Ain’t seen a thread crop up about RWT in a while. After coming back from a break, its a bit disheartening to still see bots in the nexus spamming ToS breaking websites, especially during exalt which is supposed to be the big haul of new players into the game.
Any news on anything thats being done about it?
How about any ideas that’d try and prevent this?
There are quite a few individuals within an rwt discord who have 10s of vouches, it’s literally right click and mutual server and you can easily find IGNs of RWTers, DECA kinda lazy…
I’ve just been warning new players asking about it about what it is and to start away from it. A meager contribution, but it’s something.
I’ve heard people who were more anti-DECA mention that was a source of money for them, and they’d be hesitant to rid themselves of it because it makes them money (someone specifically guessed it was partly because of the Kabam associates that still exist in their team), but I haven’t researched it heavily. It’s not likely anything I could have much influence on, so I’m keeping my head low with that.
I might sign some official petition against it if that somehow ever came up though! •~•
This would be radical idea but we could flood or DDoS the RWT sites. Remember, there are more than 1 site to target.
Many countries (including Germany, I believe) deem it illegal to send any form of cyber attack. Doesn’t matter if the target is doing illegal things. DDoS’ing isn’t something to take lightly. By doing it, you screw up the hosting server, which affects other sites as well.
Ok then, DDoS/flooding method is eliminated.
Let’s try… players should cooperate with Deca to have word filter. That’s less radical that DDoS’ing.
Only solution is to rid of the trading system completely.
I’d come up with some hair-brained idea to attack them completely at the throat, but this has been an issue for years and it seems the “solutions” we have, only mess with the normal playerbase. But I can suggest one that wouldn’t be too much of a hassle to players:
Account 2-Step Verification
Step One: Email
Allows you to play the game, but trading/talking is restricted. These actions can be done between guild-mates and those on your friends list only.
Step 2: Phone Number
Allows the player to trade and talk publicly. You will recieve a verification text/code to enter before unlocking the account.
Alternative Step: Verified Account Filter
If it becomes to restrictive, they can add a Verified Player filter, which can be set to either 1 or 2, depending on how verified players are. (Default: 2) Players will need to add a phone number to be seen by default.
But what if I don’t have a phone number?
You can still play with friends on Discord, or make some friends. Or get a phone
Can’t phone numbers be faked?
Seems to be the best course of action for other websites, faked accounts should be limited and easily removed.
Can’t RWT still go on?
Yea, but we won’t have to hear about it.
Excellent Idea! I myself has proposed 2-Step Verification; however, my intention was to smite bots entirely, though this works just as well!
A good way to combat bots might be to track what words or sets or characters are said. If the same words or combination of characters are used by 20+ accounts 200+ times in 10 minutes or something, then that word or phrase will be temporarily added to the spam list for 24 hours or something. This would of course exclude things like " buying", " life", “deca” player names, greetings or things like “lol” and other commonly used words that aren’t associated with RWT
Mmh, those people are good at dodging that bullet. Not only can you change the words repeatedly, but you can use symbols in replacement of letters. We have an example of that right now in the nexus. /\ for A.
It might sound easy to just add that to the list of banned phrases/words, but there’s a point where you start to interfere with normal speech, and taking that approach takes up a lot of time and energy. Shadow muting and spam flag messages in this game are an example of a similar idea to this gone wrong.
I really do not think it is a problem that is worth investing any large amount of time, resources or effort into it.
It is a problem but because of things like a greater accessibility to loot in general and a large amount of desired items being SB makes RWT for realm a minor issue to me at least
Step 2: Phone Number
Even if I did carry a personal tracking device, I wouldn’t give my phone number to a video game.
I wish the old WS forums were still around so I could link you to hundreds of bad ideas to combat RWT. If you fight the shops, you’re also fighting the players. It’s bad enough that we have ancient bloated text filters randomly eating legit chat about the game. Block the bots, advise the new players that gear ain’t worth money, and stop wasting all of our time with poorly thought out filters.
There’s a lot more people with your cellphone numbers with a lot more malicious intents for it than you know, but there isn’t much to do with it unless they have your phone. Hell, I’ve personally invested in a burner number for all my 2-Steps. But I digress, I’m no expert on the topic.
But back in the days of Wildshadow, there really wasn’t much incentive/resources to stop the bots. Big corporations have invested millions on new methods to stop fake accounts. Considering DECA is willing to rebuild the entire structure from the ground up, its safe to say they can begin investing more into security for accounts, in turn, helping with the bot problem.
A simple neural network that could oversee all previous and current trades would stop RWT in their tracks. Find suspicious transactions, see which players interact with the suspicious player, and form a web of data to analyze.
The issue however, is not the programming of the network. It’s the current server architecture. The Exalt client has opened several avenues for the developers to detect client side hacks, improve the client side experience, expand and improve the game etc, however very little was changed to the server afaik. It would seem that inventory and trade data is outside the bounds of the current code implemented. At least, in the means to formulate that data into anything meaningful at the moment.
This does not mean that such a process is not unattainable or impractical, it’s just more work across plenty of developers who already have their own tasks and the machinations of a game company is beyond me.
I’m happy to see people like this suggestion as I’ve suggested exactly the same thing 5 years ago and the idea received negative feedback for reasons such as players not having phone numbers. I can’t see it a problem since not being verified won’t stop them from playing, they will keep trading and chat restrictions.
In a 100% free game you can’t do much better than that to prevent botting; unless we make the game steam-exclusive, phone numbers would be pretty nice to require.
Unfortunately, it’s been years since RotMG has seen any kind of spam bot fighting. I get private messages all the time from bots.
It would be more comfortable if we were able to setup a manual filter; so we can block specific phrases ourselves and get some peace from nexus and PM spamming. Some sides of this game are still pretty archaic to me, and being an indie game (with a small team) doesn’t excuse that in my point of view.
User defined filters (such as the rank filter you can set in options) are a much better avenue, but even this has a negative impact on new players.
In my opinion, the bots in this game are much less annoying than they used to be (came back a month or so ago). I only ignore a few bots per week in Nexus if I’m not hopping around servers. There’s usually only 2 per server that send public messages. The rest of them don’t seem to rotate accounts.
Almost all of the bots that send private messages will respect a “stop” reply and never bother you again. Only a couple item gambling sites didn’t respond to it in my experience.
Er …
Actually it’s not too implausible, technically. There are libraries out there to take care of a lot of the programming. There is specialist hardware too, but I don’t know DECA would want to spend money on that.
The problem is neural networks usually work by training. You e.g. train them to play chess by playing lots of games against themselves, gradually building up experience. You train them to recognise faces by showing them known pictures of faces, mixed up with other things.
How do you train them to recognise RWT? You can hardly get them to do lots of trades ! You could have them monitor transactions but how to tell which are RWT? Especially as they just look like pretty ordinary trades, or transfers between main and mule accounts, or gifts, There’s no magic way to tell which are RWT; if there were they could just block them.