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Great game being taken over by bots. Creators of BnS don't know the solution?


Radarsu

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About me
I'm writing to you as a programmer (web developer), who is really surprised that people who could create such a great, complicated MMO are being beaten by semi-amateur programmers who create macro-based bots. Really, that is the biggest problem of this game that you seem to be unable to solve and it is probably going to kill this game one day.

 

Question
I'm not sure if European and even Korean development team seriously don't know how to deal with bots, but it looks like so.

 

The explaination of problem

Bots are everywhere. On the arena from rating 1300-1700 there are 90% of bot players (mostly destoryers). It kills fun for a lot of people. Already many people from my Clan decided to not use arenas, because they only meet bots, who are farming zen beans always doing same attack combinations etc. They negatively influent market by decreasing price of Soulstones dramatically and they destroy all the fun of playing arenas at low-medium ranking.

 

Bots are spamming messages on faction chat and whispering people. You keep on blocking character combinations etc., what is clearly bad idea from the ground up. This great, well developed game, sometimes really looks like dead mmo overtaken by bots. Many people are going to quit playing if you do not fix it quickly.

 

Invalid approach

You cannot fight spam-bots by blocking specific chat messages or communication in game just like you cannot fight arena-bots by disabling arenas for people wearing Hongmoon Cloth, because it is simply not going to work!

 

Also, bot reports etc. are not going to work if enemy is able to spawn bots faster, than you can check reports and remove bots - what's happening right now.

 

The solution
The verified and well known solution to fight bots were captcha-like systems. Of course, I do not recommend you to put captcha in the game, but the problem of differing human from bot isn't that hard.

There is already something called "Daily Dash" in the game. There should be another "mini-game" like that, which every player has to play once 4-24 hours, otherwise they are not being allowed to play and they are being logged out. Also, the game should pop-up if somebody is writing unusally huge amount of messages on the chat. The reward for that game should be something valuable - let's say 1 gold, so it won't annoy people and they will rather find it nice.

The game I'm talking about may be web-based and has to involve recognition of objects (from huge database that cannot be easiely obtained by bot-makers). An example:
http://terrillthompson.com/blog/images/recaptcha/captcha-sandwiches.png

 

P.S.
I am aware that my solution and advice is probably not going to ever be realised, as you would probably have to pass it further to Korea developers etc. etc. but I just had to write this because I am hardly annoyed by bots and one day I'll have to quit playing this awesome game, as it will die overtaken by bots... Instead becoming the best mmo existing for the next few years period.

captcha-sandwiches.png

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