Botting and In-game spam

There are different kind of bots:

Real client-side bot:
It just emulates input on keyboard/mouse.
It's impossible to recognize server side, you need a check on the client like a captcha.
These kind of bot are usually used for trivial things like spamming chats or muling etc.

Man in the middle bot:
It's a program that knows how the client and the server communicate with each other and injects/receive packets
almost impossible to recognize if well done.
These are the bots that runs on diablo 2 etc. They can do anything it's just like coding an AI.
The problem is that there's nothing you can do to prevent it. sure you can make things harder, make the protocol really complicated(unlike d2). maybe cypher the messages etc. But in the end since all the protective measures taken are written in the client a hacker(true meaning of the term here) will be able to read it and examine the behavior of the program with a debugging tool.
A funny thing to do and could really make things a lot harder for the hacker is to have a variable protocol.
For exemple each action like move to x,y,z could be sent to the server with 100 differents ways. Same things with message received by the client.(ie: Having a lot of synonyms in the protocol).
It's an extra layer of security that could really mess up every attempts to understand the protocol.

also you can switch encryptions on the fly (needs good implemented ones - if not it does have the opposite effect) and use parts of longer keys on different rounds etc.


But no matter what you do .. if the game is successful and many ppl play it - there will be money involved and things will get more and more interesting for hackers to get in.

Anyways bot is like plague on every popular games.

I just hope that some solution for getting rid of them will be put when the game will be on the open beta phase...

Wait and see

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Boryoku wrote:

Encrypt your packets and make sure that there aren't even seemingly trivial things stored in the client (such as movement speeds - which is one a lot of games like to leave in for some reason).

One problem with encrypted packets is that the ISPs then can't tell what the packet is & assumes that it's an encrypted torrent & will throttle it into oblivion.

This happened with me (my ISP is BT, in the UK) whilst playing Sacred 2. My ping would get progressively worse during the evening after ~5-6pm & get up to ~1.5 million ms (that's ~25 mins). needless to say, the rest of my web traffic was fine...

I certainly don't envy the devs on this one.

From all the mmos I've played, I've noticed that the ones who try to be reactive about these things - that is they do nothing until it's a big problem - really suffer. The community, the image of the game, everything suffers.

I just hope they're proactive and have a plan in place if it gets bad. Players can help regulate spammers with reporting and auto blocking from the reports. I think you have to track players to punish the major botting offenders.

I recently read Tera is going to try to use a monitoring software from Crisp Thinking to more deeply regulate this stuff. Interesting to see how it works out, not sure of what other big games use it (any?).

Unlike games that you have to buy or pay for every month, Bots in this game will do nothing but hurt GGG's chances on making money. So im sure they will do whatever it takes to get rid of them and prevent them in the future.

Botting & in-game ruined the trade on Diablo2, hopefully it'll be a lot different on here :\

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Boryoku wrote:

...I sincerely hope security isn't something that's going to get tossed on the back-burner until OB or release, as that might do irreversible harm to the community.

My understanding is that they've got a hacker on the team to test and provide feedback on any security vulnerabilities they might have. So, they are paying attention to the issue.

I'd like to see an easy report system for bots, maybe a GM chat channel in-game, with what I hope can only be described as a moderator presence in game.

If the mods themselves are too busy for it, player-appointed mods are the next best thing, provided they're watched for corruption.

Crack down on cheaters hard with the ban hammer, sure they'll just make a new account, that's when you ban them as soon as they start modding again, which they will, they always do.

Many will eventually quit and move on to one of the many other games which can be cheated, as opposed to losing everything they botted for on this one.

Alot of games fail when the cheaters take over, I hope this isn't going to be one of them.

Be sneaky about it too, i've seen bots on other games auto disconnect when a GM shows up, remember to also look for them with random newbie characters which don't have a GM tag.

I really hate bots as well. They destroy the integrity of the game. I agree with Wickedry how there should be a reporting system for botters, this would be a valuable tool in game.