The Mana World Forums

I don't think CAPTCHAs will be too effective at stopping bots. The person running the bot would just need to check the game window occasionally and do the CAPTCHA for the bot. CAPTCHAs would also annoy legitimate players. I support more a involved battle system and diminishing returns for repeated kills of the same monster type.

True, if it isnt timed.

Even if it is, it can be taken care of easily. If the botter has two monitors, they can surf the web on one and have the game open on the other and respond almost as fast as someone playing the game.

Hum... there is always scenarios in which something doesnt work well, but this is an improvement because for a 60 user game, already having bots and not doing anything about it is really pointless, I heard fatalist comment from players, I bet you have a perfect solution already made and ready and thats why imperfect improvements blows.

Also anyone can do somthing else while playing this game right now, dont try the impossible, the problem of bot is when it replace someone for many hours. The kiora bot is online 24/24 hours, I dont think someone is browsing 24/24 beside it.

True. But I think an image CAPTCHA could drive away more players than it would attract (if it would attract any). The process for determining when it should be show would have to be worked out carefully to prevent it from interfering with legitimate players. Think of how annoying it would be to be surrounded by high-level monsters and have this come up and they get killed because they couldn't defend themselves or flee.

Thats what I'm working on...

For now, if a player stays in the same map for a certain time, and in the same 2 maps for a certain time, other players could ask him a bot check once every y time, how much time the ip is connected and "active", players could be allowed little bonus item when writen sucessfully, to reward them for not getting mad at doing it, many possible stuff, still working on it...
with some random on the time intervals

The best, simple enough and effective captcha would be something like: "pick out the cats out of these nine pictures".

If you have both photography and drawings in there and a random array of pictures of different types and you have to select a random thing out of them, bots don't stand a chance if you at least rotate and add stuff there occasionally.

Captchas are poison for the game immersion.

As I already stated before you should rather try to explore solutions which do not impede the game experience for non-botters (and maybe even improve it).

Good idea Rotonen, we could create a npc just to ask those timed questions.
The npc could normally stand in a town telling he sometime follow people to ask them questions like a sphinx.
If people dont answer the questions correctly or particulary within the time, something bad happens and the server could note how people lost to the sphinx. If people answer correctly the sphinx is vainquished and the get something, the thing now would be to set how the sphinx would come to aim bots, without being too easy "summonable" by players.

Crush, the bots are a much much worst problem right now.

We could use GM to find bots and judge from replays they would send us.

Lecter wrote:Good idea Rotonen, we could create a npc just to ask those timed questions.
The npc could normally stand in a town telling he sometime follow people to ask them questions like a sphinx.

So let me get this right, if a bot never visits the town, it will never be followed and asked any questions?

Lecher wrote:If people dont answer the questions correctly or particulary within the time, something bad happens and the server could note how people lost to the sphinx. If people answer correctly the sphinx is vainquished and the get something, the thing now would be to set how the sphinx would come to aim bots, without being too easy "summonable" by players.

So, puts people for whom English is not their first language at a disadvantage?

Lecher wrote:Crush, the bots are a much much worst problem right now.

Not my experience... I've only come across one obnoxious bot.

Lecher wrote:We could use GM to find bots and judge from replays they would send us.

Possibly, however, I'm inclined to agree with Crush on this one, that any scheme involving a CAPTCHA (or CAPTCHA-like) would spoil the gameplay and drive people away.

I agree with Crush 1000%! I HATE any type of captcha that I need to put in, doesn't matter how simple they are, all it ends up being is punishment for legitimate people.

Crush, the bots are a much much worst problem right now.

No, they aren't. Right now, pretty much all of the bots ever do is train to get high levels. The two long running ones I can think of right now is Kiora and ©©ßao©©, and ©©ßao©© is the only annoying one.

IMO the only good choice to deter botters, is to create a monster AI intelligent enough to make it hard to bot against, yet easy (and more fun) for legitimate players to fight.

Before reading this thread I proposed this idea as a solution to the problem with bots used for experience gain.

Are there any other kinds of bots that are issues in the current game world?

- Miana

A captcha / Turing test is only good for the login.

Even for that I'm strongly and consistently against captchas in the TMW client.

I merely stated how to make a functional captcha. A captcha with twisted text which is actually easier to read for a machine than for a human does not make a good captcha. Then again image recognition is trivial for humans and for years to come impossible even for supercomputers.

Whjats fantastic here is that the bots have being reported to the devs, yet no one did anything, I though of just making a reporting system but I doubt itll be useful. And having 5%-10% of players being bots isnt what I call inimportant. When there is 20 guys on the servers and 1-2 of them are bots, its ridiculous. Finally, I though about GM, but its useless if its only for that, any player can report abuse and then admin should check it a bit.

So far, I've seen players do bots where their character either stands in one place and kills every monster that comes near, those that walk to and fro while attacking in random and the character that walks toward the closest monster and attack it (mouse script?). I have yet to see a bot pass the Turing test.