I agree with that statement. That's why showing unique connections to a server solves that problem. It doesn't have to be displayed as a pure percentage, more like an bar indicator of how many MCs a visitor can except by joining a server.
Sure.
Like I always repeat, I'm not here to tell people how to run their servers, I'm rather here to create an environment where servers can be fairly measured and compared.
To some degree you are. For example you already impose a rule on everyone where they're only allowed to count 4 characters as online per IP.
You also would count 500 afk MC (macro chars or custom designed to never get disconnected) as spoofing, wouldn't you?
So you're clearly in the business already of imposing your rules and standards upon server owners, it's just a matter of
how much to impose on them.
From visitors perspective, where the most significant factor is how many players are playing on a server, it doesn't matter if players are using cavebots or logins tremendous numbers of rune makers.
You don't think there's a difference between a server with 500 players that are 100% humans and a server with 500 players where 490 of them are MC cavebotters, for a player?
You don't think there's a difference for example just in the matter of simple human interaction?
How many players will be active in game channels on each server you think? ..
Not to mention cavebotters will just stick to one spawn and do the same repetitive things over and over, never questing, never changing spawn, never do anything unexpected unless they're malfunctioning..
In both cases a regular otservlist visitor would be deceived. He joins a server and thinks that there are for example 100 players online and it's well-populated while in fact those 100 players are controlled by just 25 people. That's the point I try to make.
In varying degrees. I've posted several solutions to these problems in this very thread though.
If the visitors wants to play on a bot-free server, he will basically look for such a server since those are very uncommon.
Not really, it varies mostly by client version, newer versions seem to have a lot more bots, with a few exceptions, either way I'm not sure what point you're really making here.
Tibia is basically a game based on botting, just try to spot a moment when XenoBot servers are down (and botters can't use it) to see how the total number of players online drops out.
Arguable, again it depends on client version and the type of server, the more custom you make it the less likely there's bots (since bots are programmed mainly to do basic well-established routines, it doesn't know how to do "new" things), either way we're just establishing how important it is to separate "botting" servers from "non-botting" servers here, since one of them clearly has an advantage when they're not separated.
It's not a case nowadays since most custom clients have the option to auto-login after being disconnected from a server (just like a bot). So a regular person who doesn't use bot can stay online 24h/7. As long as his computer is online (just like a bot).
Even worse. Make a rule about it. Or is your plan of action to stop making counter-measures and let the most ruthlessly exploitative servers win the market?
Well, like I said earlier, you missed a point. From otservlist's visitors perspective such character would look like a botter and would deceive him just like a botter. The difference is that such characters doesn't occupy popular hunting spots and doesn't ruin server's economy
It's beside the point how it "looks", what matters is what's
actually going on.
If the player is not afk he will be able to respond to human interaction, if it's a bot it won't be able to respond to human interaction, and that's where you catch and separate the two.
Yes, that's a thing which I can do and is into my TODO list. Basically there will be some checkboxes which server owners would be able to fill (like having the anti-bot software et cetera).
Than there will be more options to filter out servers in "search" section so it will be easier for for example people looking for bot-free servers to find what they need.
Awesome
I tested warning system back in a days - it doesn't work. When people realised that I use that they started to use it against me by basically spoofing and just checking how I ban "servers" or how much time I need to find the spoofing mechanism used by certain server. Then I started to use something which you named incremental ban-system, but only for those servers, whose owners expressed a willingness of fixing their servers as fast as possible. Those were banned for just a week or until they fixed their servers instead of a month banishment. It didn't work either, why? This image expresses more than 100 hundred of words (this guys server's were banned literally like 10 times):
Gamers will game. Once you've had enough you're in your full right to permaban.
It's a similar situation to street beggars irl. Many of them will use the money donated to them for drugs, basically abusing people's kindness.
But does that mean you should never donate again because some people abuse the system? Just gotta get smarter.
Right now if I see it was someone's first banishment and he is willing to fix the server asap - the server is unbanned after a week. Otherwise after a month. If it's another banishment or someone intentionally tried to deceive my visitors (by for example logging in fake characters to raise the total number of players online) he is banned for 3 months (same about people flaming me instead of trying to resolve their situation in a civilized manner). If someone uses very sophisticated spoofing mechanisms (which basically required a lot of my time to analyze it/find evidences) - those are perma banned. Same happens to people which were literally banned dozens of time and their whole activity is to create a server, spoof with huge number of players, get banned, create another server (over and over again).
Pretty filthy tactics for sure.
Answer yourself a question. What a regular person can think when hears that person X received a warning? That there was something wrong with it's server (spoofed/counted wrongly number of players et cetera). People will not brag about those things. At the other hand, people who were perma-banned have nothing to lose. They will try to create agenda that otservlist bans people without a valid reasons to push others to for example create different server lists so they can have a fresh start (and new platform to advertise their server). They are incentivized to do that so obviously they will do that. Greed is what push people to do that things. That's for example why Bitcoin works
The whole system is based on incentives and human's greed.
Makes sense.
Not sure about Bitcoin or what exactly you were thinking about it, I use it to pay developers personally to maintain my privacy, but there's for sure a lot of greed when it comes to the stock market side of it.
Like I said in other topic. I don't talk about those things since it gives an edge to the people who creates spoofing mechanism. The more I talk about it the more problems I will have in a future (and the better spoofers will be).
Sure, I'm pretty sure there's no heuristic difference between cavebotters and MC macros placed by GMs though, just thinking about it logically it's literally the same thing except that it's controlled by one person in one case, multiple people in another, there's literally no other difference, unless you want to argue semantics macro vs cavebotting which would be missing the point.
That would result in losing most of my visitors since this is the factor which matters the most for my visitors.
But is also the most unreliable data point. Agreed?
I've also addressed that in the other topic. Review/voting system is worse than sorting by players online. Why? It's way easier to manipulate.
1) it's a popularity contest so by definition servers with more players will have more reviews/votes and will be at top BUT -> point #2.
2) people can be incentivized to write good reviews about the servers they play or bad reviews about the other servers (and there is no way to check if such if a content of such reviews is bad or good).
For example imagine that server X which goal is to be the most popular server in Poland starts giving free gold to their players for writing bad reviews about all other servers in Poland. Those can be things which can be hard to verify like that they bought an item but never received it.
Or like GameMasters creates hidden islands where they create exp monsters for their friends playing that server. Et cetera.
Such system would be basically VERY BAD and doesn't give ANY positive value.
That's why if you see a review systems in environments where money is involved you can't trust them as long as a bar to enter is high.
Steam resolves that for example by allowing only people who bought a game and played few hours to write a review. Doctor-review websites in my country allows comments only by those who reserved a visit and paid it using that review website.
On the other hand those reviews also can't be trusted since doctors can request the review-system to remove particular reviews (bad ones) and if they don't do that, they choose a legal path and the burden of proof is then on a review-system website. Of cource since it's a relationship many (doctors) to one (website) review-systems can't just go on war with all that doctors in court and choose to delete the reviews.
I know what you're saying, but there are solutions around this.
Mr. Texas, Xenobot guy, I don't remember his name, wrote a post about it yesterday or today in the other "problem with otservlist" thread, mentioning some (imperfect, but functional) solutions, such as JS fingerprinting, which is imo. the strongest technical solution, however invasive it might be.
There are other solutions, for example if you can co-operate with OTLand on this, you could create an API (or OTLand could) to allow you to link forum members up with otservlist reviews and use OTLand metadata to highlight the reviewer's OTLand data, such as post count, etc, allowing players to make their own informed decisions.
Basically I agree that a voting system is flawed, so I wouldn't recommend for using an "average" score for any OT since the data would likely be fairly unreliable, but it can still be useful information for a player looking for a server to play since at least
some of the reviews will inevitably be useful.
You could also for example allow image attachments and/or cam/video attachments for people to upload their own proof.
