Bots again....

Bots come up alot. Some people say they are unavoidable, some people argue alot will slow or stop them...

Where do bots fit in ashes of ceation.

With a subscription based payment method, and slow progression. Bots will be "more of an investment" than in some other games

With a game heavily reliant on social structure, having players revolve around nodes, no group finding functions, and heavy mechanics to focus on making players communicate with one another, like tavern, open world pvp, and a larger party size of 8. Bot will be more or less easily discovered and in turn farmed themselves, making them less profitable for the high investment they would require.

Gatherables placment will have some rng and weather paterns further change this so bot will be less effective overall at gathering. Gatherables will be fought over by players at tines already, and bots may be out competed.

With the curruption system and true open world pvp, that cant be opted out of known bots will just be killed repeatedly. While there is curruption, if a bot stays green and currupts its attacker it drops more loot than if it were to fight back. And if it were to fight back and keep more of its loot. Nothing prevents players from killing it repeatedly. Also with death giving negative exp and sudo-deleveling you, reducing your stats. A bot dying repeatedly would become even weaker and easier to kill repeatedly.

Caravans. Even if bots gathering goods become prevalent, the movement of those goods is something that needs to be handled as well.

Processing. The most likely place to find bots in my opinion. Would like some thoughts on how the processing method works more to see how bots may very well fit there. And think of ways to further desuade that.

TLDR at the very least boting in ashes will be more work for less reward than in other games. And botting would probably be most effective in processing overall.

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tautau

1. Perma-ban botting accounts, quicker the better. Don't refund the $ they paid to open that account. If the bot is an alt, certainly ban the entire account, including the main.
2. IF we have some of the skills we did in L2, like fake death, we can kill bots without going red. Gather a train of mobs, run to the bot, fake death, mobs kill bot. Pick up their drops, then train another bot.
3. If a player or a guild deserves a reputation as a botter, it is up to us...the player community...to shun and ridicule them. For example, if the 'LeetDudes' guild bots, nobody ally with them. War them, Siege them, PK them. Don't let cheaters prosper in AoC!

BaSkA_9x2

The more you @PenguinPaladin explained why bots will be "more work for less reward" the clearer to me it becomes bots, but RMT in reality, will be very rewarding.

If the real world price of in-game currency and resources is high, then people who develop bots for a living and those who run them for a living will try even harder. And let's not forget about Venezuelans (which are going through a humanitarian crisis) who will "legitimately" play 18 hours per day to sell gold and make 10 bucks a week. If they get a new account banned once every month, they still made enough money to pay their bills and buy food.

If Ashes is a success and gold is valuable (valuable in-game, scarce), which I hope both will be true, RMT will be a huge problem, both from botting and from gold farmers. Hell, I'd bet there are people who played Alpha 1, cracked open the client and are already working on bots for that old client.

Like @tautau pointed out, the only real solution to solve RMT in general, botting or not, is effective game moderation. It's very hard, if not impossible, to make a game bot proof. But, even if Intrepid is able to do it, there are still thousands of people who will farm gold for a living because it pays better than working a regular job (or in some cases there are no jobs at all).

So, unfortunately, the only solution is to implement things like region blocking (for example blocking Venezuelan IPs from joining servers outside of SA), VPN blocking(it's easy to find out which IPs the big VPN providers use, so you need to constantly update and block them), permanent HWID banning (once a MAC address or other kind of HWID is banned, they're unable to play the game unless they spoof their HWID which isn't trivial for most people) and have people to investigate RMT, for example Intrepid itself buy gold to find RMT accounts, investigate them and permanently ban every account, IP, HWID involved, both buyers and sellers.

TL;DR: RMT will, without a doubt, be a big problem in Ashes. It depends if Intrepid wants to invest money to actively stop it, which in the short term means losing money, but in the long term and morally is the right thing to do.

PenguinPaladin

BaSkA13 wrote: »

The more you @PenguinPaladin explained why bots will be "more work for less reward" the clearer to me it becomes bots, but RMT in reality, will be very rewarding.

If the real world price of in-game currency and resources is high, then people who develop bots for a living and those who run them for a living will try even harder. And let's not forget about Venezuelans (which are going through a humanitarian crisis) who will "legitimately" play 18 hours per day to sell gold and make 10 bucks a week. If they get a new account banned once every month, they still made enough money to pay their bills and buy food.

If Ashes is a success and gold is valuable (valuable in-game, scarce), which I hope both will be true, RMT will be a huge problem, both from botting and from gold farmers. Hell, I'd bet there are people who played Alpha 1, cracked open the client and are already working on bots for that old client.

Like @tautau pointed out, the only real solution to solve RMT in general, botting or not, is effective game moderation. It's very hard, if not impossible, to make a game bot proof. But, even if Intrepid is able to do it, there are still thousands of people who will farm gold for a living because it pays better than working a regular job (or in some cases there are no jobs at all).

So, unfortunately, the only solution is to implement things like region blocking (for example blocking Venezuelan IPs from joining servers outside of SA), VPN blocking(it's easy to find out which IPs the big VPN providers use, so you need to constantly update and block them), permanent HWID banning (once a MAC address or other kind of HWID is banned, they're unable to play the game unless they spoof their HWID which isn't trivial for most people) and have people to investigate RMT, for example Intrepid itself buy gold to find RMT accounts, investigate them and permanently ban every account, IP, HWID involved, both buyers and sellers.

TL;DR: RMT will, without a doubt, be a big problem in Ashes. It depends if Intrepid wants to invest money to actively stop it, which in the short term means losing money, but in the long term and morally is the right thing to do.

RMT will be the major issue in ashes i believe also. To the point intrepid should probably look into having double or triple in game GM's on release. And crack down hard from the get go, and as more people give up on it reduce the size of staff if possible as things go along

tautau

Remember that a full time, trained GM is expensive. You will need three shifts a day and there will be a lot of servers to monitor. What do you need to pay a good GM per year, including benefits, perhaps $80k? So, three of them is about a quarter million a year to have one more online 24 hours five days a week. To have several online all the time 7 days a week we are certainly talking at least $1 mil a year. Are we (including you @PenguinPaladin ) willing to put in another $10 or $20 per month to cover GMs?

BaSkA_9x2

tautau wrote: »

Remember that a full time, trained GM is expensive. You will need three shifts a day and there will be a lot of servers to monitor. What do you need to pay a good GM per year, including benefits, perhaps $80k? So, three of them is about a quarter million a year to have one more online 24 hours five days a week. To have several online all the time 7 days a week we are certainly talking at least $1 mil a year. Are we (including you @PenguinPaladin ) willing to put in another $10 or $20 per month to cover GMs?

I disagree. You don't need GMs 24/7. You need pattern detection software running 24/7 and regular working hour GMs to investigate the accounts the software tells you to investigate, apart from player reports.

I believe nobody would disagree that, back in the day, WoW had the best GMs ever. Obviously they only existed because Blizzard gave a shit about their game and could afford them. I believe Intrepid will remind us of the Blizzard that is now dead.

PenguinPaladin

tautau wrote: »

Remember that a full time, trained GM is expensive. You will need three shifts a day and there will be a lot of servers to monitor. What do you need to pay a good GM per year, including benefits, perhaps $80k? So, three of them is about a quarter million a year to have one more online 24 hours five days a week. To have several online all the time 7 days a week we are certainly talking at least $1 mil a year. Are we (including you @PenguinPaladin ) willing to put in another $10 or $20 per month to cover GMs?

I mean honestly, with the path ashes is on... if they keep going with the quality they seem to be going for, yes.

Honestly if they put out a "gm package" where i could get priority responces on my reported players id personally pay more a month for it. If the game is good, and they are willing to maintain it in that way, i am not against it costing what it needs to

And the higher cost just makes boting and geting banned that much more of an investment monetarily. You know what. You've got me. Raise the subscription fee.

They could even do this through.... monthly cosmetics.... you could subscribe to receive embers monthly or something to allow for teirs of further investment towards these goals of having more GM's.

Its hard to quantify how many sales you will receive with only a cosmetic shop available. If you could somewhat stabalize how much money you can expect to make through the shop, like a subscription to embers monthly, you can more reasonably budget for these things.

Its not an expencive game i am afraid of. Its an expensive game that is also a shitty product. If the product is of quality, charge what you must.

PenguinPaladin

Otr wrote: »

How do you recognize a bot?

Attempt to interact with it. Try and fight it. Kill it a few times if you keep seeing it on the same areas... act like an npc in a social game, then be treated like one.

PenguinPaladin

Otr wrote: »

PenguinPaladin wrote: »

Otr wrote: »

How do you recognize a bot?

Attempt to interact with it. Try and fight it. Kill it a few times if you keep seeing it on the same areas... act like an npc in a social game, then be treated like one.

So try to annoy him and if he is annoyed, then is a human
That might work. Could be implemented directly into the game.
Periodically it could trigger some annoying events and check who is not annoyed and ban them

Try to annoy him... you are such a troll at heart.

"Hey man whats up"

No response, eh whatever... run into the same guy at the same place the next day. "Hey buddy" no response or reaction again... flag him and hit him.

And so on. Im not saying, hey, hey, hey are you a bot, hey, hey. But its a long time investment game. If i notice you never talk to anyone, and act like a bot. Im killing you every time i see you. Report me if your not a bot, ill explain to the gm that the dude plays like a bot.

BaSkA_9x2

Otr wrote: »

How do you recognize a bot?

A variety of automated ways to tell if a character is a bot, but they all depend on how much information the game logs.

For example, if the game logs your actions, bots usually repeat the same actions over and over again. Good bots don't perform the same action every X seconds, they usually add a little RNG to add some milliseconds to every action, but still isn't too hard to detect.

Another example, if the game somewhat tracks your cursor movement, bots don't move their mouse like normal human beings, so that's another easy way to detect automated software performing actions.

More robust ways of recognizing a bot is to implement machine learning algorithms in some specific activities to create patterns for what real players do. If a character being played by a real human being is an outlier every now and then, it's fine, you're only an outlier. But if a character is repeatedly being recognized as an outlier for hours or days straight, you've probably found a bot.

There are many ways, models and strategies that help find bots, but in other words, pattern recognition software is one solution if the game logs the right information. Funnily enough, many bots use pattern recognition and computer vision algorithms to perform actions in games.

Azherae

Otr wrote: »

PenguinPaladin wrote: »

Otr wrote: »

PenguinPaladin wrote: »

Otr wrote: »

How do you recognize a bot?

Attempt to interact with it. Try and fight it. Kill it a few times if you keep seeing it on the same areas... act like an npc in a social game, then be treated like one.

So try to annoy him and if he is annoyed, then is a human
That might work. Could be implemented directly into the game.
Periodically it could trigger some annoying events and check who is not annoyed and ban them

Try to annoy him... you are such a troll at heart.

"Hey man whats up"

No response, eh whatever... run into the same guy at the same place the next day. "Hey buddy" no response or reaction again... flag him and hit him.

And so on. Im not saying, hey, hey, hey are you a bot, hey, hey. But its a long time investment game. If i notice you never talk to anyone, and act like a bot. Im killing you every time i see you. Report me if your not a bot, ill explain to the gm that the dude plays like a bot.

Well... what I said jokingly, I considered it too for a moment.
If bots recognize resources by checking somewhere in some data, the game could move the resource a little bit to the right or to the left on the screen, to force the bot to analyze visual data. But probably a bot can do that too. So that data should be blurred or altered to be hard to recognize and analyze which of course will annoy players.
But the first video I saw a few months ago when I heard about AoC was presenting how things look and how resources will blend with the environment. It was not said but that statement made me think that a bot maker will have more work to do.

Regarding talking to players, not everybody might knows English. The bot can be instructed to salute or say something in a different language, stop just for a second, look to the player and then run further. It can be eventually made to behave like a solo player who doesn't want to speak much. I was reading some years ago that bots were made to play shooters and players were not able to recognize who is a player and who is a bot. Those were made for research purpose but I suppose those who make bots are skilled programmers.

Blurring or altering visual data at the level where a human still considers it to be 'the same' is easy to get around.

The easier way to catch a bot is to do it in a reverse 'mousetrap' style. Occasionally spawn something that is 'glitched' and can't be interacted with, looks like a resource, but doesn't actually deplete or move.

Watch and see which characters suspiciously keep going back to the same spot, or get stuck there, when a human would have 'realized something was wrong' and stopped.

This is an oversimplification of the methodology, and it works for lots of things. If you find you can't make something that bots won't figure out how to do correctly, instead make something slightly frustrating to a human but that a bot will continue to try to do, incorrectly.

daveywavey

tautau wrote: »

Remember that a full time, trained GM is expensive. You will need three shifts a day and there will be a lot of servers to monitor. What do you need to pay a good GM per year, including benefits, perhaps $80k? So, three of them is about a quarter million a year to have one more online 24 hours five days a week. To have several online all the time 7 days a week we are certainly talking at least $1 mil a year. Are we (including you @PenguinPaladin ) willing to put in another $10 or $20 per month to cover GMs?

80k?! I'm coming to work for you!!!

daveywavey

PenguinPaladin wrote: »

If i notice you never talk to anyone, and act like a bot. Im killing you every time i see you. Report me if your not a bot, ill explain to the gm that the dude plays like a bot.

What's to report? Open World PvP is a pillar of the game.

Noaani

PenguinPaladin wrote: »

RMT will be the major issue in ashes i believe also. To the point intrepid should probably look into having double or triple in game GM's on release.

Why would you want them in game, rather than actually working?

A GM that is in game is there for PR, not to handle bots.

Take that same person, give them data from various flags in the game, and they can catch and ban bots at a much faster rate.

It took me a long time to understand why people thought that Blizzard cared about the game early on - it was clear to me that they didnt. However, if you have more GM interaction than any other game, people that have no clue will completely miss the seeds of a broken economy that are being planted, and thing the game with all the online GM's is just the greatest.

PenguinPaladin

Noaani wrote: »

PenguinPaladin wrote: »

RMT will be the major issue in ashes i believe also. To the point intrepid should probably look into having double or triple in game GM's on release.

Why would you want them in game, rather than actually working?

A GM that is in game is there for PR, not to handle bots.

Take that same person, give them data from various flags in the game, and they can catch and ban bots at a much faster rate.

It took me a long time to understand why people thought that Blizzard cared about the game early on - it was clear to me that they didnt. However, if you have more GM interaction than any other game, people that have no clue will completely miss the seeds of a broken economy that are being planted, and thing the game with all the online GM's is just the greatest.

I dont say "in game" as activly playing and not receiving reports or working. I say "in game" as in actively effecting what is happening in game. Baning cheaters and responding to reports......... who wants on staff players of the game?

truelyyy

In my simple opinion these game companies if they put in the effort could remove bots.

Firstly there's the subscriptions paywall.
Secondly there will be active GMs, so reporting will be very useful.
Third ashes are not a barren corporate company so they will actually put reasonable resources into removing bots, with all these factors combined I don't see bots being an issue.

The 2 main reasons I'd say bots are a problems is current games is 1. F2P & 2. game owners are lazy, don't put enough resources towards it, but ashes team put love into their game it'll be fine.

Anonymous332

No macros would make people have to do them through third party which will make it easier to ban bots

Enigmatic Sage

Another BOT thread, lol. Intrepid is working on something to detect and prevent any botting from occuring. Botting will be against TOS and i imagine they will enforce this rule. Players need to do their part so the team can do theirs to verify bot use. It is not always a one sided thing.

PenguinPaladin

@Taaku

May want to check out the top of this thread for some of your bots concerns

Taaku

PenguinPaladin wrote: »

@Taaku

May want to check out the top of this thread for some of your bots concerns

Thank you! This helps!

Depraved

tautau wrote: »

Remember that a full time, trained GM is expensive. You will need three shifts a day and there will be a lot of servers to monitor. What do you need to pay a good GM per year, including benefits, perhaps $80k? So, three of them is about a quarter million a year to have one more online 24 hours five days a week. To have several online all the time 7 days a week we are certainly talking at least $1 mil a year. Are we (including you @PenguinPaladin ) willing to put in another $10 or $20 per month to cover GMs?

spoiler alert: GMs are just people in a call center in latin america making 3-5 an hour

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