REVIEW: Game Has Potential, But Snail Is A Psychopath

[kabuto202]

How many of you CHOOSE to run only one client? Great. Not against the rules. Don't belly ache about the people that power game. Just because they min max all their characters and run multiple clients to maximize efficiency doesn't make them basement trolls, just industrious people that have (maybe a bit too much?) zeal for their hobbies.

I feel like you're just arguing semantics. To quote Shakespear "What's in a name? That which we call a NEET. By any other name would smell as stink."

Also, people are going to bellyache about those people because they're forced to share the same gamespace as them. It's basically like cheating. If you do it in a singleplayer game, no one gives a shit. If you do it in a multiplayer game people get mad. Telling people that don't enjoy being forced to share a gamespace with someone running a botnet to get over it, because it's not against rules isn't helpful. I'm genuinely unsure as to how to explain why such an unempathetic tone-deaf response is a bad idea.

How many of you CHOOSE not to run bots and scripts? Great, no rules violations there for those that do use them. Unless someone has a foolproof method for combating them that is both cheap and efficient, I don't see the rules on this changing. (Think you have such a method? Great. Code it up and market it. I'm sure the software development world will beat a path to your door. You might not make Facebook billions, but I see a lot of checks with many zeros after the one in your future. Maybe you'll contribute such tech to your favorite indie game for free.)

Asking for a fool-proof method is an unrealistically high standard that demonstrates massive ignorance of the basics of SaaS cyber-security. Nothing is full proof, but there are plenty of "good enough" methods that are employed by basically every single tech company in the world (even the non-gaming ones) that make botting cost prohibitive enough where it's not worth the effort especially when there isn't any financial benefit from doing so. HnH isn't WoW where a multimillion dollar gold farming market exists that makes it worth the effort to circumvent basic protection tools. Some basic IP verification, some flat bans on addresses coming from AWS, and if you're feeling REAAALY spicy some hardware verification. That's enough to deal with the majority of script kiddies playing this game, and a hard ban hammer will take care of like the couple of people who would bother circumventing it. Heck, I'm pretty sure most here would stop doing if it wasn't tacitly encouraged.

This whole: "We don't want to be in a constant fight with people bypassing our security features" attitude just sounds like an excuse to avoid dealing with an already existing problem by making up an unsolvable future problem that hasn't materialized yet. You might as well drive with your eyes closed and without seatbelt because there's no full proof way to not die if some rando decides to swerve into you.

[Harthel]

This is the best dog-shit game I've ever played.

[shubla]

I think that there is quite a large a difference between botting good carrots because you want to see big Q number. Which is relatively harmless and innocent.
And botting to abuse people (killing, raiding, banning from chat etc.) for your sadistic and sociopathic needs.

[iamahh]

ideally the game could incentivize constructive behavior

I'm noticing this world much more destructive and less chill than the other's I've played

it feels like a bunch of Karens took over this world, everything is extra petty and nobody seems capable of chill anymore

[Zentetsuken]

to be fair, threads like this used to be way more common, but it was always in the aftermath of a big raid or some major fight or somebody dying

if shubla wasn't using this thread as a place to manipulate new players in to thinking that being muted from a realm chat is somehow illicit behaviour worthy of divine intervention it wouldn't have made it to page 2

[cherryquartz]

I think that there is quite a large a difference between botting good carrots because you want to see big Q number. Which is relatively harmless and innocent.
And botting to abuse people (killing, raiding, banning from chat etc.) for your sadistic and sociopathic needs.

Isn't that exactly what you did though? You literally used a bot to kill people. If you want Snail punished, you should be too. That is my entire point.

[strpk0]

Asking for a fool-proof method is an unrealistically high standard that demonstrates massive ignorance of the basics of SaaS cyber-security.

In the future, you can skip the fancy tech buzzwords when trying to make your points. It doesn't impress anyone nor make your points any more believable.

Nothing is full proof, but there are plenty of "good enough" methods that are employed by basically every single tech company in the world (even the non-gaming ones) that make botting cost prohibitive enough where it's not worth the effort especially when there isn't any financial benefit from doing so.

Objectively false. If you look up the state of many if not all popular MMORPG games out right now you'll find every single one of them have a rampant botting problem. Even with dedicated heavily staffed and expert anti-botting teams there's only so much they can reasonably do to slow the problem down. Not one game has solved the issue nor found any "good enough" methods that have made it not worthwhile to bot the games. If they had, there would be no botting whatsoever going on in said games, whether for profit or not.
Next point.

HnH isn't WoW where a multimillion dollar gold farming market exists that makes it worth the effort to circumvent basic protection tools.

Great point. HnH also isn't WoW where the developers have the resources or time required to continually monitor and attack the botting problem. We barely get updates as it is, and most of them have reduced significantly over time in size as the developers get wrapped up in larger game rewrites or have taken other jobs in order to support themselves financially.

Some basic IP verification, some flat bans on addresses coming from AWS, and if you're feeling REAAALY spicy some hardware verification.

Easy enough to conveniently simplify the problem and make it seem obvious. Much harder again, to actually make it happen in a way that wouldn't take a lot of development time, upkeep and constant monitoring. What do you do when your "easy" method starts banning people wrongly? Do you ignore them and let them stay banned? Do you devote the time to also manually verifying every single edge case and/or ban appeal?
As MagicMan said, if you have developed such an effective solution I'm sure both the developers of this game and the rest of the games industry would love to talk about it with you. Otherwise, saying things like this only shows that it is you that misunderstands the intricacies of maintaining these types of anti-botting measures.

That's enough to deal with the majority of script kiddies playing this game, and a hard ban hammer will take care of like the couple of people who would bother circumventing it.

Again, in the process taking away time from developing the game and fixing core issues that much more largely impact the experience of every player.

Heck, I'm pretty sure most here would stop doing if it wasn't tacitly encouraged.

Not really. As you so helpfully mentioned, most of the botting issue in this game stems from mechanics that are both blatantly broken and unenjoyable for people to do themselves, instead of any monetary incentive (for the most part). Which is why the developers haven't "encouraged" it as you suggest, but instead decided to turn a blind eye to as the other solution would both make a lot of people's experience with the game worse, and also eliminate the opportunity to evaluate what parts of the game are unhealthy yet mandatory enough that they encourage botting behaviour from people. This philosophy has resulted in a lot of great QoL updates to the game, such as being able to area farm crops instead of doing it one by one, auto drinking water to regain stamina, study desks to reduce the need to constantly refill your study window, etc etc.

I for one am glad the developers are taking this sensible approach to mitigating the botting issue, where both the game and its players benefit over time as the fat gets trimmed out, instead of wasting time developing "easy fix" anti-botting measures that would be doomed from the start and only leave the game in a less enjoyable spot when they get implemented.

[Ardennesss]

a bunch of cringe takes

People bot hafen because it saves time and it's allowed, people bot other games to make money. As small as this game is, all it'd take to stop ~90% of botting is a few nukes to scare people off the secret sauce - and then a few very simple server side checks against certain behaviors to catch another 9%. The 1% of total autists that'll make it their life's mission to bot hafen undetected? Spoiler, they're botting to raise certain parts of their industry which you could just spot check once every couple weeks. We literally had a kingdom get nuked last world because Jorb got BORED enough to actually check what stats people had and investigated the people at the top and found they were exploiting. Claiming that's not a feasible method to deter botting is at best ignorant and at worst malicious.

[strpk0]

People bot hafen because it saves time and it's allowed, people bot other games to make money. As small as this game is, all it'd take to stop ~90% of botting is a few nukes to scare people off the secret sauce - and then a few very simple server side checks against certain behaviors to catch another 9%. The 1% of total autists that'll make it their life's mission to bot hafen undetected? Spoiler, they're botting to raise certain parts of their industry which you could just spot check once every couple weeks.

Lots of assumptions and made up numbers here. It's almost a trend with people that are so vehemently anti-botting yet don't even make an actual effort to prove why their points are valid.

We literally had a kingdom get nuked last world because Jorb got BORED enough to actually check what stats people had and investigated the people at the top and found they were exploiting. Claiming that's not a feasible method to deter botting is at best ignorant and at worst malicious.

Nobody is saying the devs being forced to spend time (whether small amounts or not) sitting down at their computers looking through logs and manually verifying constantly to detect botters and catch them with their pants down every so often wouldn't be effective. What is instead being discussed here is whether that's healthy for the game and its development and/or justifiable by botting's current impact on it.
Clearly if the developers haven't picked your option given that they probably have the tools to do it right now (you said it yourself, jorb checked up on server stats when he felt bored and found exploits), then perhaps there's a reason why they haven't chosen to do it. Call it lazyness or lack of resources, it's clearly not going to be done, so I don't see what use there is in arguing for this as a viable solution to botting.

And besides, your example is extremely unrelated to botting. What happened there was an actual game exploit which players were abusing and then, when caught, actively trying to conceal from the developers in order to gain an unfair advantage. The stats they gained from doing so were also glaringly only achievable through exploits and nothing else, thus leading to immediate suspicion. What makes you confidently think that detecting small-scale botting done by someone that isn't trying to get themselves banned/nuked by standing out too much would be as easy as in this instance?

[wonder-ass]

a bunch of cringe takes

People bot hafen because it saves time and it's allowed, people bot other games to make money. As small as this game is, all it'd take to stop ~90% of botting is a few nukes to scare people off the secret sauce - and then a few very simple server side checks against certain behaviors to catch another 9%. The 1% of total autists that'll make it their life's mission to bot hafen undetected? Spoiler, they're botting to raise certain parts of their industry which you could just spot check once every couple weeks. We literally had a kingdom get nuked last world because Jorb got BORED enough to actually check what stats people had and investigated the people at the top and found they were exploiting. Claiming that's not a feasible method to deter botting is at best ignorant and at worst malicious.

you would litearlly nuke the games player base to 0 lmao.