automated clients

[Chicka-Maria]

True it does have the auto follow option, but it does not have the option to auto pick up items or auto attack as far as i know.

[Nard]

The problem is that even the official client has the follow option. Because our "official" is still a third party client and that option is wanted for other games that use the client, even the official creates the problems that wouldn't otherwise exist. I'm uncertain how 4144 feels about it. He is a TMWC member as well as creator of the client we promote use of, so it would be good to get his input on the matter. I believe it may be a problem because it would force what is supposed to be a general Athena-based client to have options excluded for the sake of just one game, which also happens to be the most popular one to use his client.

Wombat, the official client has the follow option but does not allow any action while following but emotes and chat. So if a character fights or heals while following it is a bot. Some GMs argued that it was difficult to see in a stack who attacked and who did not. The players who integrate a botting stack are perfectly aware of what they are doing, at least after a warning, so the argument does not stand any more. If I and many players were able to detect this kind of botting and tell you the char names, I think GM are able to do it too. If you had been playing little while those stacks were active you would see better what I mean. The characters that are actually banned for afk activity are just small fry when compared to what occured in the past, when it was difficult or even almost impossible to get significant loot when a bot or a stack was around, when they didn't drive a bunch of deadly mobs on you. If you were lucky, a stack allowed you to follow it and you could get a couple of cherry stems. (I am sure that Chicka will agree with me on these points, also useful to watch mob behaviour) Also server sends damage and experience information to the client (use F10 to retrieve information about your target); That's why I think it should be possible to retrieve information from several targets.(*)
Other MMORPGs allow this feature which is rather friendly and useful in long distance or "complicated" transportations. Are we less skilled than their developers that we cannot deal with it? The only real issue I can see with it is with Miriam−speed-skill quest where auto-following is kind of cheating (but not so much as the quest allows helping, Alastrim confirmed).

(*) edit: at list with a small script, which scans the on-screen chars.

[wushin]

Well honestly if someone wants to hide their bot it's not hard. Someone could sit and play a number of clients at once as we do have a nice open spot when we have no GMs online. Technically since we don't require valid anything, you can create any number of accounts. Park your main in Hurns. Park a bank alt in each Town. Bot farm on bannable accounts and trade the stuff to bank alts to put in mains bank or alt banks or shops or manamarket. Since the whole code is Open Source wrapping DRM on it is going to be a pain considering accounts have no need for a valid email.
I mean if you really wanted to hacking manaplus to support xmpp can't be rocket surgery. Piping general or whispers to a IM client and back isn't that much harder. Hiding all this from the server is cake. Bam! Gms can't tell you're a bot. They can watch you and you can pass the turing test fine. It's not even hard to do this amongst a cluster or group of servers.
Now lets also consider those that have used bots and the positions they held and other things they may have abused.

My ancestors are proud of me Imperial, can you say the same?

[prsm]

Well honestly if someone wants to hide their bot it's not hard. Someone could sit and play a number of clients at once as we do have a nice open spot when we have no GMs online. Technically since we don't require valid anything, you can create any number of accounts. Park your main in Hurns. Park a bank alt in each Town. Bot farm on bannable accounts and trade the stuff to bank alts to put in mains bank or alt banks or shops or manamarket. Since the whole code is Open Source wrapping DRM on it is going to be a pain considering accounts have no need for a valid email.
I mean if you really wanted to hacking manaplus to support xmpp can't be rocket surgery. Piping general or whispers to a IM client and back isn't that much harder. Hiding all this from the server is cake. Bam! Gms can't tell you're a bot. They can watch you and you can pass the turing test fine. It's not even hard to do this amongst a cluster or group of servers.
Now lets also consider those that have used bots and the positions they held and other things they may have abused.

My ancestors are proud of me Imperial, can you say the same?

I read it twice, I have no idea what you just said!

[Hello=)]

I dont agree with these statements at all.
After a recent incident, we (the active GM team), spent hours on how we should proceed.
No matter what decision we come to there will be a group of people arguing against our decision.

I'm probably poorly formulated my views. The things I actually dislike here are:
1) This process is applied to players but lacks transparency and not public, which is well below of modern standards.
2) It's black vs white decision: either no punishment at all or draconian punishment. Details are disregarded, etc. No way to assign punishment proportional to damage caused.

I do not think it's fair to apply same punishment to everyone without considering all circumstances and amount of damage caused, just like real courts would do. I find such judgement model oversimplified and not performing well, as we can see on recent example one more time. If we apply TMW-style judgement IRL, we should execute both serial killer (I'm fine with it) and unlucky driver who hit drunken man suddenly falling on road (I do not think it's fair, granted circumstances, even if result the same - some human is dead).

If we go lenient, some will argue we are too soft. If we go hard, some will argue we should have been lenient. Its a no win situation for the GM team.

Now I argue current system oversimplifies judgement and it comes to the fact that instead of potential abuse of punishment degree selection, we have rather face very selective application of rules, which is far worse to my taste. Should it be not a case, virtually all TIM users should be banned already for the very similar offences. And I do not think it's fair to punish only some single person out of whole bunch. So right now when GM faces relatively minor offence like autofollow (ab)use there are 2 options: ignore it (bad) or apply draconian punishment (bad as well). Some GMs prefer more advanced approach (like issuing warning) but it's not really part of rules. I do think it's better to formalize how it done to make it more transparent and less frustrating for players.

You know t3st3r i find it funny, that when it is related to some kind of automation you completely lose it, but when it is related to your friends suddenly we hear different t3st3r, who doesn't think automation is so bad. it seems to me you got double standards and you can be blamed for not having a fair judgement either.

I do think it's really incorrect view. Just because I've seen quite many similar "abuses" from TIM users but never demanded their ban (as I consider it relatively insignificant offence). But if we're about double standards, once someone faces punishment for such offence, others should face it too, isn't it? And you probably will be unhappy to learn who did similar mistakes. At this point I would not call names but I can admit quite many well-respected players did similar offence (some forms of AFK activity). And if we're about justice and black-and-white style of judgement, it would be perfectly fair to ban virtually all TIM users, since virtually all of them are forgetting to switch off some of automations on AFK. That's how I detect them, btw .

True it does have the auto follow option, but it does not have the option to auto pick up items or auto attack as far as i know.

Still falls under definition of botting under current rules. So formally it's possible to face hardcore execution procedure if GMs decide to apply letter of law directly, as written in rules.

[Chicka-Maria]

If there is a way to kick TIM users off the server getting them to use another client that would be interesting, One less botting client to think about which is better than none. IMO this client should have been talked about as well when there were riots from other people about it not long after it came out. In my view It's just plain wrong, especially when having more than half the GMs who are supposed to be encouraging following the rules using a client from their guild that supports automation (client that can take advantage of the game) as well.

Not that I think this is still happening, But I've been told by an older GM who happened to be in the guild people in the guild would take advantage of it because certain GMs would tell them in the guild tab when they were going on rounds. Which obviously was disturbing to hear and I won't name names, though like I said I doubt if this still goes on since it was over a year ago.

Just another reason why I think logging guild/general tab is a great idea but that was pushed out of the question.

Is there no server code that can identify automation?

regards,
Chicka

[o11c]

If we apply TMW-style judgement IRL, we should execute both serial killer (I'm fine with it) and unlucky driver who hit drunken man suddenly falling on road (I do not think it's fair, granted circumstances, even if result the same - some human is dead).

Your comparison is faulty; being unlucky is not a crime. Botting is a "crime", however great the impact.

A more apt analogy would be to execute both serial killers and drunk drivers who kill pedestrians or other drivers or their passengers (which would probably be more effective than the last 100 years worth of anti-drinking campaigns put together).

[Wombat]

Wombat, the official client has the follow option but does not allow any action while following but emotes and chat. So if a character fights or heals while following it is a bot. Some GMs argued that it was difficult to see in a stack who attacked and who did not. The players who integrate a botting stack are perfectly aware of what they are doing, at least after a warning, so the argument does not stand any more. If I and many players were able to detect this kind of botting and tell you the char names, I think GM are able to do it too. If you had been playing little while those stacks were active you would see better what I mean. The characters that are actually banned for afk activity are just small fry when compared to what occured in the past, when it was difficult or even almost impossible to get significant loot when a bot or a stack was around, when they didn't drive a bunch of deadly mobs on you. If you were lucky, a stack allowed you to follow it and you could get a couple of cherry stems. (I am sure that Chicka will agree with me on these points, also useful to watch mob behaviour) Also server sends damage and experience information to the client (use F10 to retrieve information about your target); That's why I think it should be possible to retrieve information from several targets.(*)
Other MMORPGs allow this feature which is rather friendly and useful in long distance or "complicated" transportations. Are we less skilled than their developers that we cannot deal with it? The only real issue I can see with it is with Miriam−speed-skill quest where auto-following is kind of cheating (but not so much as the quest allows helping, Alastrim confirmed).

(*) edit: at list with a small script, which scans the on-screen chars.

Thanks Nard, I was only aware there was a desire for fixing auto-follow as you said and not that it had been put in place.

[Hello=)]

Your comparison is faulty; being unlucky is not a crime. Botting is a "crime", however great the impact.

I would agree botting is crime. However, I do think this crime can have wildly different degrees of offence and wildly different amounts of damage made to project. So I think there should be more wide range of possible punishments, covering both "relatively light" offences and "complete bastards". Putting everything in one basket is IMO wrong.

A more apt analogy would be to execute both serial killers and drunk drivers who kill pedestrians or other drivers or their passengers (which would probably be more effective than the last 100 years worth of anti-drinking campaigns put together).

I doubt it would give any effect. Would be yet another cruel and pointless manslaughter. Humans would try harder to avoid being caught. And then police chases would be really deadly carmageddons. If you're doomed to be executed, you have nothing to lose. So you do not have to care about your life too much but rather try to run away as hard as you can. If half of city destroyed in process... who cares?! You'll be executed anyway - so absolutely nothing to lose. On other hand, if you're only about to spent few years in jail you can prefer to give up peacefully and receive punishment you deserve. But ok, you never had idea how humans are working. So you can't trace even simplest human logic and possible outcomes. You're really bad at this .

If there is a way to kick TIM users off the server getting them to use another client that would be interesting,

Would not work. Some bots already got this idea and pretend to be usual clients. Because some external observers were able to use not-so-obvious correlations to pinpoint them. Far better than GMs can do. This scared some botmakers and they preferred to look like usual clients for now. At least in client identification strings, etc.

Is there no server code that can identify automation?

This is impossible in general case. You can try to detect few certain behaviours but bots would soon get idea and change their behaviour too. In fact it's rather hard task even for human to detect some automations. Generally speaking, one program can't make definitive conclusion about another program even if you have source code of that program. Our case is even worse. At most its possible to nail down some most obvious automations. Needless to say botmakers would create workarounds quite soon.

[SriNitayanda]

But if we're about double standards, once someone faces punishment for such offence, others should face it too, isn't it?

Actually thats exactly what i meant, yeah if you notice someone using automation you can report it to GM's and yeah they might get similar punishment... but like i said already, some people who may be caught for minor offense got a warning or known to have troublesome behavior in the past. for example i know that if i am to be caught for minor offense i might get ban + reset, cause of the incident i already mentioned in straelyn post. but straelyn for example who got caught for the first time got only a warning. thats why i trust GM judgement and the system you suggest which is more complicated is already partly being in place, when GM's disscuss this offense or the other and what punishment should be applied. i think the system you suggest would actually make it more complicated to enforce the rules cause any offender would claim that his behavior caused minor damage.

This will stop people from using automation to gain millions of GP per day. Everyone should be playing equally on the server.

Your concept about how people are making lots of money last year is completely wrong, since illia came out there is much more interesting way to make money than grinding. I for example till i became regular player on illia teams, didn't have more than 1M gp and if i had i immediately spent it on equipment i didn't have. i never had interest in rares till i began to finish illia on regular basis and made lots of money out of it... and i know people who began to play in late 2012 or begining of 2013, got similar stories. + there was an exploit in illia which doubled or tripled our money till it was removed.

Anyway i dont think the rules needs to be changed, i already stated what my opinion is.

[Nard]

I would like that the people who have been using manabot intensively, stack in the gy, advertize for this client to their friends so some of them got banned, to stop to give moral lessons in this thread.

[veryape]

A few points I want to pick up on that I have seen in the thread.

1. Ban non stock clients (TIM was mentioned)

I think it is against the spirit of an open source game to not be able to connect with modified or self written clients, also how would we implement such a thing? from a checksum of the client or something? Not sure that will work since some people compile it and might use different flags.

I'd say prosecute crimes against the rules once we spot them is the best practice and the only viable one. Using client X is not against the rules, using it to break the rules is, and this applies even to stock manaplus, it is quite possible to bot with this client to, set it to "go, attack, pickup" and jam your x button down and voila, you have made yourself a crude botting client without touching the code.


2. Punishment of crime should be different depending on circumstances.

I think that although this approach is quite intuitive as little "judging" of the gm's as possible is the right approach. I've never seen someone contend the most digital ban there is (spam). As I mentioned earlier the crimes might be seen as minor or major from players and gm's perspectives, but if we start to be open for discussion every ban would be a possible nightmare at the forums. As soon as we implement the rules like this the forum would be littered with people acting like lawyers. As it is now you can use non-stock clients and automation features, but while doing it you run the risk of being caught using them uncarefully.

Bottom line is, you went out of your way to use a client that has those features, you enabled them. This is playing with fire and you might get burned for it if not doing so carefully.


And at last i would like manaplus to have the follow-function turned off/hidden if it connects to server.themanaworld.org, sure people could always download the code and circumvent this by easy measures but for 90% of the player base default is king. Those that would like to go out of their way to cheat would find a way to do so. As Nard pointed out following does not accept actions without loosing follow, but as Straelyn said in his post he used it to always have a mage around to heal him. IMO this is against the rules and surely gives you an advantage over other players. Hi basically said "Hey I used the stock client with its features" and yes he did, and that is why I think that it should be disabled because a lot of people does not realize that this is playing against the rules - why give them the option to do so?


I think that we need to design our way out of certain problems, right now one of the best ways to earn a fast buck is to hit red slimes and sell their drops. This is an easy task to set up a bot to do, if we changed the way to get cash in this game botting will not be as tempting to a lot of players.

[Nard]

I think it is against the spirit of an open source game to not be able to connect with modified or self written clients, also how would we implement such a thing? from a checksum of the client or something? Not sure that will work since some people compile it and might use different flags.

Open source means that a software allows everybody to look how the software is made, adapt it to own application(s). Open source does not mean that the software is will be allowed to be used for any application. TMW has rules that have to be followed whatever the client is. I suggested that the official client should be taken as reference to say what is allowed and what is not. Everyone stays free to modify the client and use it on his personal server or on any server that allows it, but should be obliged to submit new features to TMW leading team's agreement to be allowed to use them on the server and even on the testing server. The rules say no botting is allowed. Tim is an enhanced Manaplus. It's enhancements have the obvious and only goal to transgress them. Then a Tim user should be suspected a priori to want to cheat. The only exception to this is the encrypted guild chat, which is thus available only to one guild... Planeshift and Ryzom are open source and both specify the way their client is allowed tu be used in game.

[Hello=)]

Actually thats exactly what i meant, yeah if you notice someone using automation you can report it to GM's and yeah they might get similar punishment...

Never seen it in practice except one time (very recently). That's why I do not think it's how it should work. And why I do not report it to GMs? Because I do not want to see yet another hardcore execution for minor offence, obviously! Not to mention it could cause damage to project, far worse than silly automations can do. It's not like if I'm filming another part of "Judge Dredd". Btw, in my country it's considered shame to contact law authorities at all... because they often fail to enforce law in adequate ways. And I have to admit TMW came to similar state, where I would prefer to mumble something about "all cops are bastards" and prefer not to report issues except most blatant cases. Just because I can't expect sane situation review and adequate GM actions. Choice between "no punishment" and "draconian execution" does not covers all possible cases, obviously.

but like i said already, some people who may be caught for minor offense got a warning or known to have troublesome behavior in the past. for example i know that if i am to be caught for minor offense i might get ban + reset, cause of the incident i already mentioned in straelyn post.

That's another case of TMW rules idiocy. But root cause of both issues is the same: GMs and TMWC overall are only entities who can create or change rules. And they selected to put minimal efforts at this, at expense of ingame climate. They prefer own convenience. I can understand it, but...

but straelyn for example who got caught for the first time got only a warning. thats why i trust GM judgement and the system you suggest which is more complicated is already partly being in place, when GM's disscuss this offense or the other and what punishment should be applied.

I've seen some (rather unexpected) proofs it could work, furthermore, some GMs actions made me to think it would work even better if some changes applied to this process to make it public and following some clearly defined patterns instead being purely ad-hoc. But, well, looks like ideas to try to change anything tends to scare TMWC members.

Bottom line is, you went out of your way to use a client that has those features, you enabled them. This is playing with fire and you might get burned for it if not doing so carefully.

Right. But there is difference between getting finger burned and being thrown into fire. Sure, its more simple to swing by executioner axe instead of bringing someone to court and doing proper judgement with proper situation review. I think its ok to apply "quick" judgement procedure in obvious cases and if someone is unhappy with punishment, they can demand review by "judges panel". But at risk their punishment will be increased (for taking extra time) if there was no valid reasons. This supposed to discourage abuse of this procedure. But well, I attempted my best to propose solution I can see. If GMs are not happy with it - hmm, okay, I attempted my best.

And at last i would like manaplus to have the follow-function turned off/hidden if it connects to server.themanaworld.org

Oh, I never thought you'll also resort to solving GM problems at cost of user experience and players convenience. There are games where autofollow is allowed and even target could be shared. Common consensus in MMORPGs seems to be is that bad thing is when multiple automations controlled by single player are taking part in battle (giving unfair battle advantage to owner) or when someone botting while being AFK (unfair resources/XP gain by owner). And it's battle advantage and unfair loot/XP what really matters as it screws up healthy competition and undermines project value.

[SriNitayanda]

And why I do not report it to GMs? Because I do not want to see yet another hardcore execution for minor offence, obviously! Not to mention it could cause damage to project, far worse than silly automations can do. It's not like if I'm filming another part of "Judge Dredd". Btw, in my country it's considered shame to contact law authorities at all... because they often fail to enforce law in adequate ways. And I have to admit TMW came to similar state,

Not saying you should, just saying you can. like i said i would probably act in different way in particular cases.

I've seen some (rather unexpected) proofs it could work, furthermore, some GMs actions made me to think it would work even better if some changes applied to this process to make it public and following some clearly defined patterns instead being purely ad-hoc. But, well, looks like ideas to try to change anything tends to scare TMWC members.

I think Prsm opened this thread in order to have new idea's from the community... so if you really think the way you propose is practical go ahead and continue proposing it.

anyway i am done here, good luck.