BOT EPIDEMIC CURE

here`s a idea I'm sure many wont like but how`s about temporary stopping the option to go to scrolls or any raid map until a solution can be found for the rampant and disgracefull botting that's going off in both theses maps ,its at a epidemic rate at the moment and I'm sure thoses doing it are laughing at both bigpoint and clean players ...

 

Yes, and remove shinies and pearls from tentacles.

 

momment any ship logs on water, have a pop up like ( mimbus ) where they have to answer those 'captchas' this will slow the 'auto relogging after sunk' and if not answered or incorrect 1 week ban. this way if there is 'accidents of non botter'' they will not lose boat. bots r only efficient if they work continuous, this system would more then anything provide the noticeable change we want and would pretty much shut us up for awhile. but also not remove every botter which is very bad for business ( botters spend money to )

( and when entering bonus map, random popup captchas virgo=1 cap=2 sag = 3 cancer = 4

 

every vote counts guys/gals lets make this happen

lets see who votes

 

I never see bots in raids. Maybe if they let us high level players go swipe the sun map we can help with the issue.

 

if this would help then i voted yes. i earn my items the hard way-by playing the game fair. it is just a game and why would people want to cheat-it takes the fun and challenge out of it!

 

if they are going to let lvl 26+ boats go in behemoth, then all lvl should be allowed in Sun Map as well

 

All the bots my itty bitty tiny boat sank and capped using lots of pearl ammo that could of easily and sunk my boat are still botting after I reported them weeks ago. Yeah! Whatever will finally stick and work to get rid of these game wreckers that steal from all of us including Cheatfight.

 

Concerning the botting issue, they should have a section of the forum to report suspected botters that players can report it to, just like the section called chat, it's private and it would provide an outlet for honest players to report bad guy usage of exploits and hack/cheats. If someone accuses someone who is found not to be botting then they would receive some type of punishment, chat ban, failure to log onto ship for a certain time period.

 

Better idea, if they would do a random monthly housecleaning things would be much better.

 

Wow +1 Great Idea. I'm sure they will implement this right away. Keep at it. Together we can do it. I'm sure the devs are working on this right now as soon as they saw the idea. Wow +1

 

I've not voted, not because I don't agree with the idea, but because the options are a little one sided. Although the idea is good, I think it needs a bit more thought. I totally agree with you that stopping scroll bots and raid bots would be great for the server, however it needs to be looked at in a way that doesn't negatively effect players as well.

By removing any access to the raid and scrolls, legitimate players will not be able to farm very efficiently outside of events, or get their HP from scrolls if they are running low, whereas the botters who have all this stacked up for years won't actually be effected as badly. For players like yourself who have HP and Queens Legacy for long enough it is not a problem, but for those that don't it could be really counter productive.

Now, lets say they do take on the idea. How long is it going to be before a resolution can be made that eradicates all bots from the game? I am open about my past and anybody who knows me at all knows that I had a history of botting and the sorts before serving my time, so I feel like I have a more comprehensive knowledge of how they work and how they can be stopped.

There are essentially 2 types of bots. Packet and SCAR. Packet bots can be detected relatively easily, as proved by the past ban waves that only hit these players, as the data being sent to and from the game through the bot can be detected. That's about as much as I know there as I am not a coding genius by any stretch. SCAR bots are lesser known and less readily available, often slower, but much harder to detect. They work by using colours on the screen to navigate what is where. In the example of the game it would use colours and shapes that you see on the screen to assess most the variables such as HP, Map etc.

Saying fix the bots is all very well but there are some things to keep in mind that BigPoint do have to work with.

1. Feasibility - Easier said than done to just remove all the botters from the game. Packet bot users can be found easily and are always the ones caught in the ban waves. Other bots are harder to detect so it is not like they just have to write in a simple line of code and suddenly all the bots are gone. It is doable, but it is a long process having to work around ever-evolving bots, some of which I doubt the developers would even have access to due to them being private bots.

2. Affordability - This is the part we all hate about it. As the situation was almost ignored when bots first started coming into the scene, the presence of bots has grown massively to an extent that it just dominates the game. This has lead to 2 main results. Many players have left the game, and about 75% of the active community bot to one extent or another. Getting rid of bots sounds great on paper, but if not done carefully and properly, what you will find is that 75% of the game are banned, meaning BigPoint lose a huge amount of their income, meaning that prices are going to fly up so that they can keep their company alive. People say the botters don't spend anything but that's very very untrue. Personally I would say that the majority of players that spend a lot of money are botters. Not all, but definitely a large majority.

Basically, BigPoint cannot afford to keep the game going if they ban all the botters and people have figured this out, pushing more people into the botting community. This catch 22 I believe is past any kind of fixing and I personally think that bots will never be acted on majorly, apart from the occasional "scare ban" waves. If they were really serious about it they would have banned more than they did each time, but they can only afford to try and stop people doing it, rather than ban them and lose their income. This is why cannons are so expensive. People cant bot mass Voodoo Cannons or Doomhammers in the same way that they can bot pearls, amulets etc, so the botters will still spend on these.

The other option is just to stop the bots from working, which is possible seeing as they need updating every time there is anything new added to the game in a sync, but with other bots it is much much harder to fix. A simple update to the code of the bot can get it back up and running within 10 minutes of the update.

Sorry for rambling on. Although you may not believe that I want bots fixed based on my track record, I would much rather play in a bot free game than one riddled with them. This post isn’t meant to glorify bots in any way, it is there because I think it is important to share my knowledge of bots with the community, else I wouldn’t be posting it at all. Hopefully this will help shed some clarity to the rest of the community as to what the team are dealing with and why it is not a straight forward process at the stage we are at.

Thanks,

~Des

 

Excellent post. Considering the costs of actually banning all bot users, it may be better to annoy them enough to make them stop botting by their own will. How? Mass banning for a week or two. They will be back, they will spend money and if they get caught cheating, 1 week off should be fine so they eventually get bored of having those weeks off the game. Another option is to intentionally lag their clients if thats possible. The solution requires creativity.

Packet bots are easy to catch, but SCAR bots are more simple and less popular and that can be a problem. These can be stopped by recording player actions to detect patterns and determine who is acutally a bot. However, scripts may fail and ban innocent players (it has happened before). I like to do some APM and fool around in scrolls, so it may look weird if monitored. The sad part is that SCAR bots can be set to simulate a human and do exactly what a normal player would do with randomized timers, so those would require a lot of effort to remove.

I just want to share some knowledge

 

thank you for your imput Destruction,,,
but theres allways a plan B adjust raid maps and scroll`s in a way were upon bots cant function doing either as for chests and shineys I'm sure there would be away to alter or adjust theses also.

 

I think Satan's idea above is great. Just do mass bans of 1 day or 1 week every time they log in through a bot. Nothing permanent, but just to the extent where they arent going to want to bot. There are many ways they could go about it I guess, but what gets me is... If they can detect the packet bots, why have they not tried just temp banning more of them more often. Rather than banning 10 people or so per server every 8 months, make it every player for 1 week... and run that every week...?

Must be much more complicated than that or they surely would have done it.

 

I very much appreciate the comments but they are depressing showing just how bad the game has been run from a business point of view. It is from a position of weakness by not cleaning house of bots even though some of the players who bot spend money. We all know the rules. With that position of weakness are honest players that have stuck with the game they enjoyed with all the money and especially time into this game that are willing to compromise to somehow get new or old players back into the game and spend money to keep it going.

Basically Botting has been rewarded by the management of Big Point thru their inaction all these years. Hassle them 1 or two days a week and they still get substantial ill gotten rewards with minimal time investment with such a time intensive game. I reported a bot in 1/3 weeks ago and it has switched over to a harp bot for the event. This player has this same type of bot in 2-3 other 1 maps. It has never been banned. 10 players per month or whenever a ban wave hits is simply symbolic and like lottery for them. I'd say wipe this game clean as much as realistically they can given some programs are harder to detect. It sends a clear message, drop the prices and advertise "under new management". Sorry! I am a law & order type of person who was in the military too. lol

 

Well said! There's no need whatsoever to apologise for having self respect and integrity.

I wasn't in the military but was brought up with some decent good old fashioned honest principles in life = To never cheat or steal.

Sadly, these are basic principles that are no longer practised by some today!

 

There are 2 ways of looking at the bot situation

1. Yes there is a loss of revenue From the players using bots

But

2. The level of gameplay because of bots, has Increased the amount Honest players spend trying to stay competitive against the bots.

It would be interesting to see if the raised level of bots on game has actually reduced income, or has increased revenue from those trying to stay competitive?

These bots, which may be seem to us the players as a loss of income for BigPoint, but it may actually be generating more income because of the bots.

If this is the case, then it would explain why BigPoint does not take more action against the botters.

 

I don't think anybody disagrees about action needing to be taken on bots, but as I said earlier, a lot of the suggestions seem rather rash. Think about it literally. If bigpoint banned every single player that bots, regardless of how much, then how many players would be left. Next time youre on TeamSpeak with all your guild members just think about who you would lose, and how that would effect the game. Think about all the enemies you would lose, and how less frequent fights would be?

There is one thing everybody on the game has in common. Regardless of whether you bot or not, whether you're an ally or an enemy, spend or not, or even play every day or once a week. We all play this game to have fun. In a game that is already dwindling in numbers in comparison to back in 2010 when the game peaked, banning 75% of the game will not make the game fun for anybody. Yes, there are players that just bot and do not play, and are near enough irrelevant to fights, but then there are also players that bot when they are at work or when they are asleep but then play the game when they are on. I am not condoning the use of bots, but by banning every botter there will be no game left at all. Those that are left will be playing a completely dead game and therefore get bored quickly.

I am not saying that bots shouldn't be punished, I am not saying that bots should not be banned at all, but I think what needs to happen is what I said in my last post. Ban every player caught by the system with a script for 1 month, regardless of who they are, how much they spend or how long they have been botting for. Run the script every day and ban them for 1 month every time a player is caught, and keep banning them every single time until players do not want to risk it any more.

After say 3 months of running the script, any player who has not been banned before since their account was made should be issued with a reward, something significant like 100 Lv4 Doomhammers. Something that would really make up for their honesty in the game. I think Doomhammers would be a good idea because it is something that botters cant get anyway.

 

I would argue that the revenue lost to botters despite a few botters spending money and honest players spending money to hammer them is far greater than what you argue for.

#1 During the years I last played when we had far fewer bots and exploits in the game those honest players and myself spent thousands of US dollars on our boats. A huge group of upper, mid and lower level honest players left US West server about the same time going to other online games/companies that had stricter policies against cheaters. Aside from spending on Mega Happy Hours BP was making regular revenue off of ongoing charges like Premium and other options even though the game was not near as monetized as it is today. They monetized it because we all left!

#2 Tolerance threshold will be lower today for those honest players who are will to first spend money on this game and second realize their valuable time in this time intensive game is better spent elsewhere due to just how rampant the bots are. They are everywhere. Everywhere! It devalues the financial and time investment in the game especially with just how monetized the game is today with endless options and upgrades which would require a 2nd job just to pay BP for SeaFight.

#3 With the highly competitive world of online gaming there are far better customer focused options out there. Those competitors know the strengths and weaknesses of other games out there and the mistakes that have been made. This game would be a great case study of what not to do at a business school in college.