Long time MMO player, (WoW, Runescape, countless others)
Have been observing the conversations in this forum and it looks like two key issues at this point that crop up often:
Bots
lack of materials (given events are expiring)
I have a suggestion that I want to pass on to the team, but want to know what the community thinks first.
The idea comes from RuneScape, who had a good way to control bots on an F2P game way back in the 2000s, and this is Random Events!
How this would work:
every now and then while going about your business, a random event pops up teleporting you to some sort of mini-game type scenario
there would be a number of possible mini-games / scenarios and you would receive one at random therefore making it extremely difficult for bots to handle and interrupting their gameplay requiring manual intervention to pass
timely completion would provide honing materials and / OR skins.
not completing it in a certain amount of time would result in a penalty
Edit: (addressing the event just before an island, etc)
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if these random events took 1-2 mins on average to complete perhaps they wouldn’t come up 5 mins before every hour and for upto 10 mins after the hour?
they wouldn’t come up inside adventure islands, inside chaos dungeons, abyss dungeons or raids (instead it works like a queueing system and would occur right after the dungeon - just like on RuneScape)
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Thoughts?
Would the community be open to taking a “hit” for a few mins every now and then to destroy the bots?
That sounds cool, until you get randomly placed in an event right before your adventure island and now you have to wait another 4+hours. I think you can see why this won’t happen.
Yep I thought about that while posting, and my thoughts were:
if these random events took 1-2 mins on average to complete perhaps they wouldn’t come up 5 mins before every hour and for upto 10 mins after the hour?
they wouldn’t come up inside adventure islands, inside chaos dungeons, abyss dungeons or raids (instead it works like a queueing system and would occur right after the dungeon - just like on RuneScape)
I like the idea, I just don’t think it works in a game that has timed events all day long. I never played RS, but I assume it didn’t have that. Now, I also don’t like that LA has these timed events, I would much rather do them at my leisure…
I think they could eventually automate their way around the random events, but given that they would have to detect which event first, etc. it would take months before they would be able to effectively bot around it I would say?
The other thing about that is ; if each random event had a number of different permutations - it would take an exponentially increasing amount of time before they would be able to brute force and perhaps it wouldn’t be possible!
I think 2FA would be harder to implement as you’re moving outside the application layer and perhaps would need to interact with Steam, etc.
Whereas in-game “CAPTCHA” based solution like the one proposed above would be fully within the control of SG / AGS and built within the application layer of Lost Ark
I could be wrong but this is my gut feel based on my experience
- let me know what you think team!