How can we discourage botting?

[getema27]

lol this ChatGPT what a noob

nothing changed it's still tibia. gaming equipment these days is so fast tho kids are spamming like hell without a sweat.

u still need as much insight in keystrokes and mouse movement as possible. coded with good player insight is next step.

when a good player is playing a botter, he knows he's botting. this is the kind of information you want to apply on large scale.

 

[Tofame]

Sorry to say but thats a terrible idea.

First you are assuming the player can read, that actually understands the language, is willing to read, understands the message and is actually willing to coop.

You also assume no players will missclick or select the wrong answer. You'd be surprised how many people fail a test for missing the date/name or other simple questions

That system is very intrusive and hurts legit players for no reason. What if that modal window makes you die?

The solution is to build your game around being fun and not a grind fest that can be acomplished by a 1 brain cell living being just to reach a goal where "the fun" is.

There is a reason why big MMOs are selling level boosts, faction changes and so. They own their game market and can monetize features that players are willing to pay for. Before this, they'd be forced to either bot or not play at all. The so famous WoW token is an excellent example on how to combat bots and actually profit out of it.

Theres a lot of things you can do to have a healthier game and lower the chances of people botting.

Level caps to move the shift from infinite grind (vertical progression) to other objetives and have some kind of horizontal progression instead (group content, PvP, achievements, side activities...), more quests/story/side missions that rewards higher than mindless monster killing, spell rotations/combos and several different monster behaviours...

I'm not even suggesting to put a cap to how long you can kill monsters (stamina) or play a day - if players enjoy that way of playing let them do it but if your game is fun and manual gameplay is so much faster/better a lot of players will shift into this type of content and while doing that the game will be much more active and healthy. If anything defines MMO players is that they love maximizing everything... so theres that.

I actually had a similar idea, but much more detailed. And also based on otclient, not cipsoft, it wouldnt work there.

My idea was to show player a captcha window at night time (during the time most people sleep and majority are bots).

1. Language issue - toddlers dont play your game, they can understand atleast their own language, so they could read if text was translated to whatever language they are understanding. And its possibile in otc obviously
2. Dying because of the window - the window can be small (bigger horizontally), placed at the top, and with some opacity reduced. (Or maybe in the corner actually)
3. As said before, this doesnt appear during the day. You are able to check players timezone, so it wont hurt players playing normally. Even those that do night-gaming if they see it only once I dont see a problem. If it really was, we could give a reward for solving a captcha.
4. But captcha system is always bugged - we develop our own captcha, not the one used on website, unless there is a one that is clean.

 

[Animera]

I understand that if I add anti-bot measures, players may stop playing in my OT for at least three days. I understand that people have commitments like work, studies (college) and other types of responsibilities that consume their time, leading them to use bots. However, I would like them to play manually, without the use of bots. It's becoming more and more complicated to deal with this


For whoever invented this OTClient bot, it would be good not to have created this type of bot.

Having commitments is such a shitty excuse for botting.

So because of 'commitments' we need to farm even more then we ever could manually even as no lifer? We need to eliminate every kind of grind small or big, or create a grindless play where there is no future from OT developer/owner perspective? unless you think it's okay to reset every few days/week and re-donate the cashgrab project?

If you have no time compensate your money with a pay2befast donation store system. Which should come from most likely the time you've invested out of the OT anyway.

People getting hyped and want to achieve X asap. That's because of hype not because of lack of time.

Most OTs you finish in 3 days(let alone if you eliminate every kind of grind) and then your struggling to find a other OT that fits your likings it's a endless loop. So why even considering to speedrun the "fun". Achievements feel like nothing when you didn't had to put some kind of effort in the first place. Which somewhere contradicts the fun.

If you enjoy a OT, you better enjoy from it as much as you can as long as you can. (But it's obviously being abused for the sake of competition of highscore race/wars etc).

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It's not that hard to protect your server from botters.

- Protect your client with encryption + RSA.

- Check on login if the client matches. As some will try to modify your client or use a other OTC, vanilla client.

- Perhaps occasionally check of client files X interval in-game to see if they match the original.

- Put a limit of how many players can login each IP, this could force people to use proxies, but this can come with a paywall aswell.
Limiting the MC to the budget of the player.

- Create a system that detects unhuman behavior and store it in the database, for example i have a secret system called "bot frags", with a bot frags highscore.

- Create a system that will keep track of every kind of interaction in case of a secret main.

- Create a system to give players who are botting reduced Exp/skills/loot or any of your special system with reduced rates.
To compensate for the manual players and perhaps reduce the impact of botting/mass botting in general. For example people with a bot flag
can't loot spell scrolls at all.

- Create a command to jump from player to player ignoring those at trainers, exited client and bot flag mode.

- Create a system that keeps track of who is longest online, made most exp.

There will always be someone who is able to get through your systems but at that point it's no use to put effort to enhance your security from there. But it will keep the majority away from abusing. Combine that with the command system you can easily keep track of who is active and whoever of that small group is doing something bot wise that your provided bot can't or if they are botting without the bot flag it's easy to tell who is cheating. If you got doubts check the bot frags to see how likely your suspected player is cheating. Also make sure your own bot doesn't give bot frags ofcourse.

If you provide a bot on your server, then it must be an extension not a replacement.

Oh Btw: captcha's won't work bots can easily calculate and if someone really wants to he can get through any captcha. Even google's captcha isn't holding off botters :') their collected data is also messed up by all the bots that did get through captcha.

@up: Night time differs for each timezone, in the heat of the moment a modalwindow is still f*cked as it prevents interaction on lower layers. Unless maybe you come with a system that damage from both parties are nullified during the modalwindow. But can still be abused n some way invincible tank blocking for a teammate.

 

[boiga]

I've had the idea for a server where exp gain and skilling is a completely offline activity. You would select a monster to hunt much like selecting an offline trainer, and come back to exp and loot gains when you log back in. Online players can then be offered lots of dungeons and bosses and quests with nice loot. Players can focus their online time on fun activities and socializing with other players. Essentially turn TIbia into an idle MMO.

Does this make it a different game than Tibia? Tibia is a game about the grind--when we take away the grind, what are we left with? Answer that question and give players something worth their time outside of exp and skills.

 

[swashed]

I've always been on the botting team. Botting is great and it's kind of frustrating how everybody is so against botting. Bots only exist because certain tasks become super repetitive and mindless...so mindless that a bot can do it. I think the only way to stop people from botting (in any game) is to make manual play very rewarding. Simple as that. For an OT server, it could be something like a GM hosted event just to give one example.

 

[Bloodbringer]

I've had the idea for a server where exp gain and skilling is a completely offline activity. You would select a monster to hunt much like selecting an offline trainer, and come back to exp and loot gains when you log back in. Online players can then be offered lots of dungeons and bosses and quests with nice loot. Players can focus their online time on fun activities and socializing with other players. Essentially turn TIbia into an idle MMO.

Does this make it a different game than Tibia? Tibia is a game about the grind--when we take away the grind, what are we left with? Answer that question and give players something worth their time outside of exp and skills.

I really like this idea, this is almost the same as the "daily rewards" shit Tibia does but just giving exp instead of resources, why not?
One other idea I had for an OT is having random dungeons with procedural map generation - think something like Diablo, where dungeons would be slightly random everyday but still a similar enough path and with fixed quest/boss rooms - not only would this make cavebotting much harder but also would make grinding much more fun - its never the same and you could have other kind of random and special things - such as a boss or a quest area that will only rarely appear in that dungeon.
So not only you can have progressive questing/dungeons (where you want to progress to the next area) but if you want to keep grinding the same area (like Tibia works) it would still be interesting, you would expet something different every day.

I think with today's technology that procedural map generation is super viable and could work on a OT, hope someone trys it

 

[zeeb]

Rewarding players for NOT botting is not the way to go, it doesn't work at all, they'll just keep botting while they're AFK anyway.
As long as you make the server a fun place to be as an active player and other ways to grow in strength except mindlessly grinding monsters you should have a place that can have a decent population without botters being the majority.

One way to discourage botting is to make it more punishing to die. After all a botter have a much higher risk to get player killed unless they use some really fancy script. PVP-E is useful for this since it incentivises players to engage others in PVP and it is pretty easy to kill a bot and get some free exp. Other ways to do this is to have AOLs or blessings be more expensive, since active players are better at avoiding death it doesn't hit them as much, but botters are sure to spend it. Also has the upside of reducing the economic inflation botters cause, not entirely but every bit helps. Loot rate matters.

But the best way is not to try and prevent it with half measures, but punishing it instead such as having GMs do the bans manually by spotting it.
Instead of being lenient towards it, as long as you've made a statement that botting is prohibited, then punish them with an IP ban directly, it's more hassle having to solve that than to make a new account. If you find good GMs, you can hire them to do this workload and it will be pretty efficient.
This is a very successful strategy used in most Private WoW servers. They usually have a Lead GM that chooses where the other GMs are allocated for the day. But they have money to spend so you might want to start with a few and add more if you can afford it. You could also add maybe 5 GMs then agree on a deal to give them 10% each of the profit from any donations to the server if you don't have any cash on hand. That's half of the profits divided among 5 people, which is more than reasonable. (Profit in this case means any net profit made after server costs have been paid etc, but server costs rarely exceeds € 20 a month, unless you're getting ripped off or have chosen a host with more performance than you will realistically need)

You could also make some automatic checks; such as simple (kindergarten level) questions everyone would know the answer to and if they fail to answer it in time or correctly they first get kicked, the second time a short ban (1 hour~) then the third time a bit longer (2, 3, 6, 12, 24..) and so on.

Personally, I'd rather have my servers die because all botters left than having it die because I let them do as they please.
That way I know I have to add some new features that are inticing to the active playerbase and just continue to hammer botters as usual.

 

[Silba]

Rewarding players for NOT botting is not the way to go, it doesn't work at all, they'll just keep botting while they're AFK anyway.
As long as you make the server a fun place to be as an active player and other ways to grow in strength except mindlessly grinding monsters you should have a place that can have a decent population without botters being the majority.

One way to discourage botting is to make it more punishing to die. After all a botter have a much higher risk to get player killed unless they use some really fancy script. PVP-E is useful for this since it incentivises players to engage others in PVP and it is pretty easy to kill a bot and get some free exp. Other ways to do this is to have AOLs or blessings be more expensive, since active players are better at avoiding death it doesn't hit them as much, but botters are sure to spend it. Also has the upside of reducing the economic inflation botters cause, not entirely but every bit helps. Loot rate matters.

Those do seem like some good ideas that i agree with and have been working on myself for a while.
While i haven't launched my server yet, from initial play testing it seems like i've got a really good 'natural' anti-bot atmosphere.
I have pretty huge pvp incentives, without going in to too much detail, killing someone within a certain level range will reward you and do so proportionally(not just exp from pvpe). Also death is not soft at all so my players will definitely think twice about afk botting.

But the best way is not to try and prevent it with half measures, but punishing it instead such as having GMs do the bans manually by spotting it.
Instead of being lenient towards it, as long as you've made a statement that botting is prohibited, then punish them with an IP ban directly, it's more hassle having to solve that than to make a new account. If you find good GMs, you can hire them to do this workload and it will be pretty efficient.
This is a very successful strategy used in most Private WoW servers. They usually have a Lead GM that chooses where the other GMs are allocated for the day. But they have money to spend so you might want to start with a few and add more if you can afford it. You could also add maybe 5 GMs then agree on a deal to give them 10% each of the profit from any donations to the server if you don't have any cash on hand. That's half of the profits divided among 5 people, which is more than reasonable. (Profit in this case means any net profit made after server costs have been paid etc, but server costs rarely exceeds € 20 a month, unless you're getting ripped off or have chosen a host with more performance than you will realistically need)

You could also make some automatic checks; such as simple (kindergarten level) questions everyone would know the answer to and if they fail to answer it in time or correctly they first get kicked, the second time a short ban (1 hour~) then the third time a bit longer (2, 3, 6, 12, 24..) and so on.

I could not disagree more, GMs are usually quite stupid just by the mere fact they have that role and think they are effective at all.
There's a lot i could (and have in previous posts here) say about GMs but it really does just boil down to the simple facts that GMs and "checks" have failure rates that are unacceptable and both make the game considerably worse for legitimate players.

Unless 100% of botters can be dealt with 100% of the time whilst legitimate players are 100% left alone then it's not effective at all, the botters that escape and the legitimate players that get false banned or otherwise inconvenienced will cause much more damage to the game than thousands of casual and harmless botters ever could. This is true even for WoW and it's private servers and every popular MMO. Bot farms run their economies and thanks to stupid GMs and useless antibot systems the botters have 0 competition. In the rare case that botters don't run the economy then it's the venny's or some other poor country using the economy to make a living which is just as destructive, if not more.

 

[zeeb]

I could not disagree more, GMs are usually quite stupid just by the mere fact they have that role and think they are effective at all.
There's a lot i could (and have in previous posts here) say about GMs but it really does just boil down to the simple facts that GMs and "checks" have failure rates that are unacceptable and both make the game considerably worse for legitimate players.

There are a lot of people not fit to be GMs, as with everything, but this is why I wrote "good GMs". GMs that just wants to flex their position are just detrimental and I know it is possible to find good GMs. Basically any decent adult with experience in the game should be reliable.

Checks do have risks, but considering you can make them appear at selected times and not have them ban for length outright you minimize collateral damage, so you don't have to worry that they'll punish most legitimate players, for example if they were to be AFK. Could even have a timer of 5 minutes if you so please which gives them more than enough time to answer. If they still can't answer basic questions that a toddler could manage within that time frame, maybe they should focus on development instead of playing video games.

In any case, those are my recommendations on how to combat botters. Do what you feel is most effective and fine tune the approach until it is satisfying. Best of luck.

 

[wronson]

slamdunk botters into trash bin, destroy botters balls with sledgehammer, karate chop botters in half

 

[Nemphis]

push a qr code every hour to the screen, lock all controls and wait for the user to scan it with his phone, get a text back with a 4-digit code, enter it to the game to continue playing lolol.