A possible way to counter botting in a player-friendly fashion

As is becoming more and more apparent, there's a worrying trend of people using bots to gather money from chests for them, which can only hurry along inflation in an already brittle economy. ArenaNet's former measures against this form of abuse has affected real players as well: the number of chests available has been lowered and their content was toned down. The bots however moved to other unnerfed places, and despite ArenaNet's efforts in banning them, there still appears to be a large number of them active.
This simple change to chests would turn them into exactly what I believe they were designed for: intermediate rewards for fighting your way to a certain point, exploring off the beaten path and defeating a boss, etc.

Bots won't be able to just run up to the chests and ignore all enemies anymore, and if they're clever enough to kill entire groups of enemies, chests will be the least thing to worry about.

Personally I think automatically opening them or spawning them when an associated group dies would be best, keys would just clutter up inventory, but that's just details. If there's a way this can be implemented, I think the problems bots cause right now will be entirely remedied, without people having to get paranoid to be mistaken for a bot and getting reported whenever they do some casual farming, as is currently the case.

Great thinking, DarkWasp.

Hey

First post here, but I think it's a worthy start

From my experience of other bot-consumed games, things will only get worse from now on, unless something is done about bots NOW.
This is how it works. A bot is created by some coding-geek, but it is very basic and limited with what it can do. Some people get a hold of the code and start making their own versions of the bot, with added functionality. Once those start gaining popularity, more and more coding-geeks get involved in creating them and eventually you end up with a whole community thriving off of each other's work and adding bits here and there.
Take for example Diablo2. I played that game to bits until people started botting. Firstly it was just one or two bosses that would have bot 'support', but as it stands now (or since the last time I played, which is around 3 months ago), bots can pretty much run through every single boss in the game and pick up everything they drop, even sell stuff to an NPC, restock health potions, etc, etc. The list goes on!
I fear this could happen to GW too, depending on the game's popularity (which seems to be growing quickly). Hell, even I bought this game and I've only ever bought 4 games in my life (FYI, that would be Half-Life (bought 2 cos 1 cd key got lost), Half-Life 2, Diablo 2 + expansion (ok, 5 games...), and then GW.

There must be countless ways of identifying which accounts are using bots and which are not. Player-movements differ immensly to those of bots and I think this is where ArenaNet need to put their focus. Otherwise we'll end up with what basically would be a community of super-henchmen that will only make life harder for all us legit players.

There's plenty of threads discussing the nature of bots already, this suggestion was just posted as a solid way to stop the currently most rampant form of botting, being those bots that do chest runs over and over again.

The problem with identifying player movement is that players start getting paranoid about being mistaken for a bot, and that seriously detracts from playing enjoyment. Sometimes a bot with some randomized behaviour mixed in can seem less linear than a player, so this kind of paranoia is sort of understandable. I was hoping to relay this suggestion as a temporary solution to one facet of botting that is currently plaguing GW, a solution that tries to affect only bots instead of everyone in the game as has been the case formerly.

In my opinion, I think that would only put more pressure on the botters to make more advanced bots. I see it as a delay effect only. If players would be required to kill monsters before good chest drops spawn, then botters will find a way around this, which in turn only makes them more capable.

What about making chests only lootable when you bring along a certain amount of party members or henchmen? Make it so EVERYONE in the group gets an item from the chest when opened as long as they are a real human character and not a henchmen, but if it's just a single person with a bot with 7 henchmen then that person would only have a 2/8 chance of getting anything from the chest like it is now?

You can't combat this just by 100% banning accounts because they'll make their money ebaying then just go out and buy another cd-key. I'd also be willing to wager many botters have stolen accounts from keyloggers and other trojan programs as well to help safeguard their master account.

But that's always the case. If they start to monitor character behaviour for signs of botting, there might be a string of bans resulting from that, but at the same time it will encourage the people writing the bots to implement more randomness and other tricks to avoid detection.

I think the only way to stop people from improving bots is to either discourage the incentive to bot (which ultimately means all grindables, including exp, will have to disappear from the game - not really a viable option) or to leave the bots unchecked (since they won't need to improve, although in all likelyhood people will still work to optimize the amount of gold they farm per hour with their bot).

I think this would also work, I was thinking about maybe a threshold of having at least two members in a four-player map, four members in a six-player map, six members in an eight-player map before chests start coughing up rewards. People who can go out with half the members normally needed to clear an area are obviously powerful enough not to need excess loot, and this would encourage partying. It still leaves the issue of the bots getting something out of the chests, especially if the henchmen got themselves killed (they're good at this) while the bot makes his usual run to the chests. It's a good idea, but not a fully-covering solution.

Why change things which will affect normal players as well... the only solution is to ban ANY bot users.

If bot makers make better bots, then A.net needs to make better bot detection.

Yeah, and why can't researchers just invent a cure for AIDS? That's what they're getting paid for, isn't it?

The aim of this thread is to help suggest ways that frustrate botting attempts with the least amount of consequences for people who play the game like it was intended. Just saying ArenaNet should fix things is not a constructive suggestion, saying their fix shouldn't affect you is even less useful.

Actually, most companies are paid to make treatments for AIDS and cancer. More money in that.

Why not just have an automated message that, if a player enters and leaves an area repeatedly, sends a whisper saying, essentially, "You have entered this area X times. Please reply to this with the message of <Insert randomized code>". That would allow ArenaNet to ban many of the current bots, as the owners would not be watching them, and if the message has a new word order or such every week, it prevents players from making bots just to reply to the message.

Botters get caught. If they aren't banned, they will bot again. Ban them all, and keep the game as much the same for the rest of us as possible.

i think the thing with the key is actually a good idea. Normal players will fight their way up to there (altho using a key on a barrel or wreckage is odd), and open the chest. But what I can ALSO see happening is ppl selling keys in town...

Look no need for cheek.

Your idea has merit however anyone that prevents normal players like me from farming some areas would be annoying. Look how much the drops have been affected already by bot farming.

Changing game elements just makes everyone suffer and annoyed. The only real solution is to kill of the bots.

Bots are not mutating and uncurable like AIDs currently is (which by the way is a stupid example on your part), they are computer programs. Companies can stop them, they get hold of the code and add their on counter-code to detect them, there is only so many ways bots can be programmed.

Only problem is cost, it costs more to program bot-blockers and such, then it does to change ingame elements to make bots harder to use.

they could make the keys non trade and only used in the area in teh specific time the key was looted leave the area key disapears

That little piece of 'insert' text could easily be extracted and put into a reply. You would need something like they do on most forum sign-ups now, a little box with letters/numbers that are hard to read even for us (I've come across a couple that I've had to try several times because you couldn't tell what case the letter was...
Anyway, it seems like that would be too difficult to implement...

I think what A.net should have a look at is the average time it takes for users to complete certain transactions (i.e. clicking on the 'play' button once logged in, double clicking the ID kit and IDing an item, targetting an enemy, etc.) and see which ones are faster than humanly possible. If any are going way too fast, flag it, and if that same transaction happens again at the same speed (for x number of times), it could give a clear indication that the account is using a bot. Of course there are ways to implement random pauses into a bot script which could disguise it, but since there are so many transactions in the game it would be hard for them to randomize every single one (it would take a long time to do...).

Of course this does seem like a lot of things for A.net to implement into their system, and it's up to them if they want to spend resources on just getting rid of bots, and it's a shame that the only way to recognize a bot is by going through these kind of lengths. After all, they are supposed to simulate a real player as much as possible.

just do the thing with groups you need 50% of the group to be in an area for chests to appear

4/2
6/3
8/4

the half manned group fights the mobs the mobs drop a key for the chest they are currently at they open up chest and key disapears, key is also non trade and disapears if player warps or ports into a city, you can also make the key a "quest item non trade" if making them disapear when you warp/port is too complicated to code or w/e but this should work

i doubt anybody could make a fully ai bot system to fight 100% randomized areas of mobs, find the key, open the chest, AND loot at the same time

You'd be surprised. They did with diablo2. I'm not saying it would be easy with GW, not at all, but I think that's half the fun for these kind of people. And, the rewards would be greater too (in terms of real money... people would pay for this kind of thing).

Wouldn't this mean that the botter gets 8x more reward per time unit by getting 8 accounts and having them group?

That means more money in the pocket for Anet and less money in the pocket for the botters/hackers, so what's the problem with that?

This is doubtless true, but I doubt people who've not dicked around with "problematic" software -notably hacks- would at all have a GW keylogger on their machine.


The problem with bots in GW is their effect on the economy. That, in itself, suggests several ways of making bots useless, e.g. by making it impossible to transfer gold between accounts, and if that was fixed I see no problem with letting people use bots all they want.

Not only is this a good idea towards getting rid of bots, but its a good idea to increase the rewards of encountering monsters even with 0 exp rewards.

The thrill of seeing if it can be done, being able to attach your handle to a popular bot, all reasons for people to write bots, and the lazy masses eagerly take their work and put them to use. Problem is there can easily be twenty-five people dedicating their spare time entirely to perfecting these bots; how many people can ArenaNet afford to dedicate all of their working hours to blocking their efforts out? We can only hope the bot makers get discouraged enough to stop spending their time to help a bunch of ungrateful kids and people looking to make money from their hard work.

The example was just to indicate that ignoring the entire discussion preceding your post and simply stating flat out that ArenaNet should just 'fix' the bots with no apparent knowledge of the intricate difficulties involved in doing so is about as useful as saying that people should 'fix' AIDS, a terrible virus that undoubtedly can be cured: for both cases it's quite obvious that if it would be easy to solve them, it would've been done a long time ago.

It may not be a very friendly way to put it, but if you keep saying this is possible and that is possible without actually suggesting how they'd go about it, you're just not helping. I understand it's very annoying to get your playstyle affected by these bots, ArenaNet's former band-aids made things worse for all players, not just the bots, but that was precisely why I relayed DarkWasp's suggestion here: it wouldn't affect honest players all that much while at least making things quite difficult for the current bot plague.

No one seems to be focusing on the randomization idea. I would think you could achieve a drastic drop in chest farming by making chest locations in a zone determined when you enter a zone. Always have the same number, but make sure they could appear anywhere on an available path.

This seems like it would work very well. A bot would have to walk around until they found chests, avoiding or fighting monsters at times. That would be a very complicated bot.

Another thing for detecting bots would be if ANet can track each characters movements and store them in a DB somewhere. Entry/Exit points, Coordinates of path taken, etc. Then they could write queries to find out who was doing the SAME things twice. Seriously, do you think ANY human player has taken EXACTLY the same path through an area twice? I don't think it's possible. This wouldn't catch the really good bots, but would get the lazy ones...

I do hope they do something though...

Couldn't be *that* hard. I don't know how to write bot or how it "sees" what is happenning, but it must be able to see at least text if it can find and loot chests and barrels. Given that, the "code" below should be child's play for a bot writer.

1. When red dots get near the center of the map, enter "bot combat mode"

-- bot combat mode --
1. Hit C
2. Hit Spacebar
3. Use skill 1
4. Use skill 2
5. Use skill 3
etc
When mob is dead, hit C. Continue using skills

Repeat until all red dots near center of radar are gone.

Pick up crap. Loot chest. It does not take alot of thought to kill the mobs. A bot could easily do it. For grins, after hitting C, the mob could choose skills based upon the name of the mob, to allow for different strategies vs different mobs.

Only problem I see is that hitting the spacebar or looting the corpses might move the bot off of its preprogrammed track so it would get "lost".

And the idea about needing multiple people in a group just sucks. If want to go out solo or with only 1 other person, and I find a way to get past the mobs and loot the treasure I should be rewarded for it.

All a bot-maker will do is run 4 bots and have them party together. Won't stop them.

They should stop the chest-looting the same way they stop the bot-farming: Have the game detect repeated activity and make the chests stop dropping loot. Right now if you repeatedly go out and kill the same mob over and over again, a little message appears telling you that it will stop dropping loot. Why not do the same thing with a chest?

OK hae a very simple solution that won't effect the game play or take to much to impliment.

All chests and wreckage is lock, with a distorted picture code, much like what you get on the Yahhogroups. This won't effect the normal players as this code can bee seen as part of the game world. it takes a seond to type in then your off. If you fail to get the code you get antohr randomly serverside generated code. Add a dectection system in their which say after three failed ettempts the chest or wreckage explodes doing some damage then it adds to the would and stops bots dead.

A kinda lock and key system, as more fun to he RP aspect of the game, in IMO it would kill the bots outright.

In fact this idea is such a good one I'm going to mail it to a.net.