Simple solution make a server for people on Amazon Prime.
I will switch over in a second cause bots won’t pay the annual fee. I feel you would have a couple of servers like that and since I am already on Amazon Prime won’t cost me a cent but I won’t have to have a server queue at all time for people that are not paying you money.
This game is to make money the bots are ruining it and you do nothing about it. I see more bots than players everywhere I go.
I think this is actually a really good idea.
Ever since I heard Amazon was raising the cost of Amazon Prime, I’ve been talking over with my wife if we should drop our Prime subscription when it expires in a couple months (because ‘free’ shipping doesn’t justify the new cost and we already get Netflix, so who cares about Prime Movies!), but I might reconsider if I felt I was actually getting some good value for the price… and use of exclusive servers for one of my favorite games would be something I’d consider a good value.
This is such a bandaid fix…
Nobody’s gonna turn over hundreds of hours of work to swap servers
It’s only for the people who haven’t don’t much in the game
So this doesn’t benefit the general playerbase whatsoever
Even though I have prime, I’m not gonna switch lol
Bots pay, its all about can they make more money than costs. If a single bot can earn more than the single cost, its not an issue. WoW costed money for the game and even had a monthly subscription fee! Without looking I would assume this is why Steam accounts that have spent at least $5 is not working. Any business has upfront costs but if you can make money it will still be an issue- this is why crypto miners are a problem yet have a massive upfront cost.
If you want to fix bots, you have to make it impossible for bots to participate in the world without human interaction and responses. For example: You can’t simply put a multifactor gate on the game login as a human will log in for the bot and let it go from that point. So how do you fix it? Easy! Smilegate needs to add dynamic content as part of quests (not static choices). What is an example of this? You know that keyboard entry on the [Eye of Aira] clown boss? You do that throughout the game during levelling up quests but really important, it needs to be dynamic and cannot be read by bots. So you can do things like King Tharian he says to you: I am looking for 5 mice in this picture? And a human can easily point out the 5 (but make it interesting for players like it is a game, the object should be random too, it would be 5 swords, 5 scarves etc.) but a bot will have issues AS LONG AS THE PICTURE IS DYNAMIC and the 5 mice look different and change locations, each mouse needs to be submitted (resets if wrong) and can;t be just brute forced by clicking the every pixel on the picture etc etc. Another example: When you meet the queen in Vern you could do a dance quest where it gets you to click on random dance moves, click on “hands in the air” and only 1 of the 10 picture is hands in the air, Click on “hands on your hips” and only 1 of the 10 pictures is a hand on its hips ETC , the positions of the dance moves are random and are not consistently the same picture ETC you get the idea. You have to make it fun for players yet STOP THE BOTS!!! :).
You also need to conceptualise that I would assume that bots also can use humans in the way when the bot gets stuck!, so it has to be enough times in the game to not make it worthwhile ‘pay’ humans to do it when bots get stuck as another thing to understand. Also they can probably bankroll any upfront costs now.
Main point: Make frequent, fun and rewarding edits to the levelling system with dynamic content which is bot resistant.
Never gonna happen,only 2 countries in EU have amazon.
Bots will pay as long as its lucrative.
Only way is phone nunber verification or straight up with some id.
As far as I know bots can’t use captcha. Just put one in the game to use the market and gold sources.
Good idea but needs to be used more than just once. Bots bring humans into play as needed when they are stuck. 1 in the game is too little as humans will know to just get involved on logon. Needs to be integrated into the questing system and has to be fun and not like captcha boredom with google. Random and dynamic systems are the way to go, just a bit more than 1 captcha!