I am not sure if it’s been suggested yet, but I had an idea to stop the bots, or at the very least, negate their impact in the game by stopping them progress further into the game.
Seeing as most of the bots are running the main story, if not always, and considering how Smilegate like to meme about “frustrations” by implementing something in the game to do with whatever the issue was…
A “robot” quest could be implemented, somewhere in prideholm, or at multiple points throughout the story. This robot quest could include a captcha task, or some form of task that changes in such a way, only a human would ever be able to complete the quest.
This quest could either have multiple attempts, or something along those lines - Failing the attempts triggers an alert to support and flags your account/character for investigation.
It wouldn’t stop the saturation of bots, but it would most likely stop the bots from progressing to points in the game where they start to negatively influence real players gameplays.
The meme could be a robot npc from Arthentine or something, etc. The finite details I can’t decide.
You can’t stop people botting, but you can probably stop the bots from botting with something like this?
I think a better solution is to just restrict players from trading, mailing, or using the AH until they complete an existing task in the game which you can’t really automate, like completing a specific floor of shadespire or a specific guardian (Vertus maybe?).
This is essentially my proposed solution but just at a different point - But the thing is, why would you put the captcha anywhere else other than the start, you wont need to restrict ah/trading etc if they have no items to actually trade, which would make sense to put the captcha at the start of the game (Prideholme).
This way they simply will never be able to unlock any further content without progressing past the quest and therefore you don’t need to restict Ah/trading and other things.
True, could be something more than a captcha tho, it was more of an example. Possibly an ingame task that is somehow randomized/recursive by definition.
Capchas won’t help. These aren’t bots in the strict sense, mostly. I’ve seen a few unattended bots grinding for mobs but mostly they are multiboxers with speed hacks and key clones. They’ll just solve the capchas and move on.
What SG needs to do is detect the keycloning and speed hacking software better the way Blizzard and FFXIV do.
That’s why IMO there should be an anti-bot quest at certain stages. If they can’t clear that quest, they wont be able to progress. If you don’t complete the hypotehtical quest in prideholm, you can never leave, and thus, never grind stuff for money etc.
Yeah but you’re missing that designing an anti-bot quest is a lot more work and harder to do compared to just a semi-challenging piece of content that already exists.
That wont work. Any type of block like a captcha, or human needed intervention will only slow the bots down… They have services that auto solve captchas, sending those imputs to real people, then the information back again.
They CAN fix botting though, but that needs to be addressed at the literal SIGNUP phase of Lost Ark…
When you make a Facebook, or an Instagram, or TikTok, and espically dating apps like Tinder… To have a 100% legitmate account, security is extremly tight, and without a real phone number, from your area, you can’t even signup.
They need to fix this at the source. If you make a new character right now, you’ll see countless bots being auto-made and spawn in… THAT’S where Amazon needs to make it harder to make from the get so.
More security, having to have a legitmate unused phone number to sigh up with would prevent multiple accounts from being made, unless you had an extra phone number.
Tinder is a great example, my friend got banned on Tinder, tried to make a new account… auto-blocked the second he put his number in…
Tried a completely different phone number on his original phone, and this is where it gets crazy… RE-BLOCKED AGAIN!! Yep. They keep the hardware/software information of your phone you signed up with/got banned with
It’s limitations like this that we need, inorder to stop bots from the very beginning.
That’s not a great idea, as they could progress to that point with a bot and then manually play for one hour or so, still a good deal for a gold seller
If the captcha is at multiple points and stops progression, it makes bots way, WAY less productive as they will incur a lot more downtime, which is the whole point of having captchas.
But I see that the implementation is quite complex as captchas suffer a lot from accessibility issues by nature