Battle against bots...

[alison87]

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

Some nice ideas there.
Maybe he could incorporate the noob potions idea into a special noob starter pack to attract new players. Give them sum pots,basic kit and maybe a exp pot or sumthing in a welcome chest. Removing the need to buy pots til a certain lvl removes the need for trees in low areas an they can keep whatever they make from hunting/quests

 

[isen]

My original thoughts was it would be great to have some iconic mir items/monsters pop up and you would have to type their name...

However, we want to appeal to new players also, and if they did not know of these items/mobs then they would be screwed.

Sam

You could make the name of the mob/item part of the image. As long as its in image form it shouldn't be readable by any text reading programs, but would be easily readable by a person.

I've seen 1 or 2 other captcha systems that use this.

 

[NewHope]

Awful idea. But at least your trying.
I'd say reflect on the game the way that Xele has - its okay making everything hard to get but if this doesn't reflect progression then pretty soon the user count will drop out of sheer fustration and bordem.

 

[Tashohnie]

View attachment 14573

It's MINOS, right?

 

[SilvaRoberto]

So, we have been brain storming and have a potential idea but are unsure how it might effect/annoying the non botting community.

The issue:
We are receiving an increasing number of complaints about botters, whether or not they are botters or farmers is another issue, we are trying to solve the botting issue.

Behavior identifiers:
The botters are generally reported gathering chestnuts/hunting mobs in mizu/bw and anywhere else that contain monsters that have a low likely hood of killing them.

Potential solution:
Random captcha's on specific maps when picking up gold/chestnuts... IE mizu/bw etc when you pick up a gold pile, you have a random chance of being prompted to enter a captcha, this would only apply to provinces and potentially very low level caves.

Failure to enter the captcha correctly 3 times, or within the designated time slot would result in the character being kicked and us being informed that of the failure so we can do some investigation (I imagine some people might muck this up by mistake, so need a level of human investigation).

I can see this being potentially annoying for some people, as non botters will be presented with a captcha occasionally... But as it will only apply to low risk area's I can see is maybe working...

Wanted to gather the communities thoughts on the idea/subject.

Sam

firstly good effort mate, secondly sounds like a great idea. but how much damage has already been done with the mass farming of the instanced mizu villages they had 2weeks perma farm it minimum mulitple millions, remind me how much them spier teeth were worth?

 

[Martyn]

The bot is only avaible to a certain guild and they pay £200 a month for it..

Now these people have ruined the economy.. And need to be found..

Samuel this is a big issue an needs to be addressed sooner rather then later.. The money needs to be removed from the system and anyone involved removed from the game completely.. Haven't seen much progression at all.. And all this time the people are buying things with the money recieved via botting..

 

[Ezrolith]

I think your idea is great Samuel. I like the idea of the small gold reward for getting a captcha, would make it less annoying and more like "ooo"

 

[alison87]

The bot is only avaible to a certain guild and they pay £200 a month for it..

Now these people have ruined the economy.. And need to be found..

Samuel this is a big issue an needs to be addressed sooner rather then later.. The money needs to be removed from the system and anyone involved removed from the game completely.. Haven't seen much progression at all.. And all this time the people are buying things with the money recieved via botting..

What exactly are they buying?lol theres nothing for sale

 

[DeadGirl]

What exactly are they buying?lol theres nothing for sale

'cause they've bought it all

 

[Dun]

'cause they've bought it all

They even bought all the sandwiches

 

[MoltenDrip]

A quick thought.

I haven't tried this server out yet, and I'm definitely not a computer guy.. but read the whole forum post about botting, which the majority of it was about chestnuts and mining.

Is it possible to make select NPC's have a security code before selling an item? i.e. Chestnuts/Ores (assuming this is the main issue)

The security code being like a slot machine. For example. "Oh you would like to sell "Brown Chestnuts?"--"Yes"--(a three digit number will appear in the next NPC log with a random variation of three digits from 1-999, ) " Please input the three numbers to sell your Brown Chestnuts"

Would this be something you could code?

 

[Martyn]

What exactly are they buying?lol theres nothing for sale

everything has a price...

 

[Jest]

Nobody has ever paid 200 GBP a month for a bot in the history of mankind. I don't know where stuff like this comes from.

 

[suicidal]

Personally I don't mind if there are captchas etc. for harvesting. Honestly it isn't even worth the time anymore, I make more per hour in bc than I do harvesting now since the spider teeth change. Also seems like the chance of finding chestnuts has been lowered as well? Or just have had bad luck lately?

 

[eternallight]

Every 20k bagged a captcha to.stop afk gold.farms. normal hunt you will get once an hour

 

[thedeath]

lol i dont get it.
even huge company's fail to stop automated programs (bots) from simply bypassing, reading, ... captcha checks.
why do you think you'll succeed?
there was a time when every website, game kept making harder captcha checks to try and stop automated programs,
these days they've given up and only use basic ones to balance user annoyance with the obvious fact that it'll be bypassed eventualy.

sure captcha checks or math calculations are gonna stop bots for a few 'days' (at most).
but you'll have to make them into pure random images, have absolutely 0 client side intel on them, cant use any font that might even be remotely easy to read, cant use text that anyone who has colorblindness could read and in general cant use common sence solutions to math either.

then there's the obvious fact that you wanted chinese to come and play and now you're gonna make some system where they have to be able to fluently read and write english?

 

[Jest]

TheDeath makes a lot of sense :P

 

[Razzler]

a simple noughts and crosses game inbetween harvesting randomly .just click a X or a O winning move,with mouse,1 in 9 chances simple.

 

[WildGirl]

Only a human can answer a simple math problem like 1+5= ? or 6-4=? on a given image.

 

[Surreal]

The easiest way to stop harvesting bots would be to not stop the bot itself (almost impossible, really) but to limit what people botting can actually achieve.
Captcha's wont work for one main reason that's been mentioned somewhere in this thread before (sorry for not crediting whoever said it first) but all it will do is slow the botters down. If people can create complicated botting software, I'm sure a simple math captcha wouldn't be hard to bypass.

The 2 best ways to stop them I can think of would be to:
1) Massively reduce the worth of Chestnuts, or/and
2) Limit the amount of gold a character can hold according to level. Is there any reason for someone below level 20 (or even 30) to be able to hold a mill, really? This would introduce problems such as if a level 20 character finds an item worth more than a mill and tries to sell it but gold bars would always still be an option.

Harvesting bots wont be worth it if there's no monetary incentive or they have to level to 30+ to simply hold a decent amount of cash. Sure, they could collect all the chestnuts, max out the gold on one account and then trade it all over but it would massively reduce the bot's effectiveness.

The aim should be not to stop the bots (pretty much impossible to do completely) but to make it so there's very little to gain from actually botting.