Curse

muon · May 30, 2007, 12:53 AM // 00:53

Go to Bergen Hot Springs and Granite Citadel. You can find tons of farming bots. That really pissed me off. This can be stopped quite easily.

In many banking or account registration sites (include this Guild Guru), people are prompted with a distorted image of letters that only a human can recognize. This challenge ensures a real person is working at the other end of the line, not a program.

GW can employee similar approach. It can prompt such challenge during zoning when it sees a player who looks suspicious. (For example, solo Mo in an abused area.) If the user failed three times, the account is logged out automatically and needs to be log in again.

The advantage of this is that it does not annoy vast majority of legitimate players. For those who just happen to fit in the pattern of a bot, it is simply a few more key strokes between zones. In addition, since the account is not suspended, it avoids disputes between GW and suspended users. Moreover, the filtering rules can be adapted as soon as new bot programs appears, making it infeasible and non-profitable to write bots.

Eroth · May 30, 2007, 01:00 AM // 01:00

umm, last I checked GW can't send images through online GW chat. Maybe it can be key strokes like this.

|-|i=? or c@$|-|=? but then again programmers can get around that. I donno.

JeniM · May 30, 2007, 01:03 AM // 01:03

Dupe post

JeniM · May 30, 2007, 01:03 AM // 01:03

Noooooooooooooo don't stop bots only account ban them
bots are good

lightblade · May 30, 2007, 01:10 AM // 01:10

No...just no...

This is like fighting the bots the "hard" way, and you'll never win this way. They'll always involve and make more advanced version.

If you think all the bots out there are developed by one person, then you're dead wrong. There are workgroups and "department" of a company in China that dedicate to the development of bots.

Pattern recognition takes a workgroup about 2 weeks to bypass. It's futile.

muon · May 30, 2007, 01:23 AM // 01:23

Well, I happen to be computer science major. I know pattern recognition for twisted letters with noisy background is not easy (or my bank won't use it).

Regarding GW won't send image down, then it is up to their software updates. The image size shouldn't be too large after compression, especially if the image is black and white.

If someone already posted the same idea, that is great. This can remind them to implement this simple solution.

Emik · May 30, 2007, 01:44 AM // 01:44

While I understand you concern it's not as if these bots have personally been stealing your loot now i it?
They mind their own business and make things cheaper because they can do it en mass.
Ok, it's unfair and perhaps illegit to a certain extent but i for one don't give a rats ass if there is a bot out there or not.

JeniM · May 30, 2007, 02:01 AM // 02:01

We need bots in GW loosing bots would be the end

Replicant · May 30, 2007, 05:23 AM // 05:23

1. It'll annoy legit players. I for one don't want to have to enter stupid captcha like images everytime i zone.
2. Easily bypassed.

Take screenshot
bring screenshot into a program to crop out rest of the screenshot except the captcha image.
run a OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program on it.
have bot take text output from ORC app, enter in the text & continue botting.

theres already programs out there that can get around captcha images. not only are they annoying, but some people can't see them clearly (whether it be old age, bad vision, or just have trouble turning something that looks like a 2 year old threw up alphabet soup into text..)

Teger · May 30, 2007, 05:37 AM // 05:37

Heres an idea, not sure if it could be implemented into the current engine though:
For "suspicious" users (maybe have an ingame player report system that would force the user to take this test), upon zoning, would be faced with a rotating cube. In a random position around the cube, text such as "click the red triangle" would appear (hopefully scrambled up a bit). In other spots around the cube, random colors/shapes would appear, in the same font/formatting, to confuse any bots. The cube would never rotate so a face was DIRECTLY pointing at the screen, to prevent easy shape recognition. Hopefully, the shapes (with the red triangle example) would go something like "red diamond, red kite, red triangle, yellow triangle, orange triangle", with varied shades of red. I would ASSUME this would make it hard to make a bot for, but you never know.

Chicken Ftw · May 30, 2007, 05:39 AM // 05:39

Won't work. Silkroad tried something similar, and it took less than a week before the botters had figured out a workaround. Now the only difference is, legit players take longer to connect, having to type an image code every time. It's just an annoyance.

Teger's idea is interesting though.

Son Of The Axe · May 30, 2007, 05:48 AM // 05:48

how about this...now i'm no wiz, but! i think i have a solution........every time you see a bot you write down the name to report it ta-daa. okay even though yes there are like a 1000 bots in bergen GW promotes reporting as a way to get rid of bots..posted a bot complaint like this earlier...everyone said just report bots...so passing along the advice.

JeniM · May 30, 2007, 08:18 AM // 08:18

So all you STOP THE BOTS people, you want monthly fees?

pamelf · May 30, 2007, 01:00 PM // 13:00

Quote:

Originally Posted by Emik

While I understand you concern it's not as if these bots have personally been stealing your loot now i it?
They mind their own business and make things cheaper because they can do it en mass.
Ok, it's unfair and perhaps illegit to a certain extent but i for one don't give a rats ass if there is a bot out there or not.

I agree. I never quite understood what all the fuss was about. I mean, they're not stealing anything that's actually REAL. The only thing that bothers me about them is when people get banned for being one when they're not, but as there's no way anyone could ever mistake me for a bot (I'm broke and hardly ever spend more than 2 hours online) it simply isn't an issue for me. *shrugs*

Teger · May 30, 2007, 03:12 PM // 15:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by pamelf

I agree. I never quite understood what all the fuss was about. I mean, they're not stealing anything that's actually REAL. The only thing that bothers me about them is when people get banned for being one when they're not, but as there's no way anyone could ever mistake me for a bot (I'm broke and hardly ever spend more than 2 hours online) it simply isn't an issue for me. *shrugs*

What people dislike is that they cause inflation in the economy, thus causing things like we see today, with some items costing over 100e, and makeing the entry barrier into the game higher. Just to put things into perspective, in a game I used to play, Anarchy Online, the number of bots essentially shot the entire economy to hell so much, that if a new player actually wanted to buy a half decent peice of armor, or a weapon, off of another player, they would either have to spend weeks farming for enough gold (by which time they would be too high level for it), or would have to buy gold from online bot sites as well. While that hasnt happened in GW yet, and it probably wont, as GW2 will reset everything, its something that "can" happen due to bots.

MagmaRed · May 30, 2007, 03:29 PM // 15:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by Teger

Heres an idea, not sure if it could be implemented into the current engine though:
For "suspicious" users (maybe have an ingame player report system that would force the user to take this test), upon zoning, would be faced with a rotating cube. In a random position around the cube, text such as "click the red triangle" would appear (hopefully scrambled up a bit). In other spots around the cube, random colors/shapes would appear, in the same font/formatting, to confuse any bots. The cube would never rotate so a face was DIRECTLY pointing at the screen, to prevent easy shape recognition. Hopefully, the shapes (with the red triangle example) would go something like "red diamond, red kite, red triangle, yellow triangle, orange triangle", with varied shades of red. I would ASSUME this would make it hard to make a bot for, but you never know.

So if I don't like you for whatever reason, I just report you continually, making you take this test? Easily exploited by asshats.

JeniM · May 30, 2007, 05:04 PM // 17:04

Bots annoy you so everytime you zone you have to solve a puzzle??

muon · May 30, 2007, 06:08 PM // 18:08

You don't need to challenge a player every time. Only when the profile matches recent bot activity. As I said before, for now you challenge solo Mo at the exit of Bergen Hot Springs and Granite Citadel. Not elsewhere and not everyone. When bots moves to other places, you update your filter.

To answer Replicant. If a bot owner has to go though all these steps to get over the hump, then the method works.

As of why stop bots? I don't trade anymore. The prices are out of reach for a player who also has a life.

JeniM · May 30, 2007, 08:34 PM // 20:34

But then if you stopped bots it would cost real money to play not more GW money

watrah · May 30, 2007, 09:31 PM // 21:31

guys bots can be easily stop because they are super damp so how bots work is this way they go out kill some enemies collect drop then head back to any NPC then they sell there loot and they do this over and over until u got a good cash

so if u want to stop them u need to know one thing how bots collect there drop after they kill there enemy or how do they know there enemy is killed it is like macro or something, the thing is they use the keyboard key to activate there skill and collect there loot so to top them is by remove the key that select the drop so u can only collect ur loot by using the mouse pointer I know this will make some ppl unhappy because they like using keyboard key to collect there loot but this is the only way to get rid of the bots ones and for all