offline, having their crops passively upgrading their q without any effort imput, there'll be no reason to use farming bots. It's a bad solution, but an example of how to fight botting. There's no way to apply such solutions without changing some core mechanics, and it might even not be welcomed by players. There's no easy fool-proof way here.

[VDZ]

Imagine not knowing so much of what the fuck you're talking about and yet being so confident.

I ask again. Why do people who have no idea what the fuck they're talking about insist on talking?

I find it utterly bizarre that YOU'RE the one making these statements while spouting utter bullshit. I do reverse engineering as my day job and also have quite a bit of general IT knowledge.

Alt spam is an issue countless MMOs have solved. Prevent concurrent logins from the same IP. Force new accounts to verify with email and disallow usage of all the common temp email generators. There's literally dozens of NPM modules that solve this issue.

VPN connections and remote desktops won't help unless you're doing a bunch of per app connections which takes forever to setup and is incredibly expensive. Again, plenty of libraries to filter non-verified mail services so your point like the rest of your post is moot.

You do not have the same IP if you're not on the same network. My home network has a different IP from my phone internet, which in turn has a different IP from my work network. I could use remote desktop software to play the game using all three of these IPs at the same time, controlled from a single machine. This takes about two minutes to set up and is free. I could also avoid IP limits via VPNs. In addition to the stuff I already have access to, it's also easy to just hire more stuff online.

E-mail verification is even dumber. Disregarding temporary e-mail sites, there's nothing preventing users from generating a genuine free mail accounts (GMail, Yahoo, Yandex etc etc etc) and registering with that. And anyone with access to an e-mail server could abuse it to generate an infinite amount of mails that must be considered genuine to not screw over legitimate users. (I have access to one, though people would be angry at me if I abused it like that, though they might let me do it if I ask beforehand.)

You can do MAC address checks for people on the same network.

This is the dumbest thing you've said so far. MAC addresses are arbitrary and rely entirely on the client-side system being honest. You can easily change your network adapter's MAC address, or use virtual network adapters with new MAC addresses (especially with VMs, where that is the default).

(again, plenty of cheat detection software exists).

The devs have looked at pretty much all of them and found them all to be shit. Cheat detection software does not stop botting, it only discourages botting. In a situation with so much to gain and so little to lose like Haven & Hearth (you're not getting VAC-banned or anything, you just need to create a new account) people would inevitably still bot the shit out of everything. What implementation of such software does accomplish, though, is that we can no longer play with custom clients and depending on the anti-cheat legitimate players will get kicked or even banned (like holy fuck why do games not let me play just because I used Process Monitor earlier in the Windows session).

It's not going to get everyone, but that doesn't matter. Even if it makes it enough of a pain/remove 90% of botters and altspammers the game will still be massively more enjoyable.

I also think that this fundamental assumption is flawed. The reason botting and alt abuse are problems in H&H is because the behavior of a player affects the entire world. Denying me the ability to instantly fuel a smelter (rather than having to click 12 times every time because I don't want to get RSI) will not stop the hardcore botters from devaluing high-quality goods in the world economy by literally no-lifing their production, nor will it stop the most powerful factions from dominating the world through their "ill-gotten" gains. All it would do is widen the gap between hardcore botters and people using custom client convenience functions.