A radical change to OTS to remove/reduce botting on our servers. - A change of mind

[Damon]

Heya Otland,
Today I have just been checking on Otland like I usually do and what thread popped up right in front of me?
YES! It was yet another discussion about how to get rid of bots.
I have thought about this quite quite often from time to time, especiall when I was running my OTS. But since my servers were never crowded, I never experienced any problems with botters at all. Now seeing this thread about botting once more I've drawn a rather radical solution to this problem. I am sure few will agree with me, and alot will just think this is a joke, but in order to fight against this big problem CIP has left us, we might aswell need a CHANGE to OTS.
Well, what is my idea then? In a nutshell: Achieve a loyal and manual (also smaller) community of players by setting up PAY TO PLAY (NOT PAY TO WIN!) , and FEATURING GROUP HUNTS/QUESTS and CREATE A SERVER filled with HIDDEN SECRETS and SPONTANOUS RANDOM EVENTS bots couldn't possibly be a big help to.
WAIT...WHAT DID I JUST SAY? Yes, you've got me right. First of all I think that playing on a server where you need to PAY TO PLAY (monthly or one time fee) is another big step expected from a player. Woho! Isn't Tibia also PAY TO PLAY and full of botters? Indeed, however we are talking about OPEN TIBIA SERVERS here. I can see many botters (and unfortunately also manualers) regarding this as a NO GO and therefor not joining the server. So what have achieved so far? By now, we probably have gotten rid of 80%-90% of the botters and quite alot of possible manualers aswell, lets say 60%. While the riddance of the botters is exactly what we hoped for, the loss of the big amount of manualers is unfortune, but can't be helped - for now.
What makes our longing for PAY TO PLAY righteous? The idea of the riddance of the botters and taking OT-gaming to a next level...AND the fact, that SERVERS COST MONEY, their MAINTENANCE is a PAIN IN THE ASS and maintaining an OTS takes alot of EFFORT AND DEDICATION. I can see the PAY TO PLAY used in a cheap monthly fee (3€-4€) or a bit higher one time payment (10€-15€). However I consider the chance of ridding the botters with a monthly fee, even a small one, higher, than a One Time Payment. Alot of botters already have to pay monthly for their bot programms such as Xeno, or iBot and this would mean another investition for them to take.A small monthly fee should be affordable for anyone who enjoys PLAYING (manualing) Open Tibia Servers and is willing to understand that in order to keep botters out, aswell as guaranteeing a nice atmosphere among the players and continous bug fixes and (Map-)Updates some money is needed. This small cash goes into Server costs, Updates (maybee enough money left to hire mappers/scripters/GMs) from time to time, Bugfixes, and Maintaining the server - all these things are considered to be essential when it comes to running an adventerous and exciting OTS.
Keeping in mind, that the first servers of this "next Level", if they by any chance will be happening, consist of a low amount of players I can't see OTS owners making a big fortune from this, thus please quit your whining about owners who wanna become rich bitc***. If under any circumstances a dollar or two gets to the owner of the OTS you are playing, BE HAPPY for them, because this may just motivate them to keep going, and give them somewhat of a - effort pays off - feeling. As for further payment options I would not completly refrain from the idea of adding an item shop additionally to the subscription model, however the shop musn't consist of any items giving advantages to its wielders. I can see house decorations and outfits (as cip already has done) a fair way to have another chance of supporting the server you love.
Now, we come to the SECOND CHANGE of the "next level" OTS:
THE GAMEPLAY itself: Keeping in mind the player base will be quite low at the start of these kinda servers - I am thinking of a 50-80 PEAK here - the gameplay must be adapted to this. While I dont want to completly refrain from the possibilty of RLMap Servers, I can see custom map servers and Evo TP Servers come out on top of this battle. A custom map could focus more on exploring (hidden quests) and story telling in order to compensate for the lack of players, while an Evo Server could feature hunting places developed for team hunting and challenging quests. I am not saying that we should turn OTS in a boring single player experience. Hell, NO! The focus should just be a little more on exploring. Also putting the focus on adding RANDOM Events, Group Hunting/Quests and HIDDEN QUESTS that only appear only once for the first one to find them feature the heart of the community and can be also enjoyed with a small group of friends, whose have sworn to follow each other till the depths of hell. This CHANGE OF GAMEPLAY FOCUS also affects the entire playstyle of the players and should focus on making the usage of bots inefficent for those botters who still overcame the payment obstacle. Also for building up and strenghten their community these new OTS should be communicating with their players and use forums. In those creative events like "giving a name for a new discovered village" could bring the community together and seperate botters. A server where gold farming and selling becomes useless and group hunting aswell as player bonds are featured there is no place for bots to be efficient. Last but not least the return of reliable, non power abusing GMs can take care of probably a fair amount of the remaining botters.
Those botters who are willing to stay even under all these circumstances, will be part of the server, like they always had been. However this now should be a really small amount and easily be taken care of or atleast not game harming and power abusing anymore.

With this, I bid thee, who has read through all this my sincerest gratitude and wish you a nice evening.
I, personally don't have the time to MAKE THIS CHANGE myself. But I am sure there are still people out there who are longing for this and who will gladly take atleast some of my ideas up and use them.

You have to be the change, you want to see in the world.

Kind Regards,
Damon[/COLOR]

@EldinWorld @HalfAway @hehemidu

 

[owned]

I disagree with this idea completely. I feel like it would result in greedy server owners abusing this system just to get money then once in game players would realize the server sucks. End result - More players lost from the OT Community.

 

[Damon]

I disagree with this idea completely. I feel like it would result in greedy server owners abusing this system just to get money then once in game players would realize the server sucks. End result - More players lost from the OT Community.

I see your point there mate. Believe me I have come across this in my considerations aswell.
Well I can see two solutions to this:
1) Would be a high qualita advertising listing features, decent screenshots and maybee even videos.
2) Would be a 7 day free trial, which would give you an insight to realize wheter this is a ready to run server and/or suits you or not.
--> Botters may be joining for this 7 days, too. But wont be able to do alot of harm, let alone influence the game.

But there is one thing you have to always keep in mind:
"By failing to believe in anyone, you CANT create a future." - as for your greedy server owners comment.
-----
If you still disagree completly you might also just go with some ideas of the SECOND CHANGE (of gameplay).

 

[filipus]

Yea, because Premia is the most populated tibia world ever.
The game already has a lack of players, putting a paywall into the consumers face would only scare them away even more.

 

[manix11]

Thats some silly idea mate

 

[Eiffel]

This doesn't solve anything. Here's why:

Any server worth playing (as in tons of people are interested) will have a group of players who will do anything to get an advantage over their peers. Not only that, but the paywall would be easily traversed because the botters will know that their advantage is worth it in this server. This is why the most popular servers are more likely to have botters, where as the smaller niche ones don't.

If the server is small to begin with, the people who do not have the feeling to bot and are legit players are being dis-serviced due to the fact that you, the creator, are limiting their gameplay by not allowing other people to join them unless they pay too. Besides paying for server costs, most games go Free-To-Play because they allow a larger community, which pleases most of the hardcore fanbase that originally supported them as they have other people to play the game with.

And last but not least, you can create a server that is open to everyone but is still detrimental to the actual botter to the point that they do are actually hurting themselves in efficiency if they bot.
Would it be difficult? Yes, and for mainly two reasons.

Believe it or not, the mass of people playing Tibia enjoy botting. Why? Because they don't want to re-experience the same Tibia formula, they want to experience something different but with the same overall aesthetic and controls of Tibia. This is why I don't understand the point of Real-Tibia servers, especially those with Rookgaard. If you know about OTs, then you have played the original and understand it. It's basically a tutorial at this point, and if someone designs a server around this "tutorial", you will of course have botters. The only appeal that I see with these servers are the fact that you know so much about the rules, that all that is left is perfecting the system, and what does things more perfect: a human or bot?

The other reason is due to bad system designs. It's cool to make a class that is unique and awesome, but if you make it poorly, someone will find a way to abuse it. Sadly, most of the systems rely around monotonous tasks which bots excel at. The two most important aspect of original tibia is primarily static: Hunting and Training.

Hunting rewards experience points, which translates to progression, which translates to power. What is the most effective way to achieve this? Botting a spawn that is easy enough that you won't die, and leave it on 24/7.
Training rewards skills, which translates to progression, which translates to power. What is the most effective way to achieve this? Botting at trainers (which is a stupid, utterly stupid design) 24/7. Heck, you could use a macro, it's that easy.

The last, and unmentioned reason, is that the majority of people don't want to learn. I had a discussion with Xaguls, co-owner of DeathZot and good friend of mine, about the design values around a custom server. He's incredibly intelligent and proficient in scripting/coding that he can create amazing systems that are new and fun. The problem? Most people don't actually want to play Tibia manually or learn new things that stray off the path. Only a small fraction of the community enjoys custom servers, and even less enjoy PvP-E focused servers. Sadly, that small fraction isn't appealing if the creators want money to pay for server costs, or to just make it their job.

So in the end, the real issue is getting the playerbase to stop being so quick to judge servers and their systems. And if you're smart enough, you can find designs that hurt botters without having to lift a finger to handout punishments, they'll do it on their own.

 

[Damon]

@manix11 I can totally understand if you disagree with my idea, however some reasoning would be appreciated in order to improve the idea of a new generation of OTS.
@filipus This is unfortunately true, as I've mentioned in my first post. However I will get back on this in the following.

@Eiffel
Hey there mate! First of all I would like to thank you for reading through this and leaving some decent feedback to discuss

I will gladly pick up the topic of the "PAYMENT WALL" again, as it is the step , I personally dislike the most.
In fact I pretty much appreciate how Open Tibia has developed to be more "free" and removing the market place in the forums and going back to helping each other out for free. "THE PAYMENT WALL" merely is ought to be a hindrance for the bothers, swell an indicator for the manual players, to think different. To value what the server owners do for their server and accept that at some point they deserve to receive money, too. And here it is the subscription model, which is most fair for the players. We all agree that a pay to win itemshop attracts people to "donate money", however for their own advantage and is likely to result in a power abuse. We still have the option of a "cosmetic only"-item shop (no overpowering of the donators), like e.g. League of Legends has.
This works out for LoL BECAUSE they have a huuuge amount of players. So why doesn't this work out for OTS? Because as Riot stated only a few percentage of players (2-3%) actually buy something in the stores. A lot of people just want to play the game and don't bother buying skins/cosmetics or anything else if it isn't giving a direct advantage to them. While Riot can still make quite a good living from this, an OTS couldn't possibly cover the costs and efforts put into it with only 3% donating from lets say 200 players. So I indeed see the subscription model as a new feature which should be used more frequently. However, I do not completely refrain from the idea of running OTS for free in general and adding non overpowering benefits to "VIPs" (nothing like some ideas of CIP; I completely hate the idea of spells being limited to VIPs) who pay a monthly fee.

So I DO SEE also a way in keeping the idea of mainly "free" OTS, however the problem of the botters remains and grows stronger the larger the server is, I agree with you on this. As I am not very much into scripting I cannot tell in how far we could rid the bothers by using scripts, but I assume it isn't done so easy as we haven't seen any OTS succeeding with it really. However I could think of commands for the players like "!bot player name" which can be used by players who suspect someone of botting and makes the server send them some kind of captcha/secure question they would have to answer in 15 minutes. But this idea has been around for a long time and actually players hate it to answer those questions, thats why only players should be able to use this command in a restricted frequency a day and per player in total. Also a not answered security question should just be noted by the server but not any automatic actions should be taken as it may affect wars or other situations in which answering is difficult. Players with a frequent reports ad unanswered questions should then be checked on by GMs at some time. The script could also be written to note whether the player was in PVP combat during the security question or in PVE combat in order to judge the situation. While in PVP combat he was most likely not afk (botting) in PVE he would more rather be a suspect if he was not close to the coordinates of a big quest or anything. Anyway final judgment should be executed by the GMs and should be only executed when the suspect is caught at the execution of botting itself. There is also the problem of combat bots and other kind of bots which harm normal players, however I have no idea on handling these yet.

Additionally I DO AGREE that the gameplay has to change and maybe is a reason for people botting. But I think that with a change of gameplay resulting in the inefficiency of bots (such as RANDOM EVENTS, HIDDEN QUESTS, FEATURED PARTY HUNTS...) quite a lot can be done for minimizing the bots to a minimum.

"So in the end, the real issue is getting the playerbase to stop being so quick to judge servers and their systems. And if you're smart enough, you can find designs that hurt botters without having to lift a finger to handout punishments, they'll do it on their own."

--> This is also mentioned in the topics headline. For a new generation of OTS to happen we first have to change our minds.

Kind Regards,
Damon

 

[Eiffel]

Damon

The reason that other servers have failed to eliminate botters is because the majority of the OT community bot. The few of us that don't can't possibly compete with donations compared to them. Not only that, botters account for playerbase. More people are likely to try and continue playing a server if the server numbers, even if misleading, are high. This makes them think that a ton of people are interested in the server.

League of Legends is very lucky game, in the sense that they were at the right place at the right time. They had no competition. Their game was really bad (especiallly if you played it during Beta/Season 1) but it didn't matter since no other game existed as a standalone with that gameplay.

To bring League of Legends in as an example of why a game can't be Free-to-Play unless you lucky is bad. Many other games have much lower numbers and still get played and updated and people are happy.

The OT community, has sadly, dwindled. I remember when I first joined around 2008-2009, the community was much larger. You could have multiple servers with hundreds of players each. Not only that, multiple servers would constantly be released and played. That amount of activity has almost come to a halt, and is nowhere near as active as it once was.

You couple the population problem with the lack of actual players who play the game manually, and the amount of work required to make custom content that is good and polished is only really worth it if you manage to hit the remaining playerbase, or if you just see your server as a past time and a thing to do, with money being a lingering thought.