Looting -- The official thread for discussing the loot system. Updated 18th March, 2013.

There's one reason in particular I can think for the existence of player looting and griefing. It's because it's offering something that other games don't have. Thus the people that love this stuff will flock to your game. It does relegate your game to "niche" status though..

But how is PoE going to deal with bots? With a "brief" time window to pick up stuff people will still make bots regardless because it's still possible to make the steal. All I remember is that 90% of the time when Diablo died in D2 my screen lagged enormously. The lag will likely cancel out this "brief time window" I have thus screwing me over. Bots don't have this lag problem.

Bots can also be very hard to detect or prove, considering that the player is actually playing while it is active.

You can't stop bots... developers can do basic work to prevent almost all bot exploits, however putting in a lot of work to combat hacking and bots has proven to be a waste of time.

It's better to use heuristics, however that's extremely cpu and storage intensive.

There is one way to stop bots. Change the system. Diablo 3 for instance, will never have this problem.

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Awesomeasusual wrote:

There is one way to stop bots. Change the system. Diablo 3 for instance, will never have this problem.

Of course Diablo3 will have bots. Just like every other online multiplayer game. Don't be so naive. Where there's the potential for (a lot of) money to be made, someone will find a way. Who would have guessed 10 years ago that gold and item farming would turn into a billion dollar industry employing many thousands of people?

All that a bot requires is the ability to analyze incoming data. That's it.

At the very best, you hook the client itself. As a second measure you could run a firewall wrapper. As a last measure you can scan video output. I'm sure there are also other ways.

In any case, you can only do so much to stop these tactics. At very best you can do memory scanning and do heuristic based challenge-response... which is often annoying to regular players and only mandates a single person monitoring the bot farm.

You just cannot stop bots if people want to build bots... you can slow them down with minor tweaks, which is best case scenario. Many companies have spent millions of dollars on anti-hack technology, and *ALL* of them have failed. Anti-Hack and Anti-Copyright is probably not in the billions of dollars spent and has nothing to show for it.

It is theoretically possible to build a game that a bot could not play well, but a human could. The proof of this is in the modification to Chess called Arimaa. The problem is that the theory really doesn't apply to the structure of online games.

@Zeto: saying that the money spend on anti-hacking software development has yielded 0 results is a bit harsh.

Yes, it is true that if someone/some group, wants to break into something bad enough, they will find a way (looking at you PS network).

However, it doesn't mean that locking your door is pointless, or that you shouldn't spend some money in order to become as secure as possible.

there should be enough counter mesures to prevent everyone to abuse bots or hacks with ease.
But i agree with zeto on the part that, if someone with enough knowledge realy wants it, he can get around everything. So dont put to much money into this, just enough to prevent the majority from abusing it.

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Wittgenstein wrote:

@Zeto: saying that the money spend on anti-hacking software development has yielded 0 results is a bit harsh.

Yes, it is true that if someone/some group, wants to break into something bad enough, they will find a way (looking at you PS network).

However, it doesn't mean that locking your door is pointless, or that you shouldn't spend some money in order to become as secure as possible.

I don't think it's harsh at all, and I feel that what I said overall was either taken for granted or misunderstood.

To make things crystal clear, I didn't say they shouldn't do the minimum, which would include obfuscation and encryption techniques. These are nearly zero cost solutions, and stop all average people.

There has however been no system developed out of all the money thrown at it to actually stop hackers... the best you can do is slow them down slightly by throwing a ton of money, time, and talent at the topic. History has shown that if you throw millions of dollars at anti-hacking you can stall hacker groups by < 2 weeks. The greatest stalls I'm aware of, of all time, stalled groups for a month or so.

At the end of the day it goes back to a time benefit analysis just like some of the other topics. You get extreme diminishing returns from investment in these types of securities... point being, do what makes sense in terms of time and money...

It's running against a wall.

What GGG needs to do is be aware that bots will be made and need to make it unattractive.

One of the things to make it unattractive is to go with assigned looting, because then pickit bots will be useless.

Another one is to feed parts of the level to the client only when the player is close. That way maphacks and bots using map data will be less effective. This is not only useful for map data, but all data send to the client needs to be minimal.

Clever use of monster combinations and monster skills will make it hard for bots too. It should be a real challenge for people to write successful bot AI. Especially if they are forced to use pixel scanning methods because the data fed to the client is so small.

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tpapp157 wrote:

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Awesomeasusual wrote:

There is one way to stop bots. Change the system. Diablo 3 for instance, will never have this problem.

Of course Diablo3 will have bots. Just like every other online multiplayer game. Don't be so naive. Where there's the potential for (a lot of) money to be made, someone will find a way. Who would have guessed 10 years ago that gold and item farming would turn into a billion dollar industry employing many thousands of people?

You should think about what I'm saying first. I don't mean automated bots that walk around and farm monsters. I mean a bot as in a type of program that picks up items for you as you play for the express purpose of stealing from other players. You can't do this in Diablo 3 obviously.