How can we discourage botting?

[BahamutxD]

This game gameplay by default is dull. It is so simple anyone can make a macro/bot and automate it. I believe that if you try hard enough you could make an ape play the game but that could be considered animal abuse seeing how boring it is lol.

I guess that to prevent players botting you'll just have to make content diverse in the sense of random/unpredictable, be it random gen maps or randomize the way a player needs to go - for example spell/attack rotations, the places a player must go to continue progressing, constant questing/dialog input to npcs or things like that.

If you just set a number of dungeons with monsters in it - it is a matter of time players automate the process even if its not the most convenient way to level up.

 

[FenX]

You misunderstand me, I want to encourage myself and other server owners to discourage botting through gameplay, making the game fun to play where botting is not the first thing people think about when they play. Maybe if it's bold you might understand my point here.

You can't assert dunning-kruger without supporting evidence to discredit my claims, nice try though and so far there's no evidence that what i've said is untrue.



Jagex used to be quite open about some things such as being able to track a player based on the way they play with scary accuracy. Hardware and network details were not needed and this is one way they track bots, since most bots behave the same way hence the new wave of runescape bots using neural networks and 'ai' learning algorithms so they don't all look the same to this detection system and why custom own-made bot scripts have lower ban rates. They used to be much more open about their anti-botting stuff and nearly eliminated them at one point, you should go read, it's absolutely fascinating. (this is all for rs3 btw, osrs is a botfest since they can't integrate their good anti-bot stuff apparently)

Again though, you are grossly misunderstanding my intentions here along with mostly everyone replying, I don't run a server currently as im in the development phase so im not moaning about it being hard and not wanting to do it, i want my server and want to encourage others to make servers that dont make their players want to bot or at least discourage it somewhat so it's not their first thought when logging in. A better player experience leads to less botting, how can we do that?


These would be good tools to assist manual bans and while i'll likely run systems like this i'm going to try and make the gameplay better so botting is not encouraged as it is currently. Account deletions without warning definitely hinder botters for sure and make them uneasy to start botting in the first place, i think it's a good rule however it doesn't fix the issue that they felt the need to bot in the first place.


I am the cheater and looking at this issue from my cheating point of view is exactly why i have opened this discussion. Nothing mentioned in this thread stops cheaters it only slows us down until we get the ball rolling and figure out the anti-bot systems. I have never played a server i can't bot on no matter what the rules or how active the gms. I want people to have fun playing i don't want them to think about how they can just bot.


I know discouraging all botters is impossible, some people are just in to it, but widespread botting im confident can be abolished through changed to the way the game is played. Tibia has always encouraged botting, I'd like to change that and hear other peoples opinions on how to achieve that. (hence botting never not being an issue)

Please, no more telling me about how to ban botters. That is not the discussion. Thank you.

What wick3d and maps said. For you to discourage botting completely you just need to fix the human nature of being lazy and when it comes to competition, those who can't achieve something using their own abilities will want to cheat. So personally I genuinely think there's no solution to discouraging botting completely. People will always be lazy and will want to find ways to cheat the system. Sad but true.

OFF TOPIC: Your best bet is like a lot of people suggested, add simple lua scripts tracking stats, anti-bot check system (sort of like a captcha on screen, if not completed player is sent to jail, temple or something or if you wanna be extra strict just intant ban because how on earth would someone be lvling and not see a captcha on screen if they're not botting ), do your part and monitor your server/spawns manually.

It's not the fact that Tibia encourages botting, just look at many other mmo games. Mmos have a grindy nature and again, humans are f****ng lazy so many will want to cheat and find ways of not having to spend their time but gain progress.

Fix the society and the psychology of humans, to fix an issue you have to look at the source of it. Sadly, there is no fix - this is the reality we live in.

About the Jagex thing, I was mainly pointing towards osrs nowadays, since 2012 the "main" game is irrelevant to me but yeah, I did know about that stuff back then

 

[Silba]

Treat botting as a symptom that needs attention rather than a cancer that needs to be cut out.

Exactly.

Let me remind you that your thread's title is "How can we discourage botting?"
Permanently banning botters when they are caught for the first time is a very effective way to discourage botting (the stricter the punishments are, the less profitable it is to use a bot), so I don't understand why you oppose the concept.

I agree with you that it's also a good idea to modify the game's design itself so bots give players a less significant advantage, but why should it be the only line of defense against bots? It should be a strategy used together with extremely strict anti-bot rules, not instead.

My title comes with a lengthy post, even if my post is skimmed it explains what discussion i want. I do not oppose permanently banning botters or punishing them traditionally i am merely pointing out that it's not enough and sometimes very stupid (See my examples on medivia and nostalrius, their anti-bot attempts are 100% ineffective against anyone with google and spare time)

A nice balance is key, i agree. My main concern with strict rules is the potential to inflict damage to legitimate players though, i believe that 1 single false ban is worse than any amount of damage botters can cause. I have personally been banned dozens of times from several games and ots for botting when i haven't been and every time i instantly quit.

I'd say put less pressure on statistics and resources. But as long as there's any kind of competition people are going to want to cheat.

My intention is to let players be competitive with only 2-3 hours playtime per day, i'm not sure how to implement this yet but even if someone bots all day, someone who isn't botting should be able to manually achieve the same through something that is not possible to bot. Something engaging and random.

This game gameplay by default is dull. It is so simple anyone can make a macro/bot and automate it. I believe that if you try hard enough you could make an ape play the game but that could be considered animal abuse seeing how boring it is lol.

I guess that to prevent players botting you'll just have to make content diverse in the sense of random/unpredictable, be it random gen maps or randomize the way a player needs to go - for example spell/attack rotations, the places a player must go to continue progressing, constant questing/dialog input to npcs or things like that.

If you just set a number of dungeons with monsters in it - it is a matter of time players automate the process even if its not the most convenient way to level up.

I'd love to see an ape play, if we preconfigured the hotkeys im sure he could get a decent hunt
I do plan to make some things random and unpredictable, but finding a balance between 'hard to bot' and 'annoying for players' is going to be rough, but is where i think i can tackle the issue as a hardcore botter myself.

What wick3d and maps said. For you to discourage botting completely you just need to fix the human nature of being lazy and when it comes to competition, those who can't achieve something using their own abilities will want to cheat. So personally I genuinely think there's no solution to discouraging botting completely. People will always be lazy and will want to find ways to cheat the system. Sad but true.

OFF TOPIC: Your best bet is like a lot of people suggested, add simple lua scripts tracking stats, anti-bot check system (sort of like a captcha on screen, if not completed player is sent to jail, temple or something or if you wanna be extra strict just intant ban because how on earth would someone be lvling and not see a captcha on screen if they're not botting ), do your part and monitor your server/spawns manually.

It's not the fact that Tibia encourages botting, just look at many other mmo games. Mmos have a grindy nature and again, humans are f****ng lazy so many will want to cheat and find ways of not having to spend their time but gain progress.

Fix the society and the psychology of humans, to fix an issue you have to look at the source of it. Sadly, there is no fix - this is the reality we live in.

About the Jagex thing, I was mainly pointing towards osrs nowadays, since 2012 the "main" game is irrelevant to me but yeah, I did know about that stuff back then

Not completely, no... but the worst case scenario here is my server is more fun to play, less people bot and no harm was done to regular players. So it's a win-win, either i make my server better with or without bots. I am perfectly happy to accept the fact my server will be botted irregardless of my actions, as is my whole point against people advocating for all these rules and enforcements strategies.

Albion Online is very competitive, almost as competitive as oldschool tibia. But it is rarely botted in the same manner and in the wider content area of the game there are almost no bots (possibly none as it's too risky, on death you lose all equipment and items you are carrying no exceptions). Besides the obvious protections they have, botting is discouraged through risk, to run a bot on Albion Online is suicide unless you do it in safe areas which are not very profitable at all and don't really impact the game. People do cheat in other ways though such as loot macros but the average player is never affected by botting, unlike tibia where the whole server is affected negatively. This would be where i look for inspiration on the risk aspect of discouraging botters. If i can increase the risk to go afk without harming a regular player too much, i think that would be a step in the right direction.

 

[zbizu]

Code your hunting places to switch walls randomly every few hours. This way you will fuck up cavebot without really hurting fair players. Just make sure every setting allows players to escape without trapping them. You may even spawn/remove signs that direct to exit with every map shift.

 

[Maps]

should be something that is not possible to bot. Something engaging and random.

[8.60] Thais War with PvP bots (https://otland.net/threads/8-60-thais-war-with-pvp-bots.204193/)
try to code player behaviour in creatures

 

[FenX]

Exactly.


My title comes with a lengthy post, even if my post is skimmed it explains what discussion i want. I do not oppose permanently banning botters or punishing them traditionally i am merely pointing out that it's not enough and sometimes very stupid (See my examples on medivia and nostalrius, their anti-bot attempts are 100% ineffective against anyone with google and spare time)

A nice balance is key, i agree. My main concern with strict rules is the potential to inflict damage to legitimate players though, i believe that 1 single false ban is worse than any amount of damage botters can cause. I have personally been banned dozens of times from several games and ots for botting when i haven't been and every time i instantly quit.

My intention is to let players be competitive with only 2-3 hours playtime per day, i'm not sure how to implement this yet but even if someone bots all day, someone who isn't botting should be able to manually achieve the same through something that is not possible to bot. Something engaging and random.

I'd love to see an ape play, if we preconfigured the hotkeys im sure he could get a decent hunt
I do plan to make some things random and unpredictable, but finding a balance between 'hard to bot' and 'annoying for players' is going to be rough, but is where i think i can tackle the issue as a hardcore botter myself.

Not completely, no... but the worst case scenario here is my server is more fun to play, less people bot and no harm was done to regular players. So it's a win-win, either i make my server better with or without bots. I am perfectly happy to accept the fact my server will be botted irregardless of my actions, as is my whole point against people advocating for all these rules and enforcements strategies.

Albion Online is very competitive, almost as competitive as oldschool tibia. But it is rarely botted in the same manner and in the wider content area of the game there are almost no bots (possibly none as it's too risky, on death you lose all equipment and items you are carrying no exceptions). Besides the obvious protections they have, botting is discouraged through risk, to run a bot on Albion Online is suicide unless you do it in safe areas which are not very profitable at all and don't really impact the game. People do cheat in other ways though such as loot macros but the average player is never affected by botting, unlike tibia where the whole server is affected negatively. This would be where i look for inspiration on the risk aspect of discouraging botters. If i can increase the risk to go afk without harming a regular player too much, i think that would be a step in the right direction.

What zbizu said is very interesting and also the other person who mentioned randomly generated hunting area maps. It would definitely discourage it since it would be very time consuming having to rewrite the cavebot scripts. Also having the randomly generated map be quite complex would also help.

I really don't see why you'd be concerned about strict rules impacting legitimate players. Honestly how can you possibly falsely ban someone that's blatantly using a cavebot, not responding, when being teleported let's say 10 squares back he instantly just continues running and farming. It's not that hard to detect, bots aren't very hummanised so there will always be a pattern.

Obviously I've heard of Albion but never played it so don't know the situation but sounds like a fix right there and you should definitely take inspiration from other games

 

[Onimusha]

you can use grand line adventures as example, this is a incridible project who use new mechanics and make a game more easly to hunt and events

 

[jo3bingham]

@BahamutxD seems the have the best understanding of the problem. Tibia is boring because the only way to advance is to grind. Want to level up? Grind xp from monsters. Want to advance skills? Spend hours/days/weeks/months training. There are ultimately two types of cheaters; 1) those who don't want to be bored out of their minds (e.g., cavebots, mana sitting, etc.) and 2) those that want an immediate advantage over other players (e.g., magebot). It's hard to combat the second type because, when it comes to PvP, those who want to cheat will do whatever they can to do so. However, you can combat the first type by changing the way players advance. A lot of MMORPGs don't have big problems with cavebotting, and similar, because you gain xp in better ways than grinding monsters (quests, raids, team hunting bosses, etc.). My personal opinion is that trying to implement anti-bot measures is a waste of time, and you should focus on giving your players less reason to want/need to bot.

 

[gudan garam]

What jo3 said is so true.

It is what Cipsoft has done with its content, on top of the anti cheat system obviously.

Taking cipsoft for example, because they've done a good job at this, regardless of anti cheating systems:

Create content good enough that the players will want to actually play it.

Why would I bot my characters for 20hours on dragon lords when I can go to any other place, hunt manually for 2 hours and make 10x more exp than botting 20hours nonstop.

The new bosses mechanics cip has implemented over the past few years also help a lot with it. Its repetetive, yes, but it is effective.

Also, I feel like open tibia servers (even Real Tibia like servers) are to glued to real tibia. Make some content yourself, new content.

Edit -
When I say "make some content yourself", i'm not telling you to change your Thais city to snow, or add all the djin NPCs next to the depot.

Make some actual content. Good quests, good bosses, new systems....

 

[Silba]

Code your hunting places to switch walls randomly every few hours. This way you will fuck up cavebot without really hurting fair players. Just make sure every setting allows players to escape without trapping them. You may even spawn/remove signs that direct to exit with every map shift.

Now i never thought of that, this really piques my interest and is exactly the type of thing i was looking for. This sounds fun, would absolutely destroy most botters and discourage hardcore botters as it would be a pain to set up. Thank you for the ideas!

[8.60] Thais War with PvP bots (https://otland.net/threads/8-60-thais-war-with-pvp-bots.204193/)
try to code player behaviour in creatures

That's insane, im definitely going to dabble with 'ai' monsters after seeing this, thank you.

What zbizu said is very interesting and also the other person who mentioned randomly generated hunting area maps. It would definitely discourage it since it would be very time consuming having to rewrite the cavebot scripts. Also having the randomly generated map be quite complex would also help.

I really don't see why you'd be concerned about strict rules impacting legitimate players. Honestly how can you possibly falsely ban someone that's blatantly using a cavebot, not responding, when being teleported let's say 10 squares back he instantly just continues running and farming. It's not that hard to detect, bots aren't very hummanised so there will always be a pattern.

Obviously I've heard of Albion but never played it so don't know the situation but sounds like a fix right there and you should definitely take inspiration from other games

Interesting indeed I'm concerned because i've been on the receiving end of false bans for botting/hacking dozens of times in my life. It's unacceptable, i would rather 1000 people bot my server than me ban 1 person falsely. You don't need to agree, that's just how i feel.

you can use grand line adventures as example, this is a incridible project who use new mechanics and make a game more easly to hunt and events

Man that looks great, might have a play. Thanks for showing me, i'll definitely draw some inspiration.

@BahamutxD seems the have the best understanding of the problem. Tibia is boring because the only way to advance is to grind. Want to level up? Grind xp from monsters. Want to advance skills? Spend hours/days/weeks/months training. There are ultimately two types of cheaters; 1) those who don't want to be bored out of their minds (e.g., cavebots, mana sitting, etc.) and 2) those that want an immediate advantage over other players (e.g., magebot). It's hard to combat the second type because, when it comes to PvP, those who want to cheat will do whatever they can to do so. However, you can combat the first type by changing the way players advance. A lot of MMORPGs don't have big problems with cavebotting, and similar, because you gain xp in better ways than grinding monsters (quests, raids, team hunting bosses, etc.). My personal opinion is that trying to implement anti-bot measures is a waste of time, and you should focus on giving your players less reason to want/need to bot.

This is true and is exactly what I'm trying to do. As someone said earlier in the thread i paraphrase "think of botting as a symptom instead of a tumour that needs cutting out" and i agree 100%. I want players to be competitive with 2-3 hours playtime against those who choose to play differently but all day. Some sort of boss system and stamina changes, not sure yet.

What jo3 said is so true.

It is what Cipsoft has done with its content, on top of the anti cheat system obviously.

Taking cipsoft for example, because they've done a good job at this, regardless of anti cheating systems:

Create content good enough that the players will want to actually play it.

Why would I bot my characters for 20hours on dragon lords when I can go to any other place, hunt manually for 2 hours and make 10x more exp than botting 20hours nonstop.

The new bosses mechanics cip has implemented over the past few years also help a lot with it. Its repetetive, yes, but it is effective.

Also, I feel like open tibia servers (even Real Tibia like servers) are to glued to real tibia. Make some content yourself, new content.

Edit -
When I say "make some content yourself", i'm not telling you to change your Thais city to snow, or add all the djin NPCs next to the depot.

Make some actual content. Good quests, good bosses, new systems....

I agree, although first of all this will be a nostalgic server for myself, friends and family that played 13 years ago together so it can't be completely custom, but the way we grind and obtain items is not going to be the same.

 

[zbizu]

You can't really fix the botting problem as long as infinite scaling exists in this game. Everything that gives exp gets repetitive eventually and people will look for ways to automate it.

 

[Silba]

You can't really fix the botting problem as long as infinite scaling exists in this game. Everything that gives exp gets repetitive eventually and people will look for ways to automate it.

I'm starting to lean more towards actually allowing botting, or at least not manually enforcing any anti-bot rules except for where abuse occurs such as mage bombs or blocking spawns with an afk bot etc. It could be a fun little project seeing where my players feel like they need to bot and then 'patch' it. That should be win-win, possibly an impossibly long game of cat and mouse too, but whatever

 

[FenX]

Could always go with the idea of having "dungeons" with npc dialogues, teleports, having to use items on certain areas to move onto the next stage etc. as your main way of players gaining xp/gold. The average botter has no idea what he's doing, he downloads someones software and only knows how to follow instructions by clicking buttons. Would potentially decrease the amount of bots, obviously those who will be a little more experienced will automate it anyway but still, they'd be easy to spot.

 

[Silba]

Could always go with the idea of having "dungeons" with npc dialogues, teleports, having to use items on certain areas to move onto the next stage etc. as your main way of players gaining xp/gold. The average botter has no idea what he's doing, he downloads someones software and only knows how to follow instructions by clicking buttons. Would potentially decrease the amount of bots, obviously those who will be a little more experienced will automate it anyway but still, they'd be easy to spot.

I'm leaning towards that for my bossing system, but for general gameplay i don't like the idea of dungeons from a typical mmorpg. I love the openness of Tibia.

 

[zbizu]

Could always go with the idea of having "dungeons" with npc dialogues, teleports, having to use items on certain areas to move onto the next stage

they will just copy the instruction from yalahar demons script or any other spot with levers and there goes your protection

 

[Night Wolf]

the interface of an application should always be a bridge between what people want to do and the application itself. Whenever you have a situation when the interface is a WALL instead of a bridge, you'll find people going over this wall with different mechanics.
Botting/automating stuff is a synthom and the solution to it is identifying the parts of your game that aren't working as well as the interfaces roadblocks and solving the root cause of the problem.


Of course you can discourage the automating, but that will just force people to be interacting with an application that they don't want to and therefore lead to several people quitting your game.


Tiba client, even the newest versions, are complete garbage. They come from an era where we didn't knew that UX existed. Fixing the UX problem you'll fix the botting problem, and lastly, as human nature will always seek towards greater advantage, you'll need to apply a punishment system to discourage bots, but not to the point they won't have an alternative to quitting the game.

 

[christophe]

most effective thing i've seen is just a custom client with some basic anti-bot features. deathzot killed of nearly all bots that way.
a bit thing to consider tho is. why are people botting.
don't make your game tedious (aka no auto-loot) , (forced to afk mana sit for hours for runes)

 

[Silba]

they will just copy the instruction from yalahar demons script or any other spot with levers and there goes your protection

Any kind of system like this i would be adding some sort of randomisation to at least make it a pain to setup a bot but no harder or tedious for a player.

the interface of an application should always be a bridge between what people want to do and the application itself. Whenever you have a situation when the interface is a WALL instead of a bridge, you'll find people going over this wall with different mechanics.
Botting/automating stuff is a synthom and the solution to it is identifying the parts of your game that aren't working as well as the interfaces roadblocks and solving the root cause of the problem.


Of course you can discourage the automating, but that will just force people to be interacting with an application that they don't want to and therefore lead to several people quitting your game.


Tiba client, even the newest versions, are complete garbage. They come from an era where we didn't knew that UX existed. Fixing the UX problem you'll fix the botting problem, and lastly, as human nature will always seek towards greater advantage, you'll need to apply a punishment system to discourage bots, but not to the point they won't have an alternative to quitting the game.

Can't say I've ever botted because of the interface, the bots usually have much worse interfaces than the client yet ill still spend hours using them to make scripts. Thanks for the insight though, it gives me some different perspective.

most effective thing i've seen is just a custom client with some basic anti-bot features. deathzot killed of nearly all bots that way.
a bit thing to consider tho is. why are people botting.
don't make your game tedious (aka no auto-loot) , (forced to afk mana sit for hours for runes)

I'm probably not going to have any anti-bot features but instead address "why are people botting" and try to work from there. One of my more recent ideas for runemaking is to make the player hunt for something that monsters will drop which you are able to make runes from or which greatly improve runemaking efficiency. It's like soulpoints but not disgusting, hopefully.

 

[FenX]

Any kind of system like this i would be adding some sort of randomisation to at least make it a pain to setup a bot but no harder or tedious for a player.


Can't say I've ever botted because of the interface, the bots usually have much worse interfaces than the client yet ill still spend hours using them to make scripts. Thanks for the insight though, it gives me some different perspective.



I'm probably not going to have any anti-bot features but instead address "why are people botting" and try to work from there. One of my more recent ideas for runemaking is to make the player hunt for something that monsters will drop which you are able to make runes from or which greatly improve runemaking efficiency. It's like soulpoints but not disgusting, hopefully.

People are lazy, there's no way to change that. Competition = botting, botting = lazy people.

 

[Night Wolf]

Can't say I've ever botted because of the interface, the bots usually have much worse interfaces than the client yet ill still spend hours using them to make scripts. Thanks for the insight though, it gives me some different perspective.

the interface of your game is not just the game menus but rather the whole part in which the player is able to interact with.
What I tried to say is that the need for botting happens because tibia isn't a fun game for the vast majority that still plays it. It's highly focused on PVP and PVE is based upon grinding continuously