ANTI - BOTTING IDEA ......... NEW COMBAT SYSTEM

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Ceros
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Re: ANTI - BOTTING IDEA ......... NEW COMBAT SYSTEM

Post by Ceros »

yuminig wrote:ouch! jaxad0127 shot me down real good. I only know about bot using console so I'm not sure.
I'm all out of ideas. I guess there aren't real permanent solutions for anti-bot.
The idea Cotillion posted is pretty good. Most bots can be programmed to do pretty much anything. Without even 'programming' anything it is relatively simple to configure your client to auto target and auto attack any monster in range (which, if you are an archer is not limited to being right in front of you). I have seen relatively simple bots in action that stand in a fixed position, fire at bats for 30 seconds, walk a grid picking up all fallen objects in a circle around them, return to their position to continue firing. Any checks based on 'sitting in one place for too long' or the like will ignore this relatively simple to create bot (which can be easily made using a macro creation program or the like). Where Cotillion's suggestion comes into play is like such:

Someone is doing whatever. They are botting it up in the bat caves. The player is randomly pulled from the batcaves via (magical portal, etc) a random event. Once there they find an NPC who asks them to do a relatively simple task: kill five maggots and bring them the maggot slimes, place the following random components into a cauldron in a certain order, retrieve water from the stream over there and bring it to me, etc. Once the player has completed the task, they are teleported back to where they were, and continue on as before. A bot however, will continue trying to fire and walking their square. They will pretty much remain there, until the server kicks/bans them ot they come back from whatever they were doing and do the task manually.

Now, I am sure there are work arounds, such as logging out ever X minutes and relogging in, assuming that the temporary area you are pulled to isn't persistent and you return to the place you exited from but these would have to be examined in detail and handled appropriately. A system such as has been described, while nice, would probably require quite a bit of code revisions and I'm sure Devs would much rather work on TMWServ as opposed to recoding the current combat system as a stopgap to prevent botting.
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Re: ANTI - BOTTING IDEA ......... NEW COMBAT SYSTEM

Post by Jurgi »

The player is randomly pulled from the batcaves via (magical portal, etc) a random event.

When some players play as a team (especially in dangerous place) it would be annoying to take one of them from the middle of a battle.
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Re: ANTI - BOTTING IDEA ......... NEW COMBAT SYSTEM

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Well, the thread is about automated botting ideas. When you remove the human element (i.e. GMs) you've got to fill the gap with something. What would you suggest to prevent bots from playing?
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Re: ANTI - BOTTING IDEA ......... NEW COMBAT SYSTEM

Post by zick »

Not saying that Maple Story is the greatest game but they had something where you could only attack so many times in a given period. So if you put a coin on your attack button after awhile your player would stop swinging.

Here's an idea: come up with an attack limit (number randomly generated by a players stats possibly) and is stored server side. After a player attacks more than the limit, the server doesn't acknowledge his attacks anymore until a cool off period has occurred. If the player continues to flood the server with attack commands after awhile, the server just boots him. If the player is really a human, he'll say, "What's the dilly-yo ... my player isn't attacking anymore." He'll then stop pressing the attack button while he tries to figure out if his keyboard is broke or something. If it's a bot it will keep going.

I've always thought there should be a stamina stat, that is how long you can perform your maggot killing duties, until you need to take a break (sit down, logoff, etc.). I always thought this should be displayed but maybe keeping it secret on the server side is better.

Also, Maple Story has a right-click menu, that when you click on a player you think is botting, one of the options is to "Report Bot" ... What if we had some @command on the console (like "@botreport joesmith") where we just send a message to the server that we suspect someone is botting. A GM can followup, possibly getting an onscreen message if he's online.
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Re: ANTI - BOTTING IDEA ......... NEW COMBAT SYSTEM

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zick wrote:Not saying that Maple Story is the greatest game but they had something where you could only attack so many times in a given period. So if you put a coin on your attack button after awhile your player would stop swinging.

Here's an idea: come up with an attack limit (number randomly generated by a players stats possibly) and is stored server side. After a player attacks more than the limit, the server doesn't acknowledge his attacks anymore until a cool off period has occurred. If the player continues to flood the server with attack commands after awhile, the server just boots him. If the player is really a human, he'll say, "What's the dilly-yo ... my player isn't attacking anymore." He'll then stop pressing the attack button while he tries to figure out if his keyboard is broke or something. If it's a bot it will keep going.

I've always thought there should be a stamina stat, that is how long you can perform your maggot killing duties, until you need to take a break (sit down, logoff, etc.). I always thought this should be displayed but maybe keeping it secret on the server side is better.

Also, Maple Story has a right-click menu, that when you click on a player you think is botting, one of the options is to "Report Bot" ... What if we had some @command on the console (like "@botreport joesmith") where we just send a message to the server that we suspect someone is botting. A GM can followup, possibly getting an onscreen message if he's online.
All you have to do there is just have bots take a break of (however long max cooldown period is) every 20 minutes or whatever. And it would probably piss off more players then the warping system, since it effectively limits grinding. The system, while randomized still favors bots because they can afford to take time off (even thirty minutes every hour) because they would be able to play for 24 hours to make it up (continuously).
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Re: ANTI - BOTTING IDEA ......... NEW COMBAT SYSTEM

Post by fate »

Hi,

there isn't much that can't be automated with enough sophistication these days. Any automated mechanism for dealing with bots will thus have limitations, and people can combine automation with interrupt-driven human interaction to deal even with that whilst taking advantage of client-side automation.

The best way to deal with this seems to be to eliminate motivations for botting: punishing or simply not rewarding grinding, having limits on the economy (e.g., disallowing trading between players, or only allowing it for items that cannot be gained, directly or indirectly, through grinding), and so on. This is quite out of scope for eAthena, I'd say.

We may go with a simpler solution that would eliminate at least the most prevalent kinds of abuse.

-- fate
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Re: ANTI - BOTTING IDEA ......... NEW COMBAT SYSTEM

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fate wrote:We may go with a simpler solution that would eliminate at least the most prevalent kinds of abuse.
Care to expound at all?
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Re: ANTI - BOTTING IDEA ......... NEW COMBAT SYSTEM

Post by fate »

Hi,

we're thinking of a fatigue system: players will become decreasingly effective and increasingly vulnerable the longer they fight.
  • Fighting, spellcasting, or spell-attacking increases fatigue. Distance attacks drain fatigue more quickly (since archers attack less frequently and move about more. cf. the next point.)
  • Moving around slows down fatigue increase
  • Standing or sitting recovers fatigue very slowly
  • Inns recover fatigue instantaneously
  • Single-use sleeping bags recover fatigue after a short period (30s?) during which the player is immobile and extremely vulnerable
  • Monster spawn times are randomised to ensure that a so-and-so-long absence of a given monster is not something players can rely on
  • Dying does not recover fatigue
  • Logging out does not recover fatigue
This will penalise the dreaded standing-still-and-keeping-one-button-pressed style of gameplay, too. The idea is that this will force players to take a quick nap in a safe place every 15-60 minutes (depending on their playing style and the difficulty of the dungeon they are in relative to their own level.)

Note that this is for eAthena only. I don't know what the plans for tmwserv are.

Any thoughts on this? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. :-)

-- fate
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Re: ANTI - BOTTING IDEA ......... NEW COMBAT SYSTEM

Post by zick »

fate wrote:Logging out does not recover fatigue
What if you logging off for say 6 hours resets fatigue? I think this may also help curb people forgetting to shower/shave/have a social life because they're busy grinding ...
Last edited by zick on 01 Oct 2009, 00:05, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: ANTI - BOTTING IDEA ......... NEW COMBAT SYSTEM

Post by fate »

zick,

yes, good point. Jaxad actually recommended slowly recovering fatigue while being logged out, and I think that the both of you are absolutely right there. Thanks! :-)

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Re: ANTI - BOTTING IDEA ......... NEW COMBAT SYSTEM

Post by Jurgi »

we're thinking of a fatigue system:

A nap every 30-60 minutes? Not bad. That would make botting more difficult, especially on dangerous areas (on easier ones a bot can still do nap automatically from time to time). And that would make inns useful. After short confusion i like the idea. But the "timings' have to be set carefully, otherwise it would make it annoying to battle in hardly reachable places (you hardly get there and you are already to tired to fight.
What if you logging off for say 6 hours resets fatigue?

I agree with that. Reset after some time or just slow recovery.

But at first I still think, that human checking is still best, especially with support of players: give them "raport botting suspicion" feature.
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Re: ANTI - BOTTING IDEA ......... NEW COMBAT SYSTEM

Post by fate »

Hi,

there is no substitute for manual checking. And yes, figuring out the timing is important. Longer dungeons might have `rest areas', though.

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Re: ANTI - BOTTING IDEA ......... NEW COMBAT SYSTEM

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fate wrote:Hi,

we're thinking of a fatigue system: players will become decreasingly effective and increasingly vulnerable the longer they fight.
  • Fighting, spellcasting, or spell-attacking increases fatigue. Distance attacks drain fatigue more quickly (since archers attack less frequently and move about more. cf. the next point.)
  • Moving around slows down fatigue increase
  • Standing or sitting recovers fatigue very slowly
  • Inns recover fatigue instantaneously
  • Single-use sleeping bags recover fatigue after a short period (30s?) during which the player is immobile and extremely vulnerable
  • Monster spawn times are randomised to ensure that a so-and-so-long absence of a given monster is not something players can rely on
  • Dying does not recover fatigue
  • Logging out does not recover fatigue
This will penalise the dreaded standing-still-and-keeping-one-button-pressed style of gameplay, too. The idea is that this will force players to take a quick nap in a safe place every 15-60 minutes (depending on their playing style and the difficulty of the dungeon they are in relative to their own level.)

Note that this is for eAthena only. I don't know what the plans for tmwserv are.

Any thoughts on this? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. :-)

-- fate
Seems like this would not hamper botters at all and only effect players negatively. As long as some monsters are non-aggressive it would still be relatively easy to bot, as you could just stop fighting and wait ten minutes (or have them stock up on sleeping bags or whatever - or even have them make automated trips to the Inn every X minutes). I think this setup would be adding more hardship then benefit, although it is looking for a better solution through gameplay mechanics.
Last edited by Ceros on 01 Oct 2009, 01:31, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: ANTI - BOTTING IDEA ......... NEW COMBAT SYSTEM

Post by Jaxad0127 »

The relative recover levels would be like this:
standing < logged out < sitting < sleeping (bag) < inn
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Re: ANTI - BOTTING IDEA ......... NEW COMBAT SYSTEM

Post by fate »

Ceros,

yes, for bots that are `smart' enough to walk across several maps and interact with a simple NPC, this isn't good enough. But at the end of the day, anything we can do can be automated with enough effort, so there is nothing we can do with game mechanics that can't be subverted with clever enough mechanisms.

Your point about nonaggressive monsters is a good one, though. At this point, aggressive monsters are considerably more rewarding, XP wise, so my hopes are that the slower XP progression for bots will make them less appealing and give GMs more time to identify them before they `pay off.'

Can you elaborate on how this mechanism would be annoying for players, though? The way I see it, casual players wouldn't be affected much at all, and only heavy grinders would `suffer' (which I personally consider a bonus, since motivating people to not spend all day standing in a virtual cave, holding one button pressed, seems to be a good thing in the grand scheme of things. ;-)

-- fate
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