General bots/botting discussion

[jorb]

Probably those are not very good ideas

I'm glad we agree.

[pimotimo]

Still better to not do anything to botters
Pjsalt

[loftar]

Still better to not do anything to botters :D

I sure appreciate how the default mindset is that there is something that can "just be done".

[dageir]

Well. Maybe some people in the community could volunteer as bot detectors and document that people do not respond when spoken to?
Afterwards the devs or maybe moderators of these forums could verify the findings and raze the villages commiting botting.

[Astarisk]

Brilliant ideas! Nothing new has been posted here, as there is pretty much nothing that can be done to combat botting itself aside from changing game mechanics to not favor them (more time gates?). What do you propose to do if you run into a player that doesn't speak your language? Or what if the guy is just simply ignoring you? (I sometimes just completely ignore everything when playing the game and watch something else between clicks). Hell, it wouldn't be hard to have a bot just simply alert someone when something is afoul! That way you have a player ready to answer anyone x].

Why can't people just simply understand that on a technical level there is not much that can be done to prevent botting, and social engineering is not any better.

[ethan]

The main point being that all automatic methods of bot detection can be easily circumvented. Captchas don't help a bit -- just pop in from your web browser once an hour when they happen to solve them. If you aren't at home, just solve them from your smartphone or whatever. Or cache ten up. Or implement OCR. &c&c. On the other hand, they are certainly annoying for all people playing honestly.

The only way to try and detect botting somewhat reliably would be to monitor people manually, and, honestly, ain't nobody got time for that. I'd much rather spend that time trying to decrease the incentives to bot. As has been said from time to time, the fact that a mechanic is bottable or even something one wants to bot is at least an indication that said mechanic is perhaps less than optimal in and of itself.

Its refreshing to see that opinion coming from a Dev,

As a hermit I don't see any real benefit to botting.
Couritosity system limits LP botting,
Hunger limits FEP botting.

However when you get to village size, there is a need for a lot more resources. That have to be gathered through repetitive means.
This means massive farms, heaps of foragables, etc. Which is tedious work, that can't be shared because it requires multiple villagers to invest in the same skills, which is seen as waste so people specialise.

I like the auto-planting, auto harvesting, but its still a lot of work.
I think there needs to be less requirement for a lot of something and more requirement for few of high quality.

As an example, tables that allow you to eat shit loads. Instead make it so that the table only effects the amount of FEPs and make the FEPs count towards the next level. Eating 1 item and gaining 3 levels in 1 attribute is better than 100 food items, with the amount of hunger loss being the same.

[DDDsDD999]

loftar pls set enable_botting variable to 0 instead of 1 ty

[ArvinJA]

We need a War on Botting tbh, declaring wars on things always solves the problem

[elilasol]

I am always hesitant to discuss this subject, but okay, here goes.

I write automation for a living, I am literally paid to come in and look at a person's job and build a computer to replace them. What it really comes down to is that I can reverse engineer any interaction which can be programmed into a game. If I were writing bots, it would take about as long to reverse engineer a solution to any automated approach as it did to originally write the idea into the client. Now, if you think that means I waste a week of my time and jorb/loftar waste a week of theirs though, this is incorrect. What actually happens is that they spend a week programming, I spend a week programming, and all players using my bot ALSO have effectively broken whatever security measure has been made. The bots lose a week of time, and more importantly the players lose a work of actual gameplay implementations. Since there are multiple bots, while they lose a week of gameplay, they gain gameplay at a much faster pace. With 10 bots running I lose half a day of work compared to a player, with 20 I lose a few hours.

They could, indeed, spend all of their development time in a race between bot writers and their game. And ALL players would suffer as a result.

You wanna talk about what is not possible to truly automate? There's only two real things that have not been really solved in the programming world. And one of them is pretty close.

Pathfinding is a thing that computers have some measure of difficulty with. This is a problem of calculations that a computer must simulate for fastest path of things, where a human can look and see pretty quickly. Assuming they changed world generation to generate a terrain which made bots have issues, at best the bots would arrive at a given location slower than a human. This does provide you with an answer to your question, though. How do you stop a bot? Well any robot is going to be relatively bad at running away from things effectively. Take the skill for murder and just kill any bot you meet. Problem solved. Still, you're going to end up killing normal humans as well without really being able to tell the difference.

A second thing computers are shit at is real, live, human communication(Jorb or someone mentioned this, in the computer world it is called heuristics). A computer can't truly interact on a human level. So you could hire a shit load of gm's and pay them to constantly go around trying to strike up conversations with all... there are currently 200 people playing. This is pretty expensive. And still doesn't solve the issue, if this were a real problem you'd just install a chat client and have it message you when a conversation was happening, and you'd talk yourself.

And that's it. Captchas are not a solution. They will annoy a human and will be solved instantly by a bot. All you have to do is encounter it once as a real live player, and then you already know how to solve it. Remember anything that gets sent to the client is data that is easily and simply reverse engineered.

Also, I should point out the annoyance factor. Remember that for a bot any system of interaction costs it 0 seconds. It solves all things instantly and doesn't get annoyed when you interrupt its progress. You do. And you will only get more annoyed when you realize that the bots still exist AND you have to put up with this annoying pop up every random 20 minutes or whatever.

A real question back though. Have you really ever seen a bot? Tell me how you knew for sure? It didn't talk? I don't talk to any human I encounter, I just run, then hearth home.

[dageir]

I saw several bots last world. Self proclaimed ones at that.
Nobody felt ashamed of botting, it was the way to play it seemed. I fear there is alot of it this world aswell.
The devs are not openly encouraging botting, yet I have a feeling they take a lukewarm stance and let it slide.

My main complaint is that botting is something done by an exclusive group of players.
I realise there is no way to "win" the game, but botting is a way for veterans to maintain the "gap" and even increase it.