Silba
is stephany, the josh wife
- Joined
- Aug 22, 2013
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Hello everyone, I'd like to open a discussion about botting and how to discourage it. I see many servers, especially oldschool that are "anti-bot" but the reality is that these servers thrive because of bots and the relevant people are usually quite stupid in their enforcement. Yes that's a bold "stupid". I'd like this discussion to not be about stupid ways that currently exist.
What's stupid:
Banning bots - We can't enforce this, it's stupid and ineffective at best. People who want to bot will bot no matter what you do.
Making it hard to bot - Almost nothing we do will impact botters worse than it impacts a normal player. The exception to this is a custom client, but that stops almost no one these days.
Banning more than x amount of multi client - We can't enforce nor verify this, it's stupid and downright harmful to legit players, I don't need to list how many ways there are to share an IP with someone, this argument is older than me, we're all aware of it and it's something I have personally suffered from for years with stupid GMs as I regularly play with my brother on the same network.
Why do people bot?
It's boring to manually EXP - If the difficulty and exp rates aren't well balanced we end up on a server that's just a hotkey pressing simulator and exp go brrrr with mind numbing repetitiveness. This is exaggerated on bad oldschool servers where there's no hotkeys, it's either you bot so you dont get rsi or you play paladin.
Big numbers are more fun, me want big number level - Who doesn't want to brag about their level or easily kill those who are a lower level? Maybe they just want to have access to content but don't want to spend 60 hours gfbing tombs, see "It's boring to manually EXP".
No incentive to manually hunt - There's usually no meaningful reward for exping on most servers. Mostly everything is locked behind paywalls or tedious quests. You get most of your abilities before level 100 (especially on oldschool) and the game hardly changes from this point. We should level up so we can... level up? the exact same hotkey spamming just in a different area. It's much nicer to set up a bot and come back the next day to some serious progression and loot.
What's the problem with botting?
Artificial player numbers - Our servers will have many players yet the cities will be empty.
Low player interaction - They are botting for everything they need and rarely interact with anyone other than to sell/buy occasionally.
Economy is bot-based - Our economy will depend on botters to function.
Progression - Botters break the natural progression of power on servers, instead of the whole server moving towards being more powerful, only a handful of the best botters will have most of the power leading to power abuse in many cases. (see any rlmap server of any version that doesn't take care of botters)
They're a waste of resources - They provide little benefit to our servers yet they take up the most resources being online 24/7.
I know there's more points I've missed, I'm just drawing a blank right now and the thread doesn't need to be so long anyway... Feel free to reply with your own.
Some of you will be thinking, I'm just a salty botter who got banned, but, no. I'm actually a hardcore botter and rarely get banned and if I do get banned I just make more accounts. The stricter the GMs are against botters, the more accounts I make. It's kind of like a hobby, I rarely exp.
Ill give some examples of how easy it is to bot on "anti-bot" servers for those who are unaware and keep in mind this is all just google-fu I am not a programmer or master h4xx0r.
I'm bringing this up because I'm making my own server and am trying to figure out ways to discourage botting and I think as a hardcore botter I have some unique insight and ability to tackle this issue. I usually keep to myself about ideas I have but I think for this project I'm going to have everything on the forums, starting with how I plan to tackle botting.
Since my server will likely be one of those 0-30 players online custom ots I will have an easy time manually enforcing any botting rules since I can check each player easily. So besides that my current though process is this:
AFK Training:
I won't have trainers or offline training I am toying with the idea of having an item that is purchasable and only useable once every 30 minutes that will give the user a minimum of 30 minutes 'training' in the skill chosen. I will try to limit this somehow to make it unfriendly to botting but enjoyable for a player to get. One idea I've got to make this unfriendly to bots would be needing to 'charge' another item with monster kills then going back to town and trading this charged item for the skilling item. If I randomised the charging and/or charges and/or location of the npc to trade with each time then a bot wouldn't be able to reliably 'refill' this and I'd be sure to keep in mind how annoying this could be for the player. This should 'solve' afk training since it will always be better to manually train and if someone does afk train they will never overtake someone using this system.
Cavebotting:
This is probably one of the most harmful types of botting, my current thought process on this would be to try making stamina regain much slower and allow it to be replenished through something that is not bot friendly. Boss fights maybe. I don't expect a normal player to run in to a stamina issue though. Also the best exp/hr on my server would be some sort of regular bossing, again I'd only need some slight randomisation to avoid this being botted.
Runefarming:
My server will be oldschool inspired, so rune making will be relevant. I'm thinking of making soulpoints replenish better when killing bosses and adding an additional cost for making runes, maybe something that has to be looted from monsters. I haven't thought too much about this one yet, I want people to enjoy making runes and I want it to be just complex enough that it's not really afkable in the same way as normal runemaking.
The regen and exp will be quite slow on my server, so this will also discourage botting to a certain extent.
I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on how to discourage botting and if you want to pass comment on my ideas go for it, I look forward to the replies.
What's stupid:
Banning bots - We can't enforce this, it's stupid and ineffective at best. People who want to bot will bot no matter what you do.
Making it hard to bot - Almost nothing we do will impact botters worse than it impacts a normal player. The exception to this is a custom client, but that stops almost no one these days.
Banning more than x amount of multi client - We can't enforce nor verify this, it's stupid and downright harmful to legit players, I don't need to list how many ways there are to share an IP with someone, this argument is older than me, we're all aware of it and it's something I have personally suffered from for years with stupid GMs as I regularly play with my brother on the same network.
Why do people bot?
It's boring to manually EXP - If the difficulty and exp rates aren't well balanced we end up on a server that's just a hotkey pressing simulator and exp go brrrr with mind numbing repetitiveness. This is exaggerated on bad oldschool servers where there's no hotkeys, it's either you bot so you dont get rsi or you play paladin.
Big numbers are more fun, me want big number level - Who doesn't want to brag about their level or easily kill those who are a lower level? Maybe they just want to have access to content but don't want to spend 60 hours gfbing tombs, see "It's boring to manually EXP".
No incentive to manually hunt - There's usually no meaningful reward for exping on most servers. Mostly everything is locked behind paywalls or tedious quests. You get most of your abilities before level 100 (especially on oldschool) and the game hardly changes from this point. We should level up so we can... level up? the exact same hotkey spamming just in a different area. It's much nicer to set up a bot and come back the next day to some serious progression and loot.
What's the problem with botting?
Artificial player numbers - Our servers will have many players yet the cities will be empty.
Low player interaction - They are botting for everything they need and rarely interact with anyone other than to sell/buy occasionally.
Economy is bot-based - Our economy will depend on botters to function.
Progression - Botters break the natural progression of power on servers, instead of the whole server moving towards being more powerful, only a handful of the best botters will have most of the power leading to power abuse in many cases. (see any rlmap server of any version that doesn't take care of botters)
They're a waste of resources - They provide little benefit to our servers yet they take up the most resources being online 24/7.
I know there's more points I've missed, I'm just drawing a blank right now and the thread doesn't need to be so long anyway... Feel free to reply with your own.
Some of you will be thinking, I'm just a salty botter who got banned, but, no. I'm actually a hardcore botter and rarely get banned and if I do get banned I just make more accounts. The stricter the GMs are against botters, the more accounts I make. It's kind of like a hobby, I rarely exp.
Ill give some examples of how easy it is to bot on "anti-bot" servers for those who are unaware and keep in mind this is all just google-fu I am not a programmer or master h4xx0r.
I used to bot on Medivia, I would make 100 backpacks of SDs per day and there was no shortage of buyers. I got banned on 3 accounts but I had dozens of accounts and probably over 100 characters with different houses and hiding spots all over the map. This was achieved by 2 purpose built medivia bots, my own scripts in autohotkey several VMs and VPNs. All free. I was lucky to find free medivia bots though, they're not usually free but are still cheap.
My most recent achievement is botting on Nostalrius Fearless server. The GMs here are probably the stupidest I've encountered, they are inconsistent with their bans and don't seem to communicate with each other. (yes there's a bit of salt here, they banned my friend 3x and lifted those same bans 3x, pure stupid GMs).
So on Nostalrius it's a little harder than Medivia, it has a strict MC limit and you're not allowed to logout/move and not reply to a GM on-screen plus the GMs are more active and more stupid leading to some really weird and unpredictable bans and then donate items are a must for rune farming which stops a lot of people. I'd say I'm successful still though, I received no bans on 8 accounts through my use of VMs, VPNs and I actually had to write a python discord bot for this one to set up alerts and stuff so I stopped getting pked and could reply to GM. Again though, there's no shortage of paid bots which im not willing to pay for but they are there nonetheless.
Now I'm not trying to brag here, I know there's people who bot on a larger and more sophisticated scale than me I'm just trying to point out how a normal guy like me with almost no programming experience can absolutely circumvent any attempts to stop botting. If I can do it, anyone can do it.
My most recent achievement is botting on Nostalrius Fearless server. The GMs here are probably the stupidest I've encountered, they are inconsistent with their bans and don't seem to communicate with each other. (yes there's a bit of salt here, they banned my friend 3x and lifted those same bans 3x, pure stupid GMs).
So on Nostalrius it's a little harder than Medivia, it has a strict MC limit and you're not allowed to logout/move and not reply to a GM on-screen plus the GMs are more active and more stupid leading to some really weird and unpredictable bans and then donate items are a must for rune farming which stops a lot of people. I'd say I'm successful still though, I received no bans on 8 accounts through my use of VMs, VPNs and I actually had to write a python discord bot for this one to set up alerts and stuff so I stopped getting pked and could reply to GM. Again though, there's no shortage of paid bots which im not willing to pay for but they are there nonetheless.
Now I'm not trying to brag here, I know there's people who bot on a larger and more sophisticated scale than me I'm just trying to point out how a normal guy like me with almost no programming experience can absolutely circumvent any attempts to stop botting. If I can do it, anyone can do it.
I'm bringing this up because I'm making my own server and am trying to figure out ways to discourage botting and I think as a hardcore botter I have some unique insight and ability to tackle this issue. I usually keep to myself about ideas I have but I think for this project I'm going to have everything on the forums, starting with how I plan to tackle botting.
Since my server will likely be one of those 0-30 players online custom ots I will have an easy time manually enforcing any botting rules since I can check each player easily. So besides that my current though process is this:
AFK Training:
I won't have trainers or offline training I am toying with the idea of having an item that is purchasable and only useable once every 30 minutes that will give the user a minimum of 30 minutes 'training' in the skill chosen. I will try to limit this somehow to make it unfriendly to botting but enjoyable for a player to get. One idea I've got to make this unfriendly to bots would be needing to 'charge' another item with monster kills then going back to town and trading this charged item for the skilling item. If I randomised the charging and/or charges and/or location of the npc to trade with each time then a bot wouldn't be able to reliably 'refill' this and I'd be sure to keep in mind how annoying this could be for the player. This should 'solve' afk training since it will always be better to manually train and if someone does afk train they will never overtake someone using this system.
Cavebotting:
This is probably one of the most harmful types of botting, my current thought process on this would be to try making stamina regain much slower and allow it to be replenished through something that is not bot friendly. Boss fights maybe. I don't expect a normal player to run in to a stamina issue though. Also the best exp/hr on my server would be some sort of regular bossing, again I'd only need some slight randomisation to avoid this being botted.
Runefarming:
My server will be oldschool inspired, so rune making will be relevant. I'm thinking of making soulpoints replenish better when killing bosses and adding an additional cost for making runes, maybe something that has to be looted from monsters. I haven't thought too much about this one yet, I want people to enjoy making runes and I want it to be just complex enough that it's not really afkable in the same way as normal runemaking.
The regen and exp will be quite slow on my server, so this will also discourage botting to a certain extent.
I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on how to discourage botting and if you want to pass comment on my ideas go for it, I look forward to the replies.