Curse

twicky_kid · Apr 07, 2006, 01:37 AM // 01:37

It takes time to prove that it is a bot. Even if they follow the same path.

They also want to take down an entire group instead of 1 at a time. Farmers have multiple computers set up at 1 location. The more of those they can disable at one time the better.

Remember that we outnumber the GW crew by a long shot. With more farmers showing up everyday. They have done a better job than any other game I've seen so far.

MaglorD · Apr 07, 2006, 05:39 AM // 05:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by twicky_kid

It takes time to prove that it is a bot. Even if they follow the same path.

They also want to take down an entire group instead of 1 at a time. Farmers have multiple computers set up at 1 location. The more of those they can disable at one time the better.

Remember that we outnumber the GW crew by a long shot. With more farmers showing up everyday. They have done a better job than any other game I've seen so far.

The trouble with a lot of online games including GW is the lack of an effective bot-trap. Perhaps one way to do this is to implement some kind of character recognition which a bot cannot do, everytime a character leaves town. It's already done for account creation etc, so it should be able to be done for online games.

Ninetail Trickster · Apr 08, 2006, 01:43 AM // 01:43

The character recognition would work... or possibly include a 'gatekeeper' NPC. One has to talk to the NPC, and perform an action the current bots don't have command of. This would stop the generation of bots that's already out, and give ANet/NCSoft a chance to get after the compensatory wave a little better.

OR they could just nerf everything. ^_^

doey310 · Apr 08, 2006, 09:46 AM // 09:46

I think the character recognition idea is the best one yet althou it may get annoying to have to type something in everytime you leave a town or outpost but to catch the botters I would put up with it.

FrogDevourer · Apr 08, 2006, 12:21 PM // 12:21

Great screenshot. It shows that either ANet's anti-bot scanners were busy somwhere else, or that these scanners hardly monitor the repetitivity of a character's actions. Random actions are scattered in the best bot AIs so it would be a bit pointless to detect and ban poor unefficient bots, when you *really* want to catch the best and most stealthy ones. Unfortunately the most complex bots are also partly controlled by humans which makes most of the above ideas unrealistic.

To deal a serious blow to professional botters, you don't want to stop the armadas of bots, you want to monitor the cash flow. The effort needed to make the difference between human players and well-designed bots is too costly. However, it's quite easy to track down the cash flow (which accounts farm, which accounts are the middlemen, and which accounts are the resellers), and to identifiy repeated cash transfers between the same accounts. Identify the middlemen accounts that are never played, and that owns 90% of the botters' valuables. Squish them repeatedly, and you're giving botters a very good incentive to leave GW for another online game which with less active anti-botting features. Note that it also works against chinese farms based on cheap human labour.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Antheus

Real question is, does it matter?

Yep. Bots are affecting eahc and every player in two ways:

a/ they're plundering ANet's global drop rate counters, which in turn drastically reduce every player's drop rate. It's particularly obvious if you're a casual player and if you're trying to quest in heavily farmed areas. I remember when I used to farm in a self-found unpopular place. My loot was constant and my farming sessions were short and rare enough to ensure good drops. As soon as the place became public, my drop rates crumbled in a couple of days. It's also true for the overall drop rates. More bots mean that the overall drops are no longer shared fairly among humans players (based on the number of hours played). The direct result is that honest players (farmers or not) are ripped off because bots are stealing a notable part of the global loot.

b/ they're adding an insane influx of rares and cash which makes "good but not ubber" items worthless. Honest non-pro farmers are affected because the value of their items decreases, but casual players are screwed because they're stuck to the buying end of the player market. They are forced to gather cash to buy decent items, and they'll very very rarely find anything worth selling.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Antheus

What percentage of farmers are bots (global for entire GW population)?

A large majority of the overall farming time is performed by armadas of bots which are remotely controlled by human slaves (read: Chinese Farmers). They can manually take control of one to six bots whenever it's necessary to switch off the bot and to put it back on tracks. In other games, human operators take control and talk back to the GM's anti-bot questions, or they answer complex semi-random quizzes to access higher level dungeons. Recent studies showed that in a couple of online games, bot-powered chinese slaves were probably controlling 30 to 40% of existing accounts, and 66% of active accounts at a given time. For what it's worth, I'm sure that these numbers are much higher in GW due to the lack of monthly fee. An obvious anti-bot measure is to monitor the time spent online (few humans can be online 24/7) so the most stealthy botters are rotating multiple accounts (2/3 hours max per account) to look like casual farmers.

The realistic equation is:
multiple accounts + decent bot AI + human slave in control of a bot fleet = undetectable unbannable source of ebay cash

Quote:

Originally Posted by Antheus

How much of total income do they generate?

Good farmers are playing solo (8 times normal drops), and only one human player out of two is a farming veteran (other players are playing in groups and getting only negligible loot). The overall cash and item income from bots would be (at the very least) 50 to 60% of the economy content.

Of course, most of the time this number is hidden by NPC merchant middlemen. When you're buying crafting materials or runes, and you don't realize that half of them have been provided by a bot. Moreover most players do not realize that for each player who gained his FoW armor legally, there is at least one other player who bought the gold/materials from an ebay farm. The same stands for high-end rares.

Actually, most players *burn* valuables while playing (for instance when buying skills or customized armors) while bots do not.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Antheus

And assuming the 50 new copies per week are indeed contributed to bots, that makes 2500 copies per year. 6 months ago, GW sold 1 million copies.

You're wrong by (at least) an order of magnitude.

StreekDaMan · Apr 08, 2006, 04:18 PM // 16:18

Being the programmer and hoster of an older now closed text based MMO I know first hand how hard it is control botting. After about 6 months of my game being open publicly I noticed players mainly in groups being online for 24+ hours (active). It was then I relized that they were using text-string detecting bots. At first I watched them to try and see what's up and how they're doing it. (What kinda stuff the bot was looking at in order to figure out how it was going to react.) It's my belief (being fairly new to guildwars myself) that Anet is indeed watching the botting issue to gain a better picture over all. In my game I ended up removed about 90% (I'd say) of botters over time (about 3 months). However they were always around and will always be around. I believe Anet one day is just going to pull some Bot Raid on the accounts and squish them flat.

Yay for post #1

Antheus · Apr 09, 2006, 01:18 AM // 01:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by FrogDevourer

Actually, most players *burn* valuables while playing (for instance when buying skills or customized armors) while bots do not.
You're wrong by (at least) an order of magnitude.

Lets try to estimate the total number of bots and their income.

A droks troll run (easily automated, usually just takes down trolls) earns 1k per run. Bots are ran for cash, so they'll just STM everything. Resources and such slow down the turnaround, runes don't drop, mods are scarce.

Using a 55 the run can be completed in 10 minutes (estimate for full cycle, putting up enchants, running, etc). Avicara's take their toll (some spawns are tough to navigate, body blocking, and situations that bots can't handle). Lets assume 80% success rate, wasting 2 minutes on each failure.

This leaves us at ideal earnings of 6k per hour, or 144 plat per day. I'm sure that at this rate the anti-farm kicks in pretty quick, leaving you with essentially no drops. Switching areas might help (don't know).

1000 plat is $45 on eBay. That means, that a bot must be running for 7 days non-stop for $45. One week just to break even the purchase price. Even if my estimates are off, they are not off by a magnitude.

How many bots are there?

A bot takes 45 seconds to go from loading and spawn point at droks to the exit. Assuming they complete the cycle, that means they'll apear back in 10 minutes. Taking an "infinite" number of bots, each district has a limited size (don't know, 100 people, 200?).

Each bot spends (45/600) % = 7.5%of their time in town. There's usually 5-10 districts on US servers, less on others. If they are completely populated by bots, that makes 10 * 100 (10 districts, 100 people per dis). However, that's only 7.5% of population, meaning total bot population at 1000 / 7.5% = 13000.

Obviously, not all people in these districts are bots, so we can safely say, at any given time, there are maximum of 20 bots in droks districts = 20 * 10 / 7.5% = 2670 bots total.

During the course of 1 week, they would generate $120000. Nice sum.

But now comes the final part of the equation. The demand. There's no business value in buying copies of GW, if you cannot make up the money. So rationale is, find the optimal number of bots.

Searching eBay again for "guildwars gold" results in 23 hits. Summing up offers from one company results in 10000 plat for sale (funny number, might be a councidence). These offers span 1d4h (time of oldest offer). So, we will conclude that 10k plat sells in this time.

In order to fulfil this demand, you need approx 70 bots.

How accurate is this number? Lets go back to 7.5% presence in towns. 70 bots constantly running would result in 5 bots being in town at any given time. Since droks districts are not evenly populated, there's usually just 3-6 active districts that accept new incoming people. That means, 1 bot on average per district.

While they are not evenly spaces, and will on occasion bunch up, I dare claim, that this is a really good estimation about the order of magnitude. Being a bit flexible, I'll claim there are 50-200 bots running out of Droks.

I know there are other sites dedicated to this, but I doubt they actually have market for the remaining 2600-something bots. There's also "human" botting, the item trading, scamming, etc. But that one is unpredictable. People do trade, but they cannot guarantee revenue. These traders, being human, also have limited work times, and are just filling quotas. What they are is impossible to tell.

But my point above was not finding out how many bot accounts are out there, but estimating the impact. It turns out, that even with rough estimates, thousands of bots are simply not viable.
Banning a bot account is also not negligible. At $40-50 per copy, the bot must run for over a week at peak efficiency, just to cover its own cost.

Some will argue that all the numbers above are made up. Some are, some are educated guesses, some are quite accurate. In the end, this is all just a Fermi estimate.

But yes, bots exist, they are annoying. But I'll still stick with the argument, that there are considerably less of them than it's generally perceived. Someone bored could camp the exit area for an hour or two, and write down names. I'm willing to bet, the number of unique names would be surprisingly low. After all, if you go to ToA, everyone knows the scammers by name, and there's only a handful of them.

Edit: I forgot to include that each 55 costs 50k to make, and anywhere between 12-24h to level. So replacing banned accounts is not cost-free, even more when considering these tasks can't be automated.

Pik uR BuM · Apr 09, 2006, 07:16 AM // 07:16

I dont see the big deal is with Anet having to deal with these bots. Sure they have a responsibility but in the end it comes down to the players themself.
Look at it this way. Bots farm for money and sell it on ebay for real cash. If you want to get rid of bots, dont buy off ebay. Thus in the end the bots will be farming for no reason and thus, the ppl who created these bots will be losing profits from buyin gw accounts etc and stop doing it.
As long as ppl still use ebay to buy stuff such as money off these bots, there will always be bots.... Plain and simple

ubermancer · Apr 09, 2006, 04:41 PM // 16:41

Passphrases to enter into the area is a retarded idea. Im sorry, but if you cant anticipate the massive backlash from the community on that one, I dont know whats wrong.

Itd be FAR better to code into the client the ability to track peoples movement patterns, and send "red flag" warnings to the server.

storm of daeth · Apr 09, 2006, 09:29 PM // 21:29

it would be extremely hard for anet to take out large troups of bots all at once i just looked on ebay to see howmany different people are selling money on it there 12 pages of different "stores" so i dont see why anet can't do something about the "stores" that sell all the gold and items in the first place.

Antheus · Apr 09, 2006, 11:28 PM // 23:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by storm of daeth

it would be extremely hard for anet to take out large troups of bots all at once i just looked on ebay to see howmany different people are selling money on it there 12 pages of different "stores" so i dont see why anet can't do something about the "stores" that sell all the gold and items in the first place.

They cannot since they are not in violation of anything.

EULA applies to the game and/or account.

Selling/buying in-game items for real money is only in potential violation of EULA, hence your ability to play the game on ANets servers.

(This doesn't apply to the context or even GW, but is similar) It is possible to operate (not develop) server emulators and run them without requesting any kind of compensation. EULA prevents reverse engineering or manipulating the files, so it's impossible to develop a server without violating it. Charging for such a server would however result in copyright violation (for which there are real laws), providing it for free however s possible.

This is the core problem, namely knowing when and how to charge. It is not breaking any laws, just possibly the agreement between the company and player.

If there were at least the slightest chance of legal action, it would have been taken long ago by just about every MMO provider.

ubermancer · Apr 10, 2006, 12:34 AM // 00:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by storm of daeth

it would be extremely hard for anet to take out large troups of bots all at once i just looked on ebay to see howmany different people are selling money on it there 12 pages of different "stores" so i dont see why anet can't do something about the "stores" that sell all the gold and items in the first place.

I would appreciate it if only people who knew something about coding, and specifically pattern recognition, would post definitive things like this.

I know what I am talking about, and I say it would be less then a work days worth of coding (for me personally) to autonomously detect all the bots I pointed out. And thats being generous.

kimahri · Apr 10, 2006, 12:20 PM // 12:20

I saw that line, I tried to stand in the way, but the of course they just ran right through me...

Antheus · Apr 10, 2006, 03:58 PM // 15:58

Quote:

Originally Posted by ubermancer

I would appreciate it if only people who knew something about coding, and specifically pattern recognition, would post definitive things like this.

I know what I am talking about, and I say it would be less then a work days worth of coding (for me personally) to autonomously detect all the bots I pointed out. And thats being generous.

There's another aspect to it. I went to droks and for 30 minutes wrote down all the Mo/W exiting the area. I identified 7 bots (almost certain), and possible 8 more farmers. Total number of names passing through was 148. So yes, it would be rather easy to filter out the bulk.

But farming is here to stay. And as long as bots are stupid, they are also easily detectable. It's rather easy (once you identify them) to keep track of their earnings. If you banned them on sight, you just trigger evolution, with bots becoming more and more advanced (eventually even ran by people). This in turn makes it harder to detect them.

So sometimes, it might be better to just observe the problem, rather than actively fight it. I believe there is reasonable money to be made from selling in-game stuff, and as long as the market exists, there will be people supplying it.

And last important point is, what happens if you ban just 1 innocent person? Mistakes happen afterall.

Ninetail Trickster · Apr 11, 2006, 01:25 AM // 01:25

That's just it. No matter how precise you are, there is still a multitude of legitimate players. If you're going by movement patterns, all it would take is one player either following them in town or inadvertently using the standard bot's path in an instance. THAT would create a backlash larger than any password inconvenience.
Besides, it would take a day or less to code movement detection, but signifigantly less than that to code a bot to zig-zag himself long enough to defeat it.

kmg0 · Apr 11, 2006, 01:55 AM // 01:55

I usually join in the bot for fun. Just send yourself in the party and hopefully they'll accept. Then when they farm, you take your 1/2 of the profit. :P

Kazamafury · Apr 11, 2006, 03:24 AM // 03:24

now why would they accept? seing its a bot... and they're farming...