I might be a bit too drunk or stoned, but I have an idea…and it might be trash
Maybe it is possible to program a routine regarding group invites.
This should be a popup window on a random place of the screen and while it is up,
the invite should stop the player from everything, chatting/following/attacking ect. till the player accepts/declines.
This can obviously be used to annoy other players, so make the groupinvite with a cd of like 2-5 minutes, so one player can not just spam it on one person, and be silly. The cd should just be for the actual player invited, so that we can fill our real groups without issues of waiting ofc.
The count of invites sended should be unlimited and the timer of running invites aswell, as soon as the grp is full, all running invites should end.
If this stops bots from doing what theyre doing at that time and they need to become like active, it could be usefull for the game itself and gives us players a bit todo when were bored, splitting a bottrain would just be awesome^^
Like I said, this idea might be trash, but I just thought, how nice it would be, to give those spammers/bottrainers a little payback from us (since we cannot kill them). So this came up to my mind.
The bots would just decline. It’s not that hard to make bots respond to that correctly.
People have tried so many things to try to crowdsource stopping bots. Some games even made captchas you had to solve on occasion. Bots always either get through them, or they annoy players to the extent that developers have to roll them back. Or both.
Sadly the best way people have come up with to deal with bots in a F2P game is just to collect a bunch of data, pass it through some heuristics, and do mass ban waves (because banning too quickly helps botters figure out how they’re being detected).
The only way you can combat bots even somewhat effectively is to add 2FA for market and player to player trading AND permaban on first offense botting and buying from 3rd party sites. Anything else is just a bandaid.
I would so rather have 2FA than most the other options presented, whether based out of use cases by other game publishers or proposed by the uninformed.
Despite Lost Ark not having immense popularity on RU, you didn’t see bots. Why? You had to have a specific email login which was… 2FA verified via phone number. And you couldn’t use a spoof or regenerated number like Google Voice. You had to have an actual cell carrier. I know this may pose an issue to those without a mobile phone… what what’s the actual scope of that? (Minors without a cellphone who shouldn’t be playing this game anyways??)
It seems the old addage of medical care could be applied here: the benefits far outweigh the risks.
you can force players to link a valid phone number-2f authentication
valid ID
captcha
improve anticheat
add gms that play the game
add region lock because we all know where this bots come from
after all, half cent of a dollar is good money in ch…
IIRC around 83% of the world-wide population owned a smartphone in 2021. For mobile phones this went up to ~91%.
It’s imho reasonable to assume that the percentage is above 99% for people who play online games.
So a 2FA would hit almost no-one, even if it would suck for the less than 1% amount of people who don’t own a cell phone.
Since I am seeing “captchas” as an idea once again:
Captchas have been constantly defeated for way over a decade. There even have been (maybe there still are) people who solve captchas in exchange for money and we are not talking about just a handful of people.
Captchas don’t solve anything when it comes to bots.
why would a botter pay a guy to solve captchas?
captchas are not always the “insert this word here” there are puzzles nowdays duh, genshin impact and honkai impact 3rd do use of them in order to stop botting.
like that would not indeed hurt the gold exchange balance?
2 factor authentication are a valid option after all in argentina phone numbers are linked to our ID’s
Yes, of course captchas got more “complex” over time since the “insert word here” times. And yet they still get defeated by bots and networks.
Depending on the “captcha solving network” it’s about something like 0,5€ to 4€ per 1000 solved captchas (depending on the kind of captcha). That’s basically nothing and wouldn’t put a dent in the earnings of a gold seller. The prices wouldn’t really go up and they could continue business as usual.
no one in its sane mind would dare to complete a 1000 captchas for 0,5€ you are not making any sence
please try to inform yourself better, and even if a botter finds someone dumb enought to do half of it, i’m pretty sure that person has better things to do whit it’s life than bother itself doing “complex” puzzles.
captchas are a solution. 2fa aunthentication helps too.
Let’s see…I’ve been around those kind of scenes for years in the past.
There were networks around who offered those prices. IIRC 2Captcha was a popular one and their rates were about what I mentioned (IIRC they were also pretty much the only “public” ones). If they are still around, look them up.
And here’s a tip: Just because you can’t imagine something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work that way or that it doesn’t exist.
There are/were a huge amount of people who were doing it just on the side as part of one of such networks. Aside from rumors of “farms” who were doing nothing else, I don’t know of anyone who did it as a primary job. It’s always a side activity to earn just a little bit more cash.
