kabuto202 wrote:@MagicManICT: I mostly agree with you. Coincidentally I've done both. I've written cybersecurity logic for a variety of fintech and data companies, and now I'm in a position at a publisher where some of my work includes our internal anti-abuse tools (the publisher owns the studios). I'm under no delusion that people's financial records are going to get leaked because of this (although the lack of an SSL cert on this site always makes me wince a bit). However, it's obvious that this game has an issue with people getting an unfair advantage over others or at least an incredibly strong perception of it. People seem to universally decry exploits as "the problem" because it effectively lets people bypass the limits of the game, but how is a large scale botting any different? Like how are you practically going to convince a prospective newbie that someone growing a rage alt at 200 times the growth rate of an average characters is unfair because of a code exploit, but fair because there's a village of bots force feeding them? You're effectively arguing the difference between multiplication and adding things together several times.
You bring up a good point with Tales. Even a very basic solution seems to have provide some level of results. Now obviously, I'm pretty probably biased, but even basic level preventive measures are pretty easy to implement. I'm sure that the guys who managed to code up two entire MMOs from scratch, have the technical chops to implement a couple checks to prevent people from running entire bot villages. Because I don't see individual automation as a problem, ideally no-AFK botting rule would be dope, but even then the damage is pretty limited to being that of roughly who might just be playing the game a bit much. I don't have an inherit issue with multi-clienting, but the issues rises up when its combined with automation. I can't speak for anyone else, but if I had the choice of allowing multi-clienting without any automation or allowing automation without multi-clienting. I would prefer the latter.
As for your philosophy, I think your axioms are flawed. Why would necessarily a small part of community be able to get away with it and be undetected? Lets assume that someone wastes all the time and money required to avoid detection. Get some premium VPN so all their bots connect from different IP addresses that aren't on any open-source VPN/datacenter lists so they're not autoblocked. How long until some salty nerd walks up to the base records a bunch of video evidence of obvious botting behavior and sends it to the devs and all that shit gets glassed? If the percentile of the community that's doing this grows large enough that the devs can't handle it on their own, I'm sure they'll have the money to hire an intern to do it for them.
Also for the record, I don't have any issues with Haven on a core level. I think as a game it's incredibly enjoyable. Most of my issues are basically community level ones, which is why in another thread I was asking for a private server as that would basically solve all the problems I have with it.
I can get new genuine IP from my ISP if I unplug my modem for ½ minutes.
I wonder how you would prevent botting in this game anyway.. Yeah some common patterns can surely be detected, but then it becomes just cat and mouse thing.
Better to make mechanics so bots wouldn't give such a great advantage. (Like less grinding for example)
Banning the most blatant botters sounds intriguing but I do wonder if that would actually help.
