To many posts I see about bots and not enough solutions. Bots are a significant problem in lost arc and continue to wreak havoc on the in game economy and the gameplay experience. Feel free to post other potential solutions in the comments or thoughts about my solutions.
- Require a phone number to play.
- Pros
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Easy 2FA (2 Factor Authentication)
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Easy player tracking, banned players stay banned unless getting new phone #
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Stops mass bots. Systems exist to tell fake/spoofed from real phone numbers.
-Cons
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Loss of privacy, they get your phone number all though they wouldn’t be texting you.
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Potential account lock out, could be avoided by not enabling 2FA.
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The rare player who doesn’t have one cant play, most people with PC’s should have real phone #
- Player Moderators
-Pros
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Can deal with gold sell spammers in chat immediately.
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Can deal with chain bots (multi box/multi PC bots that stay on top of each other)
-Cons
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Potential power abuse.
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May ban legitimate players resulting in community outrage.
In order for player moderators to work they would have to be closely monitored for any abuse of power and have tools to help them identify bot accounts vs a real account acting like a bot. This can be from an account age tool, chat history tool, etc…
- Adding in game systems to make botting harder.
-Pros
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Will make developing and programing bots harder.
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Will slow bots down significantly giving less impact on community.
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Will result in more bots being banned prior to reaching content they can make more money on. Slower leveling/gameplay = less time to farm money before detected.
-Cons
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Botters are resilient. They will develop adaptive bots. Look at games like OSRS for example.
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May be tedious on the player base.
This can be done in a variety of ways.
Random mandatory events (Plz god don’t do this just here as an example)
Creating more mandatory dialog options. botters would likely get around this easily.
(hard because amazon doesn’t develop the game)
Making early content less viable in the marketplace. Economy shift, but makes it more difficult for bots to get into economy content.
Many of these are hard to implement. Player mods would require changes in the games to give players that level of the power. Hard for Amazon to do. Any economy changes or gameplay changes are also hard for Amazon to do. The easiest to implement and control would be the phone number. Please let me know if anyone has any other ideas. Lets get this fixed!!!