Botting discussion

[shubla]

Banning most abusive bots would be easy but devs have chosen not to take that path.

[wolf1000wolf]

As a spectator to VDZ and kabuto's debate, following along and reading through the various links/sources has been pretty interesting.

Putting aside the question of whether HnH's devs can or should reasonably be expected to stop botting...

Exactly what negative outcomes has botting caused in HnH? As someone who hasn't played since W10, I'm not entirely sure why "bots are bad" aside from the general sense of unfairness.

[VDZ]

Exactly what negative outcomes has botting caused in HnH? As someone who hasn't played since W10, I'm not entirely sure why "bots are bad" aside from the general sense of unfairness.

For the average player: Quality standards for trade goods rise due to botting (meaning your highest quality stuff will never be valued as 'high quality' trade goods) and there is less demand for bulk goods (major factions can just bot for them).

For players engaged in faction rivalries it apparently has more impact as it's hard and unreasonable to competitively keep up without botting yourself.

There's also some minor negative effects, like bots draining global pools causing rare forageables to show up less, and bot harvesting of localized resources meaning you're unlikely to just stumble upon a resource nobody's harvested yet and can only get them by checking when they'll refresh and getting there before the bot does.

[crowe]

So this is why I didn't really wanna waste the effort getting engaged in this discussion and just pointed out that your inability to distinguish between anti-botting and anti-cheating systems is extremely problematic. Everything I quoted here, has absolutely nothing to do with what I suggested, because those are all anti-cheat measures that run specifically within the client. Proper anti-botting measures are always implemented server-side

As person that cheated in diablo2 (both coding and using)

To this day the best anti-cheat attempt I have ever seen was diablo2
You might think I am joking considering to this very date there is still cheats.

They use to just check memory address on client ect which were easy to bypass
as said above all of it was client side checks. This was before 1.10
After 1.10...

Yet battlenet implemented a system by which every so the client needs to download a executable that checks your system

It doesn't get downloaded you are banned
If it finds something you get banned
If it doesn't return proper key your banned.

From research people did on it the file changed all the time.
It was all purposes impossible to get the key returned or to stop it.

So the solution was to use map hacks ect.. that loaded into memory before the game load freezing thread
and revealing map and unloading

Bots originally had to exit the game when it was requested to load or get banned till they made it so if it didn't return value you got banned
Came the point people started using disposable accounts for botting.

They didn't stop there.
The implemented a system to try to detect bots on movement mouse clicks and much more.

Issue of course is this game is in java.
So can't have it download code such as above and work as well.

I guess the point is as person who use to cheat in games I know there is ways to fight botting that can be very very effective.

This game you don't have to worry so much about things like map hacks ect majority of that is all server side I am guessing.

[MagicManICT]

Banning most abusive bots would be easy but devs have chosen not to take that path.

I won't say your wrong, as I think some other bots could probably be nuked, but there are three clearly documented cases on this. One--all of world 4. Two--Dis vs Dev Team. Three--the message limit on various activities that actively kicks an account offline if they are running bad scripts. As far as I'm concerned, that's a clear statement on abusive botting.

I'm trying to stay out of this as I'm tired of this fight. If anyone wants to know my opinion on botting and scripts, they're free to dig through forum history or PM me. I don't keep my opinions to myself, but repeating the same thing over the years does get irritating, which is why I'm surprised some of you are taking up this argument again.

[wolf1000wolf]

Exactly what negative outcomes has botting caused in HnH? As someone who hasn't played since W10, I'm not entirely sure why "bots are bad" aside from the general sense of unfairness.

For the average player: Quality standards for trade goods rise due to botting (meaning your highest quality stuff will never be valued as 'high quality' trade goods) and there is less demand for bulk goods (major factions can just bot for them).

For players engaged in faction rivalries it apparently has more impact as it's hard and unreasonable to competitively keep up without botting yourself.

There's also some minor negative effects, like bots draining global pools causing rare forageables to show up less, and bot harvesting of localized resources meaning you're unlikely to just stumble upon a resource nobody's harvested yet and can only get them by checking when they'll refresh and getting there before the bot does.

Hmm these downsides actually seem fairly detrimental to gameplay involving player interactions..

[kabuto202]

As far as I can tell, the practically used implementations are the ones discussed in the intro section of that earlier article, the ones that are inadequate.

Literally within the first three results you get multiple papers that involve results from life application (Aeon/Nguard).

I can't fucking do this. I don't know if you're intentionally this obtuse or genuinely have some severe learning disability. But I have zero interest in wasting anymore of my time spoon feeding an alleged "expert" basic game-security concepts, debunking absolutely baseless or irrelevant assertions, having to constantly repeat myself on settled matters, or engaging in such fucking high brow intellectual discussions as to "why different terms have different meanings". I have at this point wasted several hours of my life in this discussion and the only relevant point you've made that in any way grounded in reality is "yes, sometimes there are false positives". You can continue being the botting equivalent of an anti-vaxxer, while I go ahead to make myself some nice wild mushroom risotto, go for a late night jog on the rooftop before bed, get some good sleep so I can wake up in the morning to deploy a new release branch of a system that you insist is purely theoretical.

If jorbtar want to implement anti-botting measures, I'm sure they can. If a smooth brain like me could figure this out, I'm sure so can they can too given their technical achievements of building an MMO without even using a modern engine. If people want to talk about how and what approaches are cost effective that's a good conversation to have. But this "is industry proven method actually proven" conversation is a waste of everyone's time and reeks of boomers who hadn't caught up to industry changes since the 90s.

[KwonChiMin]

some mememe bullshit

just make an example of a single commercially successful (i hope you wouldnt argue that devs want the game to be commercially successful on at least some scale) mmo that managed to get rid of bots entirely. cause to the point all your statements are purely theoretical and we dont play theories, we play games.

[Okocim]

Bots are getting more and more advanced and their impact on the game is greater each world, this is why this topic will never die down.
Professional anti-bot measures simply won't happen because it requires effort that our J&L don't want to/cannot afford to put in.
On the other hand I don't think haven need complex anti-bot measures.
Making botting be against the rules would be a good 1st step, at the moment players don't even hide that they are using bots, just start banning and nuking them.
It'll at least make them put effort into making bot less detectible, and they will become less commonly used.
Target the big factions, you don't need to look for them, and their impact on bot advancement is the greatest.
As things stand now, even if ppl don't want to they are forced to use bots to stay competitive.

[Zajmer]

some mememe bullshit

just make an example of a single commercially successful (i hope you wouldnt argue that devs want the game to be commercially successful on at least some scale) mmo that managed to get rid of bots entirely. cause to the point all your statements are purely theoretical and we dont play theories, we play games.

But most of MMO games discourage people who use bots, by punishing them. What's not a thing in Haven and it made people to bot everything that is possible only because they can.