So much bot flood, why can't this game get rid of this trash?

#21

Have you seen the amount of bots that are created every day? You have the advertisement bots of the nexus, the tracker bots of the realm and bazzars, and the occasional flood bots that attempt to crash a server or realm. Then you have to take into account that they are in every single server in the game including the inactive ones.

In other words? Hiring moderators or assigning DECA members to manually ban every single one of them is like trying to fight a blazing fire with a cup of water; It just keeps growing, while you waste resources trying to fight it.

It’s not an easy issue to fix that’s for sure. The solution has to be automatic, because the creation of bots employed is also automatic, but even thinking of a proper defense idea is quite challenging when you want to ensure your defense solution affects the bots only, and not the players, otherwise you’ll get some angry backlash (eg. Shadow muting due to certain phrases)

#22

compilation of a list of bot names; certain patterns, etc. a bunch of random consonants and shit, which is what they usually are, will have to fill out a security questionnaire, birthdays and whatever, which should cut down on most of them. randomly generating non-fucked up names isn’t easy for a bot to do, and filling out the questionnaire is prob too much of a hassle for every account. and then have a recaptcha B) we got em bois

recaptchas are hard to fill out lmao. especially the “find a car, etc” since those are annoying even for people to do

#23

List of bot names
Create new accounts not use the old names.

“Blacklist” Certain patterns
Have the bots not do those patterns?

“Blacklist” names with random consonants and shit
Some legit players have names like that, and the bot devs could easily make a system where it uses real words to make a username.

Filling out a security questionnaire
Can be automated, it’s not like answering security questions is hard if you don’t care about recovering a bot account

Birthdays and whatever
Easy to automate as well, adds nothing to verification

Randomly generating non-fucked up names isn’t easy for a bot to do
That’s… just not true? One simple solution is to take a list of, 1000 words, mash two of them together and enter it as a username, 1 million potential usernames so its bound to work.
What is deca gonna do, ban two-word user names?

Filling out the questionnaire is prob too much
If they can automate the account creation process they can automate the filling out the questions

Recaptchas
For those who are creating these bots, manually doing captchas so that they can gain money doesn’t seem like a hassle, it’s just essentially their job. They wouldn’t mind lol.

None of these are actual solutions and would take time and effort into implementing. Preventing mass botting without seriously restricting user “freedom” is a serious task.

#24

captchas will help a ton with botting problem
plus it’s not unreasonable to rate limit account creation per ip to, say, 1 or 2 a day.

#25

VPN. There’s always a loophole.

Some bots have 10+ stars. For players, I think it is not a terrible idea to measure the number of normal chat messages sent by that player within say, an hour, and then compare that to the number of monsters killed or the number of dungeons completed within that hour.

Well my idea is terrible anyways cause they will just relocate the bots into realms and complete pcaves.

Yeah, dealing with RWT is hell.

#26

I mean, it’s kind of hard to make any sort of bot restriction system for a f2p game like this, right? Most actions that you take against bots are either

a. Easily circumvented (captchas)
b. Negatively impact actual players (star requirements)
c. Both a and b (auto-blocking certain phrases in chat)

Bot creators can make new bots at their leisure because doing so is free, and as a result everything else is just damage control with chat features and making it ever so slightly slower to make new accounts. It’s not easy to fix, or the devs (who have a definite, vested interest in shutting these guys down) would have done so already.

#27

no one can dupe rn

#28

May I mention that this hurts the legitimate beginner Realmers who actually need some sort of assistance. I myself do not turn on the star requirements filter.

#29

bruh sup

#30

Just in case anyone doubts how rapidly bots are created, I have twice now witnessed a new batch of them being “born”/“synced”/whatever. Notice how many are present in the realm. The realm went from nearly empty to 280 in less than a minute. This is post-Exalt, as well, so you can’t just blame flash or anything. This is a major problem that can’t be solved by a DECA employee making the rounds in each server banning all of them he sees.

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#31

They can allow us to choose which words we want to filter in our own clients though.

It’s better than nothing.

#32

And then they just make the bods semi-randomly alter spelling. Sure, it’s better than nothing, but to players who aren’t aware of it or can’t be arsed to put in every possible permutation, misspelling, and variation it effectively is nothing. Not to mention every single time something new slips through, it becomes a chore on the player’s part to add it to their filter.

At this point it feels like the only possible way to ever truly combat these bots would be to implement a paywall of like a dollar to make an account and also have in-game moderators banning as many bots as possible, until it becomes more expensive to maintain their bot hordes than they’re making through RWT. And for the record, that would not be an actually good idea, it’s just the only way I see that would actually put an end to them.

#33

Obviously? That’s the reason why I said it’s better than nothing.

Also, having anti-spam moderators isn’t as impossible as people seem to think here.

#34

Unpaid moderators are as much of a liability as they are a benefit. I oversee the in-game mods for another game, and I can tell you it’s not that simple. First, you have the players that want to be mods. They will be a constant source of distraction from the moment you introduce such a rank. Then you have the tryhards, those that attained that rank and treat it like it’s their job. May sound like a good thing but it leads to them overdoing it or just getting stressed out after a while, and those are probably the players you (devs) like most. Then you have reports from players about mod abuse. These are almost always false, but you really don’t want to fuck up and take the mods word for it when it’s not. You have to be able to audit them and hold them accountable when needed, and take responsibility for their actions.

#35

I never said it was simple

I also said anti-spam mods, not player moderating mods

#36

You can’t have one without the other. Else the game would already know who’s a bot and who isn’t.

#37

I don’t know what you’re talking about

#38

Are you suggesting that Deca should hire people to nuke bots, rather than giving trusted players those powers? What I’m saying is that you can’t give a player mod tools and expect them to only use it on bots. You also can’t prevent the tools from working on normal players. If you could do that, then you wouldn’t need mods. You’d just disconnect the bots you identify.

#39

Any abuse is easily undone

#40

  • Chat filter doesnt work on bots. DECA would have to change the filter on a daily basis.

  • Banning doesnt work on bots. They are replaced automatically.

  • Player moderators is a can of worms that shouldnt be opened, even if moderators could be 100% trusted. Imagine if the moderators got hacked one day & the hacker started banning everyone? It wouldn’t be pretty.

  • Making the game P2P wont stop bots. Even P2P MMOs have rampant RWT problems.

Bots arent being overlooked. Shadowmuting was DECA’s method of stopping bots, by silencing them. But its not doing a good job (which they acknowledged). Even some of the recent blog posts were about improving shadowmuting.

The problem with bots is that they simply cannot be stopped in-game. So many MMOs deal with the same problem & all they can do is minimize the damage.

The real solution to all of this is to shutdown RWT sites, but the effort to do all this is frankly not worth it. If big name companies STRUGGLE to shutdown RWT websites, what makes you think DECA can??

The solution to bots? There is no solution.