Battle against bots...

[gazzr]

Have the box ask for a random amount of gold to be dropped in it to continue. Somewhere between 1 gold and 250 gold?

Could weave it into the story by saying its a tax levied by the owner of the province or something....

 

[grimlife]

@Sam
Dont do anything or change anything....
If you have a monitoring program inplace that flags accounts, just keep monitoring, nothing needs to be changed.....

it sounds like you have it all under control, and you probably shouldnt of told people aspects of how your monitoring works :zz...


one thing that needs to be established here is,
Are these achally bots? (as noone has solid proof yet)
or are these people just sharing accounts, working in shifts to farm 24/7?? like a well oiled hardcore team???
(that donot speak or respond to anyone :P)




One drastic and very harsh measure that would stop most of the nonsence going on is to ban all Chinese and Romanian ips :P
Its not like they dont have there own servers to play on? (if they havnt been ban from there for what they do)

Would be a bad move though, i kinda like pvping them and some of them are nice players

 

[Wond]

Yeah that's true. Their argument about selling gold is fair though. Apparently it's quite hard to determine if a character has bought gold. However, making selling gold an offence is fairly easy to implement.



Yes, I see no reason to add captchas because I think they are a bad idea as I explained earlier.

No.. what I was suggesting to monitor, were the supposed bots in Mizu farming chestnuts.

Monitoring isn't going to do anything. You can't stop bots all together by watching a few here and there. A system would need to be implemented to do so.

 

[Skyline]

Anyone remember back i nthe day on Euro.

You'd buy a book from one NPC for about 250 gold and it would sell for 500 gold to a different one?

Was loads of chinese botters running back and forth with bags full of books. Pk them, they'd drop loads of the same book then log out, and just carry on.

Was pretty funny to watch.

 

[SlippitySchlong]

Bad idea, just get online as GM and monitor your server.

 

[davefromchippie]

Any genuine chestnuter wouldn't mind a captcha if it gave a adequate reward for correct answer because it would stop the inflation of the market.

 

[Thoraximus]

Didn't realise botting was such a problem if I'm honest. But given that it is - yes some kind of simple maths sounds the best way to sort it!

 

[Techno]

cap the amount of trees 1 char can harvest in a day to say 100? (you have harvest maximum trees for today) msg i honeslty dont think anyone who havests legit does more than that before retuning to pot up/hunt

 

[Koriban]

cap the amount of trees 1 char can harvest in a day to say 100? (you have harvest maximum trees for today) msg i honeslty dont think anyone who havests legit does more than that before retuning to pot up/hunt

They'd just make another character and start again. Doesn't solve anything.

I think something does need to be done to solve the problem. A captcha image may be a bit too far though. A simple mathematics equation every X amount of tree's would be fine I think.

Problem is: If the botter has it going whilst they're playing on their screen next to them, then they'll just input the code and continue botting. This will only stop AFK-botting, which is a start I suppose.

 

[Dazzle]

Spawn a single BlackMaggot in Mizu... any none botter would run like ****

 

[Aldor]

Surely the solution to the current problem is to reduce the sale price of chestnuts to match the economy of this server? It should have been done at the same time as the SpiderTeeth nerf IMO. Higher gold drops should be shifted more towards higher level content not starting areas.

I appreciate the devs are trying to make a "challenging" server but IMO they're often confusing challenging and boring. No high level player should be expected to farm low level mobs or harvest chestnut trees in order to play, nor hens for feathers.

You'll never completely stop boting or gold farming but at least you can stop them doing it on level 1 characters.

Edit: If you're not willing to lower the value of Chestnuts how about increasing the weight to punish the lower level characters more?

 

[Merc_Draven]

Great Idea, + 500 gold for entering in the right captcha... this will 100% work

(don't make em to hard though)

This will kill the botting !!

 

[TravisW]

Would it be better to just have EVERYONE at randomized times have to click or enter something, else get kicked? Perhaps give some sort of warning before hand so you could be ready for it.
1. Chat screen- You will be "checked" in 60 seconds.
2. Pop up box- Do you want to be kicked? 10 second timer.
3. Click Yes/No
Randomized times could be anywhere from 1-4hrs.

OR

Have it level based, if char doesn't receive X amount of exp in a given time, above will kick in.
Of course afk spell levelers in training room maps could be exempt from this.

Flame away, just trying to give some ideas...

 

[Freestyler]

Didn't read whole thread so sorry if this already got mentioned.

If you have a system to tell you who doesn't enter a captcha, instead of actually having it entered, it could just be sent to you as data, then you can look into investigating those chars on those IPs where there is a high or consistent level of doing these things, so anyone who is gathering chestnuts for 20 hours might be worth looking at O.O or all day everyday.

 

[alison87]

I regularly hunt a few chestnuts between about 3-5am flitting between bw, ww and mizu. I don't see many noobs around, I think bots is being blown a bit out of proportion. Not keen on the captcha idea, like Koriban id rather have a simple maths question, it worked on 4h when they did it to stop afk mining.

 

[spacemonstar]

Surely the solution to the current problem is to reduce the sale price of chestnuts to match the economy of this server? It should have been done at the same time as the SpiderTeeth nerf IMO. Higher gold drops should be shifted more towards higher level content not starting areas.

I appreciate the devs are trying to make a "challenging" server but IMO they're often confusing challenging and boring. No high level player should be expected to farm low level mobs or harvest chestnut trees in order to play, nor hens for feathers.

You'll never completely stop boting or gold farming but at least you can stop them doing it on level 1 characters.

This is absolutely right.

 

[Dun]

Ban the people who buy gold as well. As this will take away the market for the botters to sell the gold they have been making to. Cause people won't be buying the gold off them, if they know they are going to be banned.

 

[Wond]

Surely the solution to the current problem is to reduce the sale price of chestnuts to match the economy of this server? It should have been done at the same time as the SpiderTeeth nerf IMO. Higher gold drops should be shifted more towards higher level content not starting areas.

I appreciate the devs are trying to make a "challenging" server but IMO they're often confusing challenging and boring. No high level player should be expected to farm low level mobs or harvest chestnut trees in order to play, nor hens for feathers.

You'll never completely stop boting or gold farming but at least you can stop them doing it on level 1 characters.

Agree with this.

 

[Dazzle]

Great Idea, + 500 gold for entering in the right captcha... this will 100% work

(don't make em to hard though)

This will kill the botting !!

You are my hero xx

 

[Raider]

There is a real easy way to deal with bots and help new comers out at the same time, remove chestnut trees from low level areas. Spread trees around past bichon/phantom forest and make them A LOT more uncommon than they are now but up the reward for the chestnuts 10/20/30/50k to reflect the rarity, this will give those maps a nice stable gold income if your lucky enough to find a tree.

The second part is dealing with helping poor people or new comers with a stable gold income. For dealing with the poor people, up the trash items in all zones from bug cave onwards (not so much bug cave itself because a lot drop there already, but zones like PSC/PT). This will give people more gold from hunting and not feeling forced into chestnut hunting to make ends meat. For new comers you could add some sort of quest from the potion NPC which upon completion will let you purchase special potions which cost 0 gold but do the same job as regular potions, however you can not trade/drop and they will only be useable up to level 22, at level 22 all potions on the character are removed.

Just my thoughts on simple but effective ways to deal with bots.

/Xele