Bots and Botting

"

Soljur wrote:

If there's botting going on and a black market won't really affect most people in a game like this. Only the extreme players will use it and the rest won't care. I played D2 for years without ever buying anything for cash and was successful and happy.

What is of paramount importance, however, is to not allow the chat channels to be spammed by botters as that does have a direct impact on the average player.

I don't think the average player cares about botting, they just don't want it in their face all the time, harassing them and preventing them from using chat or other game features.

Also duping. Duping and chat spam are unnaceptable.

Botting affects prices a lot. You think D3's biggest problem with botting is them spamming the chat? xD
They cause items to be extremely expensive, out of reach of most general users.

"

TehHammer wrote:

"

koto2012 wrote:

Ask a simple question everytime a user logs in or ask to write a code shown on the picture. Only takes 10 seconds or less but stops bots from logging in.

And if a human logs into the account then turns on the bot, what good would that do?

1:

Most 'legit' botters run dozens of bots at the same time, it would be rather undoable for them to constantly type in codes on dozens of pcs.

2:

Smalltime botters who run 1 or 2 bots only do it so they get free income while not playing the game. If they had to type in a code every couple minutes that means they need to be constantly at the pc, and thus they might as well just play the game. It makes running a bot pointless.

The code thing is a decent idea, but in the same aspect is horrible. Yes it would kick botters off the game for not entering a code, but would essentially drive average legit players away from the game having to enter a stupid code every so often just because they cant find a better way to combat botters. I for one when playing in sessions on this game play at 4/5 hour intervals and would seriously get sick and tired of entering a code every so often to prove im not a botter.

If that stops the game from being absolutely destroyed then it's fine. I've played a game where they do it every once in a while and it's really not bothersome at all.

The code thing is a decent temporary solution for when things get out of hand, but I would much prefer to see a more effective and long-term system for the little buggers.

As far as botters affecting the economy goes...yes, they most certainly do. Like I said, I played Runescape for a very long time, and botters had an enormous effect on the economy. The most heavily botted items (such as Rune/Pure Essence, Dragon Bones, Abyssal Whips, etc.) were far below the value they should have been, simply due to bots. Of course, some changes they made to PvP ruined things as well - items were no longer destroyed on death, but dropped to the player as they were originally. Because non-consumable items entered the economy every day but almost never left it, said items became very undervalued.

Unfortunately I've never seen an effort to counter bots that didn't directly hurt the rest of the (legit) playerbase,without really solving the bot problem. An example of this is games that charge a premium for trading/selling and sometimes even chat priviledges (which is a terrible idea btw,introduces a possible p2w element aswell)
Sorry if my post comes off as negative, I would love to have solutions to offer but i'm stumped.

"

Aixius wrote:

"

Athoy wrote:

The one really good thing that WoW had in its game design (not sure whether it was intentional or not), was the concept of items that "bind on pick up". Because of that, the most important items in the game can't really be farmed by bots. And since the gold in WoW are largely unimportant except for mounts and other minor things, gold farming didn't really ruin the whole game that much.

I hated that aspect of WoW. WoW is an MMORPG, not an ARPG: none of its design belongs in this game (or a Diablo game, for that matter).

Bind-on-pick-up and auto-pick-up are boring as hell, and would be cutting off the nose to spite the face.

Agreed! It would really suck to have bind-on-pick-up in an ARPG. It discourages trading and sharing items with alts or friends. Part of the fun of D2 is going through dungeons together with friends and finding/giving each other what we need for our different character class! :) I was simply giving an example of something in a different game that (perhaps inadvertently) worked in minimizing the impact bots/botting had on the game. Thanks for your input though!

"

TehHammer wrote:

If you want an easy way to find the Devs opinions, do a search for bots (I just followed nzrock's link on the first page of this thread), click on a thread, then in the address bar remove "highlight/" and replace with "filter-account-type/staff"

Examples:
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/10686/highlight/
Change to:
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/10686/filter-account-type/staff

Awesome, thanks for the search trick! Were you able to find any pertinent developer post(s) on this subject? If so, please share :).

"

Soljur wrote:

If there's botting going on and a black market won't really affect most people in a game like this. Only the extreme players will use it and the rest won't care. I played D2 for years without ever buying anything for cash and was successful and happy.

What is of paramount importance, however, is to not allow the chat channels to be spammed by botters as that does have a direct impact on the average player.

I don't think the average player cares about botting, they just don't want it in their face all the time, harassing them and preventing them from using chat or other game features.

Also duping. Duping and chat spam are unnaceptable.

I can see where you're coming from, and I partially agree that botting will likely not affect most players.. but only given that there aren't enough of them to ruin the economy (and to be honest.. imho, I really never cared too much about the spam bots in the games I play since I usually leave the public channel as soon as I log into the game anyway. I tend to play with real-life friends, so don't really care too much about random online players unless we're pvping/partying. I can see how many players can be annoyed by spam bots though!).

That's where the problem comes in, you see. If botting (specifically farming bots) becomes profitable and rampant, then because of the economic consequences the bots have caused, botting WILL be in their/players' face. Remember how in so many games the "currency" became "items that had some value/useful" (e.g. SOJs in D2)? Again, I understand PoE's currency is not the traditional gold/credits which had little to no intrinsic value, but as long as they can be farmed, the abuse potential is still there, I feel (feel free to correct me if you disagree though! :))

And yes agreed, duping is also a concern, but lets try to deal with one exploit/hack at a time. Lol! =P

"

MonopolyLegend wrote:

The code thing is a decent temporary solution for when things get out of hand, but I would much prefer to see a more effective and long-term system for the little buggers.

As far as botters affecting the economy goes...yes, they most certainly do. Like I said, I played Runescape for a very long time, and botters had an enormous effect on the economy. The most heavily botted items (such as Rune/Pure Essence, Dragon Bones, Abyssal Whips, etc.) were far below the value they should have been, simply due to bots. Of course, some changes they made to PvP ruined things as well - items were no longer destroyed on death, but dropped to the player as they were originally. Because non-consumable items entered the economy every day but almost never left it, said items became very undervalued.

Correct. The economy is what I am the most concerned about. We don't want PoE to turn into another D2 or D3 (at least not in terms of their in-game economy).

I also view the Captcha/code-typing as a very temporary solution and would annoy the hell out of a lot of players (myself included). Although as Tagek implied, for us more non-casual/hardcore gamers, we would probably much rather put up with typing in codes every 2-4 hours if it prevents a great game from turning into a disaster. It beats staring at the Auction House items with uber inflated prices that one could never obtain any day. Unless of course, you're hardcore and play the game all the time.. but then again, why do you want to work so much harder/longer to farm just because a large number of people decided to cheat while playing a video game? That sucks. Some of us actually have lives also. =P

Regardless of what solutions GGG have in mind to combat botting and duping, one thing is very clear. They must (imho) take a very aggressive stance on this subject and employ the best preventive measures they can to avoid most of these possible future events from happening if they wish their game to last for a long while. PoE has an immense potential to be a great F2P game, but unlike League of Legends (LoL) where botting/cheating doesn't really.. uhh.. "work" or help lets say, haha, botting/duping can give players a big advantage in-game. And I actually don't mind so much if a few players get a small advantage from cheating. I don't like it and wish that wasn't the case (but wishing bad things not to happen in our world doesn't mean they actually go away or won't happen -_-'), but it won't affect me (that much) as a player. However, if bots run rampant, then the economy will be in ruins and it WILL affect my gameplay experience.


Edit: Also, it seems like some people are suggesting that botting won't happen or won't have a big effect in PoE. Although I applaud and am impressed with such optimism, we'll be in a much better position by thinking that botting and duping can/will ruin the game and best take measures to prevent them from happening in the first place in the likely case that they do happen.

Personally, if GGG can spend a bit of their budget/capital per year (50-90ish k?) paying some talented programmers/employees dedicated mostly to preventing cheats/hacks/bots/dupes/exploits, their player base will be much bigger and it'll pay back dividends in the long run. More happy players = more people paying for ethical micro-transactions. I mean look at how successful Runescape is as a F2P game, even though it's rampant with bots. If it doesn't have bots, it'll likely be even more successful and the company would've made even more money. This is a cost-benefit analysis and very theoretical without any hard number/facts/evidence though, so feel free to take my opinion with a grain of salt. :) But I am not a developer so can't really come up with an actual "solution" to this problem, but with so many intelligent people in our community, just thought that perhaps we could come up and brain storm some great ideas, that's all.

Again sorry for such a long post, this thread was really only meant to be helpful (especially to the developers!).

Fortunately, we have a barter system which means gold sellers can't exist. That, and the bots need some sort of understanding of what's worth what in order to succeed. :)

"

Superman wrote:

Fortunately, we have a barter system which means gold sellers can't exist. That, and the bots need some sort of understanding of what's worth what in order to succeed. :)

Actually, I don't think I would completely agree with that. Gold sellers can't exist in PoE since there is no gold, but currency (i.e. scrolls/orbs) sellers can exist. As long as they leave their bots on long enough undetected to be able to farm the currency items, the owner of the bot(s) can log into the characters occasionally and trade/barter the items off or transfer them all to a single main character that can be used to barter strong items.

When we say bots/botting, we don't mean they absolutely do everything for their owners and they can just sit there and wait for the money to flow in. The botters will obviously be expected to log in occasionally to trade or use the farmed currency/items and take a brief moment to understand the current market (not particularly hard, I would imagine). Hope that makes some sense, I could be wrong though. :)

This is one of the reasons I'll be rolling a toon on Cut-throat leagues. To watch em in town and follow them, and KILL them. Over. and Over. and Over. course...most bots don't run in hc or pvp servers, do they...dammit.