Botting discussion

[Zajmer]

Yes. I agree. We should use the limited dev time of two people to individually hunt down and ban bots. No! Instead, they should start using their dev time to create a robust bot detection system instead of developing the game!

Ye, it must be very tedious to spot this shit for 15minutes once a week

[wolf1000wolf]

They're a waste of everyone's time.

You need novel ideas to "fix botting". You don't need novel ideas to tell someone they haven't thought very hard about it.

Just wanted to point out that I was actually enjoying kabuto and VDZ's back and forth. Maybe for vets who are always kept up to date on the forums and HnH news/discussion, the bot discussion is truly an atomized pile of dust from a horse skeleton but for those of us who only occasionally check into HnH, the discussion was interesting enough.

[Burinn]

Yes. I agree. We should use the limited dev time of two people to individually hunt down and ban bots. No! Instead, they should start using their dev time to create a robust bot detection system instead of developing the game!

Ye, it must be very tedious to spot this shit for 15minutes once a week

This is harming you?

[Zajmer]

yes, it does.

[dafels]

Bots can be very easily prevented, I have suggested it a long time ago already.
Mandatory captchas, so many of them that it would be infeasible to pay for solving them, sending passports to sweden for account verification etc.

Yes, I think birth certificates would be better for verification. Also, death certificates, if a person dies, so his account cant be used for botting. Yes and captchas for everyone to fill in every 10 minutes! Great ideas.

[kabuto202]

It's not a paper on how bot detection works, but rather an idea to improve bot detection.

Bruuuh, I never said it was a paper on how bot detection works. I said, that it has an explanation of modern bot detection works (which it does), as I was making the point that you don't know understand the difference between the words you are misusing. See that's how a source or a citation works. Rather than tossing irrelevant tat at people, you back-up what you just said, with a relevant and hopefully credible source about the thing you just said.

It is not a methodology that has been tested in reality and it hasn't yet withstood attempts to subvert it.

Oh for fucks's sake. https://lmgtfy.app/?q=bot+detection+implementation+game

Look a world of countless articles describing what appear to be very similar system describing their implementations and results. See, I was asking for citations for your own good, because if you stop and try to find a source to back up your claim, you can avoid being confidently wrong all the time.

TL;DR: None of them work against dedicated botters (e.g. major factions in Haven). All you can feasibly do is catch scriptkiddies, who are not the problem..

No bruh, it means it's less effective against professional bot manufacturers who make bots as a career due to some multi-million dollar gold selling industry.

Most game companies have adopted client-side detection methods that analyze game bot signatures as the primary measure against game bots. Client-side detection methods use the bot program’s name, process information, and memory status. This method is similar to antivirus programs that detect computer viruses (Mohaisen and Alrawi 2014). Client-side detection methods can be readily detoured by game bot developers, in addition to degrading the computer’s performance. For this reason, many countermeasures that are based on this approach, such as commercial anti-bot programs, are not currently preferred.

I'm assuming English isn't your first language or something and that you don't know how to read tech papers. "Most game have adopted" is past tense, it may imply but does not denote standard practice. However "For this reason, many countermeasures that are based on this approach, such as commercial anti-bot programs, are not currently preferred." is industry standard jargon for "This is not considered standard or at least best practice" and even without understanding the jargon should be clear to any English speaker "don't use this method".

And even if you do manage to eventually catch some major faction bots - what then?

What part of permaban is unclear? Ban their IP. Ban all accounts associated with their email. They resume botting on new accounts? Sounds like new accounts are going to get banned.

If policing was an effective way to stop crime without harming tons of innocents, criminals would not share tactics as to how to evade the police. Therefore we should have literally zero law enforcement.

VDZ logic 2021. Seriously, you're being sold a product. The tips are how to slow down how quickly your "obvious bot account" quotient fills up. If all you do is bot on a single account for like 8 hours a day and that's the extent of your botting (as per the "tips) then that's fine. At that point you have the same exact impact as a dedicated player except you're choosing not to play.


EDIT:

Let's move this whole "botting" thing to an existing discussion. Thanks. We don't need it rehashed in every thread of the forum.

Sorry, didn't see this until I posted it. I didn't even want to waste my time with this tat, but DK poster child really insisted on proving once and for all that reverse engineering some games does not in fact make you an expert on industry anti-botting practices.

[DreadKatak]

Hell yes, bring down the bots. Make people jump through hoops to get away with it. There's absolutely a difference between coding in a convenience for yourself and actively creating a bot army to gain an advantage over players that are playing the game as it was meant to be played. They are harmful as can be, especially the brazen ones that rub their nut oil in your face with it like the screenshot earlier.

If botting and shit is fun for you, then let's make a game of 'dodge getting my bots banned' out of it. At the very least, going unnoticed is better than the current state.

EDIT: Also didn't see the mod comment. Feel free to move this, as needed.

[22nd_ChuckNorris]

long time lurker / player, dont usually bother posting but this time.... bots are the reason myself and friends quit every world. its just completely unfair to everybody else that does not bot, how can anybody even dispute that?

[MagicManICT]

Moved these posts here as I don't want to send the message that these are invalid complaints or that you don't have the privileges or rights to discuss it. Just don't clutter up the new world announcement over a matter that has been discussed multiple times in the past.

If someone wants to pick out a "more appropriate" thread from the past to merge this with, that's fine, and if folks just want to pick up what I see as another copy/paste discussion on the matter, I'm fine with that. PM me or report this post with comment if someone has a better thread for it. I really do suggest people read through some of the past threads on the matter, though, and recall that part of the solution requires the developers decide they want to do something, so any solutions that don't meet their stated goals are probably time not spent wisely.

Just to note, I'm going to try to trim what I can out of the Announcement thread. No promises I'll get everything proper.

[VDZ]

It's not a paper on how bot detection works, but rather an idea to improve bot detection.

Bruuuh, I never said it was a paper on how bot detection works. I said, that it has an explanation of modern bot detection works (which it does)

In that case, the provided source does not back up your claim that this is how modern bot detection works; apart from the intro section showing bot detection used in practice does not work adequately, it's all a theoretical proposal.

It is not a methodology that has been tested in reality and it hasn't yet withstood attempts to subvert it.

Oh for fucks's sake. https://lmgtfy.app/?q=bot+detection+implementation+game

That gets me primarily research papers on theoretical possible implementations. 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.

as I was making the point that you don't know understand the difference between the words you are misusing.

Please cite the exact words from that article that prove that anti-botting mechanicsms are not a subcategory of anti-cheating mechanisms, and that bot detection in practice occurs almost exclusively server-side. (Contradicting your repeated assertions are "Most game companies have adopted client-side detection methods that analyze game bot signatures as the primary measure against game bots. Client-side detection methods use the bot program’s name, process information, and memory status. This method is similar to antivirus programs that detect computer viruses (Mohaisen and Alrawi 2014)." - which both goes against 'server-side only' as well as it being dissimilar to invalid behavior detection anticheat (for example, various online games disconnect or ban you if you have a tool like Cheat Engine running or anything that looks like it - precisely the method described to detect bot programs here).)

See that's how a source or a citation works. Rather than tossing irrelevant tat at people, you back-up what you just said, with a relevant and hopefully credible source about the thing you just said.

That's...not how sourcing works. You can't just post a link and say 'this proves you're wrong'. You make logical statements refuting the arguments you are contradicting, and should your argument rely on external information or if you need to appeal to an external authority, you point to a source and make clear which statement the source backs up.

irrelevant tat

The correct word is "expertise". In the end, the words in papers like the ones you linked are also expertise. Most of the statements in that paper are also not backed up by external sources, but rather by expert explanations and data that seem reasonable enough to pass peer review.

reverse engineering some games

I just took a look at the list at work that keeps track of game modifications, and I have made edits to roughly 300 games for work alone (mostly small modifications, but still). That is of course not counting the tons of games I've looked at where 'just modify the game' was not the chosen solution; this number might be equivalent, but we don't have a clear list of such instances.

TL;DR: None of them work against dedicated botters (e.g. major factions in Haven). All you can feasibly do is catch scriptkiddies, who are not the problem..

No bruh, it means it's less effective against professional bot manufacturers who make bots as a career due to some multi-million dollar gold selling industry.

You are both overestimating the software engineering skills of professional programmers for niche consumer software and underestimating the programming skill and dedication of hobbyists. ("Multi-million dollar industry" does not guarantee 'sane software engineering'; gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry and the technical garbage it often produces can really make you cry.) The typical advantage of commercial development over hobbyist development is that more manpower can be spent developing...but when it comes to no-life hobbyists they can do the same (and even exceed commercial development in terms of time expenditure).

Most game companies have adopted client-side detection methods that analyze game bot signatures as the primary measure against game bots. Client-side detection methods use the bot program’s name, process information, and memory status. This method is similar to antivirus programs that detect computer viruses (Mohaisen and Alrawi 2014). Client-side detection methods can be readily detoured by game bot developers, in addition to degrading the computer’s performance. For this reason, many countermeasures that are based on this approach, such as commercial anti-bot programs, are not currently preferred.

I'm assuming English isn't your first language or something and that you don't know how to read tech papers. "Most game have adopted" is past tense, it may imply but does not denote standard practice.

Actually, it's the present perfect tense. "This tense indicates either that an action was completed (finished or "perfected") at some point in the past or that the action extends to the present". (In other words, either the games now have client-side detection, or the effects of adopting client-side detection are still present.) Let me also draw attention to:

as the primary measure against game bots

(emphasis mine)

If this were no longer the case, they would use different phrasing, such as "used to adopt client-side detection methods".

However "For this reason, many countermeasures that are based on this approach, such as commercial anti-bot programs, are not currently preferred." is industry standard jargon for "This is not considered standard or at least best practice" and even without understanding the jargon should be clear to any English speaker "don't use this method".

"Trust me, this says something else than what it says"? There are no between-the-lines insinuations here; it states pretty clearly that the industry is just not enthusiastic about the present methods. (And that is because they have a very poor effort:result ratio.)

And even if you do manage to eventually catch some major faction bots - what then?

What part of permaban is unclear? Ban their IP. Ban all accounts associated with their email. They resume botting on new accounts? Sounds like new accounts are going to get banned.

Are you still in 2005? New e-mail addresses can be generated by the average user within seconds nowadays. Likewise, there are countless proxy servers you can use to mask the real origin of the behavior (as well as countless legit origins anyone can use nowadays, like free wi-fi). So what if the bot account gets banned? The spoils have already been transferred to a safer account. Are you going to ban anyone who's ever traded with a player using that IP?

If policing was an effective way to stop crime without harming tons of innocents, criminals would not share tactics as to how to evade the police. Therefore we should have literally zero law enforcement.

VDZ logic 2021.

This situation is a lot more like how tech companies like Facebook get fined miniscule amounts for blatantly violating the law, or even for not changing anything and continuing to violate the law for years after being forced to change things. "But that's 5 billion! That's no small sum!" That's not even a tenth of Facebook's yearly revenue, and in those 7 years they've made far more profit by ignoring the law than the fine costs them. So it is with botters; you can take a small portion of their ill-gained spoils, but you cannot punish them further without significant collateral damage (as there's no real way to tell which people are and aren't involved with the bots).

stop crime without harming tons of innocents

Blackstone's ratio is one of the cornerstones of modern law. You cannot punish malicious behavior unless you are capable of doing so without there being a reasonable chance that innocents are unjustly punished instead, not even if many more malicious actors are punished than innocent ones. This is actually a major issue in legal enforcement as it greatly restricts the ability to punish crime, and a great many criminals do indeed get away with their crimes as a result.