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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Ludullu

Depraved wrote: »

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

They are that if you make them that. Now I'm not saying that Intrepid won't do that, but who knows, maybe they won't

Depraved

NiKr wrote: »

Depraved wrote: »

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

They are that if you make them that. Now I'm not saying that Intrepid won't do that, but who knows, maybe they won't

roblox does it, and many others. why wouldnt intrepid do it too? i mean it makes sense. id totally apply

Ludullu

Depraved wrote: »

roblox does it, and many others. why wouldnt intrepid do it too? i mean it makes sense. id totally apply

Huge companies do that because they couldn't give fewer shits about the customer service or their employees. What they do care is purely profits and their margins. Intrepid is trying to make a good mmo that appeal to mmo lovers who are tired of the very practices you mention.

The best parallel I could draw here is "every other mmo has most/all their content in instances because that's easier for player to do. Why wouldn't Intrepid do that too?".

PherPhur

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?

No way, there are lots of skilled people who would gladly GM for MUCH less than that. Remember, GMs, like most jobs that can be done remotely, are most cost effective to hire from another country outside of the western world.

PherPhur

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.

Yea for anyone botting at this kind of level changing your MAC address and buying a bulk of static IPs is noob work.

BTW this is one of the most intelligent takes I've heard from someone regarding the issue, most people write the problem off as if a few GMs and some anti-bot software are going to solve the issue, far far far from it.

I was thinking about ordering some gold myself personally just to feed their IG info to Intrepid. It's unrealistic that AoC would be willing to do this themselves I'd imagine, but could you imagine how hilarious it would be if the community stepped up and wrecked gold sellers lol? Once they nab one they can effectively "zoom in" on the IP for logs and chain ban a ton of them.

PherPhur

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.

I'll be doing this for a sizable portion of my game time. I'd rather spend a good chunk of my time working on this and getting corrupted than to live in AoC with farmers and botters.

PherPhur

BaSkA13 wrote: »

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.

Jagex, the creators of OSRS has anti-bot mechanisms that are the best in the industry and if you do a little digging you can find the botting community have already gotten to a point where this is useless apart from driving up the price of the botting "software".

What they do is have people record their regular movements and keypresses for a while and then throw it into software that patternizes it's movements based on the recordings.

Jagex has done so well with their software that they can even detect this, but only if the script is used publicly. So what scripters have done is they make custom scripts for each individual person and as long as they aren't used by a lot of people(released publicly), the ban rate is almost 0.

These private scripts cost a LOT more than public scripts, but its nearly a foolproof way of subverting the anti-bot software.

PherPhur

truely wrote: »

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.

We need to do nothing more than take a look at a company with MANY active GMs, money to be made by cracking down on bots(because they sell in game sub tokens), and has the best anti-bot software in the industry. I speak, of Jagex.

They can barely make a dent in botting, it's gotten too well done. At this point real players are getting banned because Jagex has such a difficult time differentiating between them and botters.

Ludullu

ChipsAhoy007 wrote: »

They can barely make a dent in botting, it's gotten too well done. At this point real players are getting banned because Jagex has such a difficult time differentiating between them and botters.

Is there open world pvp in OSRS? And if yes, do the bots respond to attacks from other players automatically?

PherPhur

Enigmatic Sage wrote: »

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.

Yes, please do your part and buy gold then doxx the living shit out of them to Intrepid. Easy chain bans.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

ChipsAhoy007 wrote: »

They can barely make a dent in botting, it's gotten too well done. At this point real players are getting banned because Jagex has such a difficult time differentiating between them and botters.

Is there open world pvp in OSRS? And if yes, do the bots respond to attacks from other players automatically?

You wouldn't be able to tell if they were custom.

But I can tell you that they could, and would. They would lose to above average players, they might beat average players, they could probably manage to scare off uncertain players.

Source: Without any scripting language and using just ingame tools in the training mode of Fighting Games, I can make 'bots' (to use in those training modes) that newbies can't beat, and I do this just by using the correct action-flow and action-hide theory.

EdH

The simple solution is to post signs throughout the game world that say "Bot Free Zone". That should work

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