Anti Bot Mechanics

[MagicManICT]

Require valid passport to register account. Must have live webcam feed of self and computer monitor to play. Easy.

And yet this still won't stop botting. As the old saying goes... if you can't beat them, join them.

My philosophy: playing a game is about having fun. If having fun is actually work, there are better ways to work than a ton of button clicks to make metal and grow crops. I can actually go work and make metal to sell and grow crops to feed myself.

Best way to stop bots: change the mechanics to something people have fun playing. Problem: everything is bottable (eventually), and not all of these "fun" mechanics are fun to all.

[sMartins]

Any of that doesn't make sense at all .... just for the records:
we are at the point to code scripts to play a game that is supposed to be an hobby for us to have fun with.
We've lost the plot.

[Granger]

we are at the point to code scripts to play a game that is supposed to be an hobby for us to have fun with.
We've lost the plot.

This.

Apart from that: as long as crime pays some people will be tempted to commit it, some nicely smoking craters popping up from time to time could solve that issue (to make the usual suspects a big less confident that they'll get away with it). Detection of bots would be no hard or time consuming issue for the devs, a while back I gave them a turnkey proposal on how this can be done effectively and accurately, without binding their time on an ongoing basis - they just don't go for it for reasons unknown to me.

The other thing is that there are mechanics in the game that further mass production (like metal spiraling), IMHO such incentives (to eg. smelt several thousand bars of metal per day) should be removed from the game (which would also address other problems stemming from quality spiraling out of control and destroying game balance).

[Ardennesss]

Don't really get what you mean by this picture. Use your words.

The easier you make everyday tasks, the easier you make life as a scripter. Regardless of how many ore can fit in a smelter, I'm still going to bot filling them and lighting them. That's the issue, how do you improve player quality of life without just extending the gap between humans and scripts.

[DDDsDD999]

The easier you make everyday tasks, the easier you make life as a scripter.

Having a bigger inventory space for higher tier smelters won't make bots anymore efficient. It'll just reduce the amount of monitoring and clicking a human player has to do. You literally say in the next sentence.

Regardless of how many ore can fit in a smelter, I'm still going to bot filling them and lighting them.

Nothing is stopping you from making more smelters and having your bot fill those already. But the more smelters you make, and manually have to fill, the more tedious the activity is for the human players.

[Aceb]

I've already make a thread about workstation and don't wanna hijack this thread, so I'll just shortly say:

early game, mid game, end game, it doesn't matter, we craft everything the same boring way, without any real chance to upgrade here. If some people don't play much or are only small hermits don't have to notice, but after playing few worlds and getting older, I just can say I'm tired of watching hourglass over and over while crafting billions of items.

It would be cool to get 2 more tiers of smelters, scythes, workbenches, which just allows to do stuff faster. Sure, it won't eliminate botting, but it has a high probability of decreasing population of botters and make it better for rest. No amount of work You put into "outside world" will help players if they have to spend hours on crafting and stuff...

[synaris]

i think i said this in another thread, but here we go again.

in order for anything in a game to have worth, it must take time and/or effort to acquire. knights of the round wouldnt be a big deal if you just found it laying on the ground. the masamune 2 or rainbow sword wouldnt stand out as much if chrono trigger forced you to get them along the way. and pearls wouldnt be worth shit for trades if you got one for every mussel you boiled.

the only way to stop botting is to directly punish the botters. ban them. because any game with any kind of difficulty or artificial worth is going to have botters.

THE VERY THING THAT MAKES A GAME FUN ENCOURAGES BOTTING. bots exploits mods hacks its all in the same vein. people want to get ahead of others by any means necessary. just like with steroids amongst professional athletes. people don't care how they win, they just want to win. people these days have no moral restraint. its not possible to design a game thats fun and also discourages botting. the only games that arnt worth botting are the ones that are too damn easy and too damn short.

as for the best anti-bot mechanic ive seen, whatever runescape 2 eventually did. some bot programmer joined jagex and designed some sort of bot catching system that was so good bots damn near disappeared overnight. the amount of bots left was like 0.3% of what it used to be.

[Ardennesss]

as for the best anti-bot mechanic ive seen, whatever runescape 2 eventually did. some bot programmer joined jagex and designed some sort of bot catching system that was so good bots damn near disappeared overnight. the amount of bots left was like 0.3% of what it used to be.

I think they just reverse engineered how the bots worked and instead of blocking it, let people continue to do it while they collected usernames. Old school runescape botting was basically undetectable because it performed every action using the actual colors displayed on the screen, there was no hook that interacted with the game server. Just programmed mouse clicks. In the same way, most haven scripts do nothing but send the server a message telling it what it wants to click on, there's not a hard and fast way to prevent it outside of disabling custom clients again.

[LostJustice]

as for the best anti-bot mechanic ive seen, whatever runescape 2 eventually did. some bot programmer joined jagex and designed some sort of bot catching system that was so good bots damn near disappeared overnight. the amount of bots left was like 0.3% of what it used to be.

I think they just reverse engineered how the bots worked and instead of blocking it, let people continue to do it while they collected usernames. Old school runescape botting was basically undetectable because it performed every action using the actual colors displayed on the screen, there was no hook that interacted with the game server. Just programmed mouse clicks. In the same way, most haven scripts do nothing but send the server a message telling it what it wants to click on, there's not a hard and fast way to prevent it outside of disabling custom clients again.

Agreed here. Point that was missed in the runescape post here is that the random events is notable too and can be handled as such since the client is open source. And a thing that was failed to also be mention is that the random event system and things like that were major failures to stop botting. It was easy to counter this system and a lot of work for very little results. Issue is the only way Jagex had any success in stopping them was bot sweeps and also creating a client that hash checked itself for file changes, hooks, and software interaction. Even then bots were still possible but could be caught easier. Either way this would spell the death of custom clients like Amber. Agree with the major issue here, stop the reason to bot. Also people failed to mention what constitutes as a bot. There is scripts noted here that do simple tasks like that you find in amber. This is automated work done by script so to me this would justify that everyone is on some sort of bot system if using amber and because of it, it seems like it quite a fuzzy line that makes it difficult to handle as well.

[Onep]

Ideally, the game will be so complex and tedious that it will completely negate the need for bots as there will be no players.