To all legit players

No, I absolutely know that GGG would have a hard time banning botters. I remember why blizzard couldn't ban botters from D2.

The much larger reason I'm advocating the above system is that it wouldn't harm the game as much. Look at it this way: setting up an intelligent 5-way loader just became really hard to pull off. You need a main with pretty amazing gear to protect an entourage of dumb followers. Each follower would take a good bit of effort to set up. All six need pretty good gear, with at least enough defense to survive three rhoa charges or a group of champ goatmen leaping them.

Once in a while half your followers would die. There's quite a bit of random danger in this game, and protecting them against everything should be pretty stressful.

So you'd still have people botting and raking it in. But it's such a massive effort to set up, now, that very few people even have the time required to do so. These individuals would only run the economy long after the game had lost its playerbase. Also, quarterly ladder leagues would probably be enough to limit their influence.

In terms of profiling, though? It's slightly easier than you're suggesting, at first. But the coincidences you'd use to spot them would eventually be built out of the bot. Examples:

In a 6-player group, all 6 characters enter town portal within 200ms of each other. 5 of the 6 dump their belongings on the floor and one of them ferries all drops back and forth to HIS stash. This happens every time a town portal opens for a 5 hour period.

Instant red flag! You have a very good case, these 6 accounts can be safely banned.

But the instant you start banning these individuals, the bot starts acting more like a person. "followers" are smart enough to flask when they take damage, and run to place zombies between themselves and dangerous targets. They even fire their ranged attack at the nearest enemy. A portal opens, and the six file through slowly. This time, all six go to town (making sure to path differently) and empty bags into their own stashes. The person in control transfers all six stashes to his through the web trading interface, using web browsers running inside his 5 proxied VMs.

Now how do you profile it, 2 years in, when things get that sophisticated? No, you're right, it's pretty hard without some sort of logging software and a very liberal EULA. I don't know if GGG can support the legal weight of something like that. (by the way, as an aside, this all is why blizzard only hands out bans every few months)

I still don't like what a /players n option does to the game, but I could get used to it.

I agree Zakaluka, both those together sound reasonable. And you are correct, unless a follower bot was used, it would become to big of a pain/time consuming to try and exploit.

Easy enough to fix tbh.

1) In event leagues: Disable XP/Loot boost when your team-mate isn't close by.

2) Normal league: Leave it alone, or do a /players x command. If you don't want to do this, then make it so that only 1 instance can be opened on the computer at once. If you do a 1 instance per, you will also need to check for a combination of IP Addressing, MAC addressing, and service instances to enforce this. One by itself doesn't work (DLL loaders for example).

Something I've noticed. Even a dead leech still applies the bonus. Which I.was surprised to find out (which is doesn't matter for the races)

Wouldn't a seperate computer and a VPN get around your fix Kuro?

"

SL4Y3R wrote:

Something I've noticed. Even a dead leech still applies the bonus. Which I.was surprised to find out (which is doesn't matter for the races)

Wouldn't a seperate computer and a VPN get around your fix Kuro?

yea, it's not meant as a 100% fix, more as a stop-gap measure. For something like this, there is no 100% fix.

There will ALWAYS be botters / cheaters / hackers in any game. Its the nature of the business. The only thing you can do is make it harder and harder.

With my fix, you wouldn't even need a VPN. A seperate computer or even VM's would be a work around. However, for a "casual" cheater, they probably wouldn't bother.

PS: Speaking of cheating and suggestions on how to stop: Buying "currency" items such buying and converting jeweler's orbs / orb of fusings, you should REALLY be able to buy a quantity of them.

I wouldn't know (ahem), but AutoIT is good a making simple, basic scripts for macro-vendor conversions. Less wear and tear on the mouse as well.

edit: I use AutoIT at work all the time (IT admin). Makes repetitive tasks much easier (ie: not repetitive at all, and saves a crap ton of time).

5 Pages and finally finished reading it all... I know I'll forget some of it, but here goes a short reply!

The issue is one that will hopefully be addressed in some form or fashion and the suggestions made have been interesting so far. I do agree with the /players command being added, whether for races or everywhere. I tend to play with just 1-2 others at a time, because I know them IRL.

I'm not much of a competitive gamer (though I do enjoy some pvp and/or race style competitions at times), but I can see how those suggested each have merits in making those aspects of the game more balanced and fair.

I wasn't even really aware this could be used in the manner presented, but have also not been playing nearly as much as I would like (RL sucks).

The issue that comes forward with some of the fixes (and it was mentioned before this post) is people will eventually fall back onto bots and other such 3rd party programs to continue it. That's an issue that always turns my stomach, so I won't get into it too heavily.

I'll just say that the idea that came to me while I read was this:

When people use loading, one character sits and gets no exp (or other benefits). Under this guise, I wonder how difficult it would be to apply a diminishing returns setting. Let's say you have 4 people (1 real, 3 boosters) and if the real person hits say 65% of total damage done xp and other benefits begin to decline, if they hit 80% or more all experience gains stop, items cease dropping, etc. I know the last one mentioned isn't part of the discussion, but it rounds out the idea.

Supposedly GW2 has a system where any enemy hit by more than one player gives higher experience.

This sounds perfect for PoE. Just have each additional character that hits an enemy make the enemy give the +50%exp/+50%quant.

If someone goes through the trouble to make a bot that plays the game for them, then mission accomplished. That's the hardest possible bot to make and is indistinguishable from normal play.

"

pneuma wrote:

Supposedly GW2 has a system where any enemy hit by more than one player gives higher experience.

This sounds perfect for PoE. Just have each additional character that hits an enemy make the enemy give the +50%exp/+50%quant.

If someone goes through the trouble to make a bot that plays the game for them, then mission accomplished. That's the hardest possible bot to make and is indistinguishable from normal play.

Guild Wars 2 doesn't reward bonus xp for more than 1 person hitting a mob. What it does is reward all participants equal xp gains. Comes in handy when you have 20 people beating the same mobs to death in an event. lol

"

pneuma wrote:

Supposedly GW2 has a system where any enemy hit by more than one player gives higher experience.

This sounds perfect for PoE. Just have each additional character that hits an enemy make the enemy give the +50%exp/+50%quant.

If someone goes through the trouble to make a bot that plays the game for them, then mission accomplished. That's the hardest possible bot to make and is indistinguishable from normal play.

Even if this was how it worked in GW2, this would create a whole new set of issues that would outweigh the first in my opinion.

I posted this in the OTHER topic about this already.

Not talking about item drops, just EXP. Its simple.

Split exp across the whole zone.

Pros.
Cant exploit boosting.
If you move away from your party a little (or a lot) to clean up the map or whatever, you still get exp.

Cons.
Leeching. Players not really helping can leech exp.
AFK leveling.



About the cons. AFK leveling, isnt a major issue, because most maps/instances/zones need to be reset every so often. If someone is controlling the toon to go in and out of the area, then I dont really see this as a problem.
Also the other players will be taking an exp loss and "carrying" the other player. Again no real issue here as people are doing the work, its not just freely given.

Leeching, issue is another issue that needs balance. Some players will leech and groups will start to be an issue. I believe simply allowing a vote kick from group option, so its not all on the leader to do it, or a nice way to ask them to stop leeching or other issues they have.



Another issue, is levels of party members, but that's another topic about exp and playing with friends.