What ruins this game...

[shadowchris]

People sleep and work, so bots can raise crop q faster than people. As for livestock, the more of them you have the more babies you get, so you get good stats faster, and bots can feed more animals than humans can.

Get out of here with that logic! Bots are evil and bad for the game!

[venatorvenator]

Alts are a much more fundamental problem than bots.

[MagicManICT]

Alts are a much more fundamental problem than bots.

Another problem you can't really fix in a f2p game. I'll grant you that only 7 free hours in a week puts limits on it, but it does only encourage me to make more alt accounts so I can manage my village properly. Keeping those extra farmers up in skill, though, is a pain as it's 3x the curios. Thankfully I only need one that can craft.

[venatorvenator]

And yet there are measures that could be taken to reduce alts.

It can't be fixed, just as tax evasion etc can't be fixed irl, but it can certainly be reduced to an acceptable level.

[Granger]

Offtopic, but relevant:

just as tax evasion etc can't be fixed irl

This is blantantly wrong.
Tax evasion would be easy to fix if the people who profit from it would not have bought the lawmakers to not fix it.
So we'll have to get rid of the established lawmakers first, then we can dry out the other leeches...

[Potjeh]

I see no reason to conflate alts and bots, they're separate issue. Shooting down proposals to solve bot problem because they don't also solve the alt problem isn't productive.

[fablewings]

Why does anyone even care?

You're probably on opposite ends of the world anyway.

[Kaios]

I see no reason to conflate alts and bots, they're separate issue. Shooting down proposals to solve bot problem because they don't also solve the alt problem isn't productive.

I agree but it also depends I think, I could suggest some type of passive character progression such as how many steps your hearthling takes increases physical strength of the character over time meaning you play one character for longer and you gain benefits because of that but of course something like this could easily be botted too.

[Darruin]

Regardless of your opinion on using bots the only thing that matters is how J&L want you to play their game, and I doubt they approve of it since it trivializes any effort. Anyway since Haven has a small community the solution is easy;

J&L personally teleport to individual players and if anyone looks like they're botting send some kind of captcha or test their way. If they fail this test/continue playing then it's proof of their botting and they can be dealt with. If they attempt to afk when the captcha appears as a way of avoiding detection then they should have a raged bear spawn on them after a reasonable amount of time (for example 3 hours). Unfortunately this removes the ability to afk for long periods safely, but it's a small price to pay imo. Next step would be to remove the fate system!

If the community ever got larger then captchas could appear randomly instead, which is more of an annoyance for the legit players but still mostly solves the problem since they will get caught very quickly.

[venatorvenator]

I think it's more efficient to focus on alts since that's what the majority of bots are.

But there's the problem of why alts exist. Part of it might be due to habit, since alts have been tolerated by community for so long that's become the norm, but I'm sure it's also because we don't have good management features for villages, claims, storages etc and people try to counter that.

This is blantantly wrong.
Tax evasion would be easy to fix if the people who profit from it would not have bought the lawmakers to not fix it.
So we'll have to get rid of the established lawmakers first, then we can dry out the other leeches...

It's not wrong; I don't think that would fix it completely. It's a crime, and you can't fix crime. At one point the cost of surveillance, control, and incarceration mechanisms becomes higher than the cost of letting a little bit of crime slip.