Players are using bots killing the game

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anubite wrote:

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Nightmare90 wrote:

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anubite wrote:

but you've seen the statistics haven't you guys? we're SWARMED with bots, there's exactly 70,450--

wait, we have no idea how many bots or RMTers really exist; according to most people on the forums anyone with more than 3 exalts on hand is likely a botter/RMTer

The issue is overblown.

I'll continue this discussion in the spirit of the latest trends.

You are delusional and a fanboy for saying this, clearly. Also Alpha member who clearly takes advantage of your position every way imaginable and lacks any deep insight into the game shown in the heavy bugs and technical issues presented in each patch by GGG.

In the continuity of this thread we shall jerk each other off as we are both Supporter of GGG.

You're delusional and an anti-fanboy for saying this, seriously, there's no empirical evidence for botters or RMTers, it's all hearsy and conjecture, you look and everybody else look like a raving lunatic. If someone somehow so much as has 10% more wealth than you, you'll cry, "RMTERRRR!!!!111" "THERE'S NO WAY YOU CAN POSSIBLY GET ALL THAT WEALTH LEGIT" - Hegemony talks about this all the time and look at his glorious stash of crap. Ugh.

I may not offer the deepest insight, but I believe I offer more concrete feedback than necessary, as an alpha member. Certainly more than I see most people present.

The very least you should be is skeptical about claims that there are "RMT trends" -- who has data to support a "trend"? Where do you get this data from? Your ass?

I only emphasize this because nobody else seems to bring this point up. Somebody has to be the unpopular voice of reason.

There is no empirical evidence for positive or negative trends in botting or the RMT. RMT and botting of course, exists, but to what extent does it effect the community? We have absolutely no idea because GGG does not share that data with us; nobody here can provide it either.

Most RMT/botting threads are just thinly veiled "buff drop rates" threads, which we honestly don't need; PoE is easy enough as it is thanks.

You are a complete fool if you do not believe this game has many many bots. If I was allowed to type the website names in forums I would just to prove my point. A simple google search can find these bots. Any person who believes botting doesn't effect them (ASIDE FROM SELF FOUND PLAYERS aka the 2%) is delusional and ignorant of their surroundings.

I sent a message to you Quarl.

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Hilbert wrote:

Spoiler

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I do strongly suggest that if you spot any "suspect" behavior that you report them also to support@grindinggear.com with as much information as you can provide (times, dates, photo's etc etc), and we'll do our best to ferret out the truth as best we can from our end.

Or your coders could read the source code of TCP view and add that to the game and ban players connecting to the authorizing servers you should be able to find out by renting the sold bots.

You could reverse their bots and send invalid requests if a connection exists there are many possiblities.

The bot sellers certainly won't invest more money for more servers or give it away for free. They will just give up.

They are many effective simple solutions to destroy their effort and ban every botter.

Cheating in online games usually is a cat and mouse game but in PoE it seems the Cat is saturated and doesn't want to hunt the mouse.

While reading this consider me as a level 2 Noob on current technical botting issues. I am not disputing your ideas or anyone else's, I am just trying to offer an additional viewpoint.

If it come to a techinical disagreement with what I have posted below - I will give you or other posters the win.


It seems to me that some of the coding solutions may be simple now, but will get more complex and then become difficult for GGG to implement without seriously impacting real human players.

For example, it wouldn't be that much of a stretch for one machine to receive the game and display it on a monintor, and for another to view through a camera, run its bot routine and then send mouse commands to the first machine.

This would break just about anything that could be done code-wise. (the mouse could be mechanically controlled if it came to that, and that would completely break the anti-botting).

We aren't quite at Turing machines yet, but once we get there, a dumbed down, slightly slowed down human player emulator will be able to bypass any anti-botting measures that allow humans to play.

I am not interested in criticism of theoretical/practical coding solutions at the moment, as the two are rapidly approaching the Turing limit. In some ways, we are already there for one computer deicphering whether another computer has a user at the helm. I am not saying technical solutions aren't possible currently, but that the offenders can quickly evolve to the point where the defense is actually a bigger problems for players than the offenders are.

I am sure many of the posters in this thread are far more knowledgeable about what is currently practical/feasible from a coding standpoint. My reply here is not a criticism of these ideas or comments. It is more of a we need to keep our heads up and see where this road leads us unless we take additional alternative measures.

If PoE reaches the D2 style point where players are seriously inconvenienced and the bots just cruise right along, I will leave this game and not look back.

I recall very clearly how frustrating it was when D2 decided to lock me out for a bit when I logged on to one character, realized I had clicked the wrong character and then logged off to change characters. Unless I was very careful in waiting to log on or off (or create games when boss farming) it became a disaster.

There are a few times a night when I need to log out of one character and onto another to help a fellow guildie or a friend. It might be a wp in another league, or a different character to help with a certain quest. D2 style measures would end up locking me out and ruining what brief playing time I might have that evening.

The bot programmers learn how to bypass these, but they still hit the players hard.



Criticisms - suggestions of the idea below I do encourage.


The solution for most of this is to mirror the problem.

Money. The big incentive is RMT because the accounts are free. GGG could have a small token cost - say Five Dollars? to set up an account. This would break the economic model of most botting. The five dollars - or one dollar - or whatever - could grant equivalent MTX points, or maybe even double points since they are account opening and non transferrable.

I don't want to break F2P, but I would like to see free to bot broken somehow.

Other ideas (blast away at them for their faults or suggest alternatives - my only goal in this post is to spark some thinking that may lead to a win for players and GGG versus the evil botters.):


GGG could limit the number of orbs (say 2 stacks) that could trade in a screen at once. This would bring the profitability of big items down and bring RMT back to orb only (I think)

GGG could look at extremely long playing times on certain IPs ranges(since the offenders could still account swap) in conjunction with playing trends styles for patterns.
They could also use subnet ranges in conjuction with connection data.

I don't know whether each install of PoE could have an identifier code that would help track it and make identifying offenders easier.

Periodic account unlock queries could be sent to those that GGG deems blatantly offensive.

In short, I think if the methodology used is more sophisticated than the offenders, the hassle and cost will make Path of Exile unattractive to commercial botters. They will go bother other games instead.



For all those taking the time to consider or suggest solutions - Thank You!

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DalaiLama wrote:

Money. The big incentive is RMT because the accounts are free. GGG could have a small token cost - say Five Dollars? to set up an account. This would break the economic model of most botting. The five dollars - or one dollar - or whatever - could grant equivalent MTX points, or maybe even double points since they are account opening and non transferrable.

I don't want to break F2P, but I would like to see free to bot broken somehow.

RMT will not be discouraged by such a barrier. If push came to shove they'd just buy the accounts first. P2P games have just as much of a problem dealing with bots as F2P games.

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For example, it wouldn't be that much of a stretch for one machine to receive the game and display it on a monintor, and for another to view through a camera, run its bot routine and then send mouse commands to the first machine.

Not sure what you mean but if you are targeting Pixelscan bots those are pretty primitive.
While linking another PC prevent detection of the script you can easily see that there is a remote desktop control or something similar.

On the other side you can kill Pixelbots easily by random patches which adjust colors.

A Pixelscan bot reads

Connect
and
Connect
differently.


And don't forget Bot can't reply. If GGG Monitors a suspected bot they could easily PM: "Sorry don't you wanna go to bed" "Hey I suspect you bot what is 2 + II - 14/7"
Even a bot detects a PM it can't reply to randomwhisper in a human fashion.

Also you have to consider that the effective bots inject code and they can be eliminated.

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If PoE reaches the D2 style point where players are seriously inconvenienced and the bots just cruise right along, I will leave this game and not look back.

D2 is on a Bot level as D2 in 1.09.

D2 got overwhelmed by bots with 1.10 because Blizzard did nothing.

You talk about Tempbans those were introduced with a 1.09c iirc because Pindleskin could drop everything, so bots ran him 50-60 times/h stressing the servers.

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The bot programmers learn how to bypass these, but they still hit the players hard.

The only way to bypass an IP ban was to switch IP(Cannot Connect)
The only way to bypass a Realm Down was to change IP and use a different CD-Key or get a new a shorter Realm Down, such as creating more than 25 games/h resulted in a 1h realm down. If you scrolled through auras really fast, swapped to a charged item cast the skill and swapped back you received a 5min Realm Down but you needed 2 characters online at the same time.
Battle.net Realm Downs didn't add time but they had a list which event caused what kind of Realm Down so you had Realm Downs between 5min and 12h(24h online and around 18-20 games per hour)

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Money. The big incentive is RMT because the accounts are free. GGG could have a small token cost - say Five Dollars? to set up an account. This would break the economic model of most botting. The five dollars - or one dollar - or whatever - could grant equivalent MTX points, or maybe even double points since they are account opening and non transferrable.

Counterexample D2.
D2+Lod cost 50$ for a long time and people still botted on new cd-keys.

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GGG could limit the number of orbs (say 2 stacks) that could trade in a screen at once. This would bring the profitability of big items down and bring RMT back to orb only (I think)

It would be interesting to test several anti RMT Measures on new leagues such as Orbs being tradeable only once. Currency decaying over time(some currency stays permanent) to prevent massive hoarding.
Let's say alchs, chaos, exalts, eternals and mirrors decay after 2 weeks.
Since they are the main trade currencies there will be an upper limit how many of those a player can possess.

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GGG could look at extremely long playing times on certain IPs ranges(since the offenders could still account swap) in conjunction with playing trends styles for patterns.
They could also use subnet ranges in conjuction with connection data.

One thing I dislike about in PoE is the definition of HC being nolifing.
You will never know if you catch a bot or a player. I think CB had better timeinvestment settings but I blame act 3.

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Periodic account unlock queries could be sent to those that GGG deems blatantly offensive.

This solves nothing but many more threads in Tech Support Forum.

Addition of Captcha every 5th time same zone is reinstanced in a row would take care of most of it with very minor annoyance to people who DO repeatedly farm the same zone (me.)

Nobody will ever fully get rid of botters.

I mean think about it. The bots were probably developed by GGG and they are probably banking off the RMT you guys do for your loot when you get tired of grinding for it. Could be any number of programmers at GGG doing this, who really knows? Or it could be some random guy from another country, or it could be ZIGGYD the traitor! We'll never know.

In conclusion if it makes money, somebody is doing it.

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Legatus1982 wrote:

Nobody will ever fully get rid of botters.

I mean think about it. The bots were probably developed by GGG and they are probably banking off the RMT you guys do for your loot when you get tired of grinding for it. Could be any number of programmers at GGG doing this, who really knows? Or it could be some random guy from another country, or it could be ZIGGYD the traitor! We'll never know.

In conclusion if it makes money, somebody is doing it.

2:1 odds, as per Internet rule 45, Eastern European or Chinese.

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Legatus1982 wrote:

Nobody will ever fully get rid of botters.

I mean think about it. The bots were probably developed by GGG and they are probably banking off the RMT you guys do for your loot when you get tired of grinding for it. Could be any number of programmers at GGG doing this, who really knows? Or it could be some random guy from another country, or it could be ZIGGYD the traitor! We'll never know.

In conclusion if it makes money, somebody is doing it.

Botting is equivalent to "the illegal drug trade" - as long as it is profitable people will do it. As long as GGG cracks down on it, it will become even more profitable for the people who can do it well. Simple supply and demand. By fiercely cracking down on botting, just like by fiercely cracking down on the drug trade, you can just make the problem worse. You kill inept competition and let the adept botters sweep the market.

There will always be botting programs, but you don't want to use the ones you can simply google. GGG is obviously able to google those too and write countermeasures. The ones GGG are really concerned about are the private ones, which is why I did not contradict myself in my previous post. Any botter worth their salt writes their own botting program and keeps it hugged close to their chest or pays big bux for a non-public one, like one you might find in an IRC channel or some backwater forum that google won't pick up.

Go download a supposed PoE bot of google and enjoy the loss of your account in under 7 business days. Thanks. I'm pretty sure GGG has those things covered.

D2 is not analogus to PoE because Blizzard was not that financially invested in stopping the botting or RMTing of items. It will never be that bad and it is why botting/RMT in PoE is not nearly that bad as people make it out to be.

Just introduce authenticator like blizzard did. They can't have 10 accounts so the solution is solved. One should never have more than 1 active accounts anyway, it smells fishy.

Anyway I am trying out Diablo 3 2.01 smart loot, it feels amazing you cant trade any unique items. You can trade in certain ways but you have to be in same party. For the first time blizzard done something good about diablo 3 andi cant believe im playing it.

Even if Path of exile has better art, music, atmosphere. Map system has failed and i can't get beyond lvl 70 maps since last months. that's poor.

I have an idea , might be far fetched but I'll give it a go anyway.

When a GM thinks someone is a bot , he messages them asking questions. If he cannot confirm the character he is talking to is human. He would simply ban the account. If your wrongfully banned you can come cry at the forums or something. It's not that fancy , but it could work...