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The right way to prevent bots
ReginoldJudd
✭✭✭
in The Bridge
I think banning bots outright and improving detection doesn't necessarily stop them, it just means people will try harder to make really good ones. It's the old "build a better mousetrap" problem.
The right way to prevent botting is to make things less predictable. Bots work because parts of the game like skirmish use exactly the same buttons over and over again. This is also what drives people to botting - because doing the same thing as infinitum is incredibly boring. I say this as someone who's landed top 10 and has the juice for it this time too. It's hard to play that way.
But skirmishes could be so much better. Needed traits could be randomized every time. Enemy ships could be, too, and could be made a heck of a lot tougher. They could feature ship abilities that cause your crew to randomly not function. Anything that grants skimishes variation would make the simplest macros well nigh impossible.
The right way to prevent botting is to make things less predictable. Bots work because parts of the game like skirmish use exactly the same buttons over and over again. This is also what drives people to botting - because doing the same thing as infinitum is incredibly boring. I say this as someone who's landed top 10 and has the juice for it this time too. It's hard to play that way.
But skirmishes could be so much better. Needed traits could be randomized every time. Enemy ships could be, too, and could be made a heck of a lot tougher. They could feature ship abilities that cause your crew to randomly not function. Anything that grants skimishes variation would make the simplest macros well nigh impossible.
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The fact is that the only two ways to make skirmishes less "boring" are to make battles more difficult and complex, which goes against the whole nature of the game being a mobile game or to make the effort resource-based instead of time-based (and we already have two event types that require a resource-based kind of effort). Both ideas have been suggested, but I think that if they decide to change the way skirmishes work based on either of those suggestions, a lot of players will not be happy with the change.
If you want to play a casual game on your phone, you've already got Candy Crush, Flappy Bird and Nobbly Noggin. I'm delighted to have a game on my phone that takes a little bit of planning, time and thought. I'd like to see more non-casual games - and you're welcome to not play those, too!
😀 Nice idea. Can a bot restart the program? If not, get the countermeasures rolling.
It makes it more difficult, but bots could still do it. Think of all the online captchas. They keep getting harder and harder as the bot makers get smarter and smarter. The problem is the harder you make it for a bot, the worse experience it is for a human. Do you really want to have to solve a math equation or pick out cars in pictures before every skirmish? DB would quickly lose more players from aggravation than they lose from the bots. The real solution is to build events that require human thought not mindless grinding.
So, realistically, what you store on the server side is an image (what you see in the CAPTCHA). That image, without further processing, is just a base64 string that, to most people, just looks like complete garbage. When displayed in an image format, you'll see "2+2" or four puppies and a kitty, or whatever else. Extracting that image information into human meaning is something that is much more difficult to do for a machine than a person.
A bot would, essentially have two options:
1) Create an exhaustive lookup of these images and what the "correct" answer is
2) Have some sort of image processing where it actively attempted to analyze the image and figure out what the actual question being asked of it is
One way to make it even more difficult on a bot would be to have multiple questions per image. Consider a picture of five puppies and three kittens. You could easily ask: "How many puppies?", "How many kittens?", "How many puppies and kittens?", "How many more puppies than kittens?"
All of these are incredibly simple questions for a person, but very difficult for a computer program to quantify.
To be clear, I hope these sorts of CAPTCHAs are not the only thing preventing bots. I hope there is consideration to making actual gameplay reward human strengths (strategic decisions) over computer strengths (longevity, persistence, consistency).
I don't bot but I have always been top 1000 in skirmishes. I would absolutely hate what you proposed above. I would take an already tedious event and make it torturous. Please, do not add anything that will make a non-cheating player miserable just to catch a few players.
Instead, do something along the lines of looking to see the exact spot (pixel) that is clicked on each segment of a skirmish and if the exact same spot/pixel pattern occurs in two runs in a row with a 100% match, it's a bot. Insta-ban. No human being would be able to initialize the skirmish, click the same attack buttons, and the same claim button in the exact same pixels every single time. A clicker/bot would.
And it would take a bot writer 30 second to put random noise into their pixel selection to evade that. And if you start looking for constant repeated effort with no changes in time, they will put random delays into their bots too. Every 2 hours + RNG(1-5) minutes pause for RNG(1-10 minutes). Your bot now has what looks like human bathroom breaks.
Here is a blog post how another company is attempting to tackle cheaters in their game. The scripting section is the most relevant for what is being discussed here.
https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2018/10/dev-removing-cheaters-from-lol/