automated clients

[prsm]

There seems to be a hush over the room when people start talking about automated clients. I myself don't use one and never have. That being said, are they legal or illegal?

Lets start a conversation on that, please.

Rumors say that some Guilds use it, normally followed by people being named. I wont name any names. I have done rounds for 2 years now and I can say definitively, I can tell when someone is automated. When I spot an automated player, I normally stop and do a "bot check". If they answer me within the allotted time, I move on.

A quick jump to the rules state "2. No bots (including ANY AFK activity or automated following)", it does not speak of automation.

So I would say they are legal, and please don't ask me where to get one, I only use Manaplus and i have no desire to use one

So If you use an automated client and go afk, you are breaking the rules! Plain and simple. If you go down the automation road, tread carefully, you have already been warned how dangerous they can be.

Prsm

and please, feedback would be welcomed.

[blackrazor]

A quick jump to the rules state "2. No bots (including ANY AFK activity or automated following)", it does not speak of automation.

Automation is a bot, and it's AFK activity, even if technically, you are within reach of your keyboard, while for example, watching a youtube movie, reading email, or playing another game. So I think you answered your own question, even if you didn't realize it, at first.

Automation software within games, and the people who use them in games, are called botters. An automated player toon is called a bot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_bot

EDIT: Incidentally, some games, like the MOG Crossfire, actually encourage botting, and even provide a scripting language for players to use for it. Other games, like Wonderland Online, offer automation tools (items) as a cash-shop item and also as quest rewards. This, along with online player shops, was a business decision of many older Korean and Japanese MOGs, because players used to pay by hour playing long ago, so it was in the game managers' interests to adjust the game mechanics to give player toons a reason to be online 24/7 if possible, even if the real human player was asleep or otherwise occupied with real life concerns. I'm not suggesting that for here, just saying that there is no "right" answer, other than what you want for your game. Other companies, like Jagex (Runescape) aggressively go after botters, banning them, even taking some to court, and publishing shame-lists of the thousands they ban every cycle.

[prsm]

Thank you BLackrazor for joining the conversation. So you are against automated clients I take it. How do you think we should stop the use of them. I has a GM have no way of telling what client any person is using?

[Hello=)]

There seems to be a hush over the room when people start talking about automated clients. I myself don't use one and never have. That being said, are they legal or illegal?

To be honest I do not like such way of thinking. There are actions and there're outcome. Both should be evaluated when making decisions.

Goal should be to thwart unfair advantage over others (i.e. man vs machine competition which leads to nowhere), not blindly declare something "legal" and "illegal" and then fighting windmills until none of these "monsters" left. This is opensource project. Client will be modified. Prohibiting something would discourage client development and would not stop people with malicious intentions as there is no reliable way to detect it. On other hand, as you maybe noticed, you can randomly catch someone "unlucky enough", one from large bunch. And apply full punishment for some minor offence. I do not think it should work like this. When punishments turns out to be very selective, it does not works.

I do think TMW needs to reconsider judgement system and consider degree of offence based on actual damage caused to project, society and so on. Someone forgetting to turn off automation? Okay, it's bad. It should be discouraged. But in no way it could be compared with some hardcore botters running dedicated botting clients for months. I do not think they all should face equal amount of punishment because amount of damage to project is not anyhow comparable at all. Hardcore botters seriously decrease value of project by putting unfair competition in place. Humans can't compete with bots.

On other hand those who use few small and convenient automations aren't that bad overall. Though in certain cases, heavy automations can lead to issues. Imagine PvP event and then someone uses automation to gain advantage over others. In such case either it should be feature of client or usage should be prohibited to make competition reasonably fair. Else there is risk to have a lot of frustrated players who can't get some "private" client to get equal starting conditions.

So I'm generally offering to put some differentiation based on offence weight and amount of time it lasts, as well as annoyance to players and overall damage to project. Something like:
1) Botting for XP/Items with noticeable gain for a long time: capital offence. Levels reset on 1st time, blocks on repeated offence. Right as it happens now. We all know there're few hardcore botters/recidivists. They shall not pass.

2) Occasional short-time botting by mistake/testing failure/etc: medium level offence. Botting is still bad. Let's ban offender from week to couple months or so, depending on exact circumstances and earlier history. Some rest should be enough to displace any occasional advantage and give time to think and reconsider actions. If offence repeats within year, consider it 1) and apply full punishment. Items gained due to botting are IMO okay to revoke. Maybe some 1-5 levels should be subtracted in relatively nasty cases which are still not blatant enough to qualify as 1).

3) Usage of heavy automations in battle to gain unfair advantage in ways not available to common public (if someone want to improve something - release source for everyone to keep it fair at least ). Consider it lesser offence and apply some short-term ban (hours to days). If that was some event, rewards should be revoked: cheating is subject for disqualification. Repeated offences are subject to increased punishment.

4) Some minor automations abuse like forgotten spell autorefresh, etc which does not leads to obvious immediate advantage of owner: minor offence. Punishment could vary from kick up to some days of ban. If it repeats more than few times a year and/or causes numerous complaints about cheating it could be considered as more heavy offence, giving longer ban times, etc.

[blackrazor]

I'm not for or against it per se (please see my edit in the first post), just trying to provide some context. In an open source MOG like TMW, where it is legal to use any client you wish, and the value on personal freedom is very high, which pretty much rules out invasive techniques to "check" on players beyond a certain point, you may be stuck with players using automation software, especially those that are programmed to actually give realistic-sounding responses to typical queries. Yes, that is possible.

I think the biggest problem you have, at the moment, is a clearly written, but unenforceable rule #2.

[prsm]

T3st3r, thank you for joining the talk. If I understand your argument, you want to have a weighted system based on criteria. Are you at all concerned that by doing this, you are putting more weight into the ability of the GM's to access every situation correctly? Won't this just open the GM's to more critisim?

[prsm]

Blackrazor, the goal here is to make the game better, not declare what is wrong without offering a solution. So please tell me how you would like rule 2 changed.

[blackrazor]

Blackrazor, the goal here is to make the game better, not declare what is wrong without offering a solution. So please tell me how you would like rule 2 changed.

Be nice, prsm; same as you, I don't have an easy solution, otherwise I would have offered it. I wasn't playing during the "heavily botted with player stacks" years, but that sounds awful, and it sounds like the admins of that period did whatever they could, even if piecemeal, to put a stop to it, hence the "no-follow" rule.

TMW's enforcement is limited by its own design. Sorry if that is not what you want to hear, but I said it to be truthful, not difficult and unhelpful. You know, some problems are intractable, within their social context especially. I didn't make it so, I am merely observing it. Sorry again. If I think of anything else, I'll post further. Otherwise, this pretty much covers all I have to say on the subject.

[prsm]

I think you read my words wrong, no offense was meant. Okay, so until we find a better solution to rule number 2, we will have to let it stand.

But i am in no way saying we can't attempt to tweak the rules from time to time.

[Reid]

Automation might not always be afk botting, what's wrong with it?

[o11c]

You can't "forget" to disable automation. You have made a deliberate decision to use it in the first place, so it should have the same punishment.

Besides, we *know* that all the dedicated botters will just claim they were only doing it temporarily.

[Hello=)]

T3st3r, thank you for joining the talk. If I understand your argument, you want to have a weighted system based on criteria. Are you at all concerned that by doing this, you are putting more weight into the ability of the GM's to access every situation correctly? Won't this just open the GM's to more critisim?

I do think GMs should not be just blind execution machine but rather something like judges instead. It's really wrong when execution happens without proper judgement phase which would evaluate actual damage.

[prsm]

So you would support us using our judgement, awesome! I hope all agree with that.

[Hello=)]

You can't "forget" to disable automation. You have made a deliberate decision to use it in the first place

I do not see how it harmful on it's own. If I own knife, this does not makes me bad guy on it's own. Certain bad uses do.

Besides, we *know* that all the dedicated botters will just claim they were only doing it temporarily.

Sure, so GMs should not be completely brainless. If you shot 15 people in 5 years, good luck to tell judge you did it only "temporarily" and not a such a horrible murderer as you look like.

P.s. btw, your ways of thinking are making me to suspect you're bot .

[blackrazor]

Automation might not always be afk botting, what's wrong with it?

All afk-botting is automation, but certainly not all automation is afk-botting. I think the concern was with the automation that is afk-botting, and not all automation in general.

The problem is that you have a license which demands that you supply the serversoft source code to anyone who asks, and yet you cannot make the same demands of someone who uses it to code their own custom client. Even a client with nefarious intent is legal and you cannot get its source to code against it. A very unfair game of "sword and shield" for certain.

You also have a playerbase that values freedom and privacy, in general, more than it values whatever would be required to track player wrongdoing regarding what is botting on their game. So you will never know which client a player is using, nor which features are enabled within it, because to do so would be an invasion of freedom and privacy. I'm not saying this is a bad thing at all, but it does limit what you can do with regards to additional enforcement.

I think prsm is very correct to observe that the current rules, while not perfect, were a very adequate response to the problems at hand, given the intrinsic limits on the system, and he is open to further discussion in the hopes of a break-through eureka moment, but failing that, the current system has served well enough for a while now, and will likely continue to serve for the foreseeable future. All in all, a good thought experiment and a good discussion. Thank you for starting it, prsm.