Bot Control Plan?

[Imma'el]

i wish the item drop system should be the same as RF online, where depends on monster level and your own level

[Calindor]

The wire I had to stop reading after your first paragraph...I cant believe somebody actually praises a dueling/arena pvp system that allows rewards. That in essence is flawed, because PvP with rewards should never be something that can be farmed in a closed system.

It will promote real pvp, war, mass pvp's, pvp at raid bosses, random organizing for pvp if a fight with some enemy group escalates. Everybody who loves it and enjoys the thrill of having to watch your back when exping will be there, and if you dont like it you can hang in your faction territory.

[TheWired]

Originally Posted by Calindor

The wire I had to stop reading after your first paragraph...I cant believe somebody actually praises a dueling/arena pvp system that allows rewards. That in essence is flawed, because PvP with rewards should never be something that can be farmed in a closed system.

It will promote real pvp, war, mass pvp's, pvp at raid bosses, random organizing for pvp if a fight with some enemy group escalates. Everybody who loves it and enjoys the thrill of having to watch your back when exping will be there, and if you dont like it you can hang in your faction territory.

hhm, I don't know if i expressed myself correctly, as english isn't my native language. My point was, after coming out of L2 and WoW, I foresee a game which is using factions and PvP zones is going to be "carebear" (I don't know if its going to work like WoW, being unable to start an attack on ennemy's territory) but personally i dislike this kind of mechanics. I'd rather have a whole system like Lineage where anyone can attack anyone, anywhere but it seems not to be the case with Aion exactly (or am I wrong? I didn't read much after all). I was just stating that the only benefits a faction game could have if handled a certain way would be in theory a stronger community. Getting rewards from PvP/some kind of arena ( WoW has BG, L2 has Olympiads) would be an alternative to the gimp PvP effect from zones and factions which already limit the amount (I hardly see how PvP is gonna be bigger in Aion than in Lineage for instance). I'm just saying, Lineage 2 Olympiad system and hero system was really good on paper, but because it was handled badly and with the course the game took, you had to be camping olympiad for hours daily and winning hero status was a run to having the best gear as skill to a certain extent didn't really matter anymore.

Lineage is the ultimate PvP game so far while WoW is the ultimate PvE game ( i wanted to say carebear but the PvE in WoW was actually quite enjoyable so...) As far as I could see, Aion is going more towards WoW mechanics than L2's.
I would love Aion's pvp to be otherwise but well, I guess if I want it to be more like lineage i should go back to it or wait for a Lineage 3...

[Calindor]

Anyone can attack anyone in Aion. There is a PvP zone designed for these battles, but that the ends of the abyss, there are random portals that let you go into the enemies territory and fight them...Its anything goes anywhere, however you can never fight your own faction except for in the arena/a duel....I also agree that L2's olympiad system was extremely flawed, and could have been a perfect system (It will be with the new Gracia expansion). The problem with WoW is that the arena's and BG's give you rewards, and that will eliminate all other sources of PvP. In Aion you will get abyss points and exp for pvping, you can buy gear, items, skills and such things with these abyss points. There will also be a hero system similar to L2's, however, none of it will be in arenas, so you have to earn everything out in the world. I think it will promote open world pvp even more-so than L2.

[TheWired]

Originally Posted by Calindor

Anyone can attack anyone in Aion. There is a PvP zone designed for these battles, but that the ends of the abyss, there are random portals that let you go into the enemies territory and fight them...Its anything goes anywhere, however you can never fight your own faction except for in the arena/a duel....I also agree that L2's olympiad system was extremely flawed, and could have been a perfect system (It will be with the new Gracia expansion). The problem with WoW is that the arena's and BG's give you rewards, and that will eliminate all other sources of PvP. In Aion you will get abyss points and exp for pvping, you can buy gear, items, skills and such things with these abyss points. There will also be a hero system similar to L2's, however, none of it will be in arenas, so you have to earn everything out in the world. I think it will promote open world pvp even more-so than L2.

I say amen to that and completely agree with every word you said and hope everything's gonna be that great.
Btw, and i know it's off topic, may I ask what server you played on in L2?

[Calindor]

I played Bartz in 2004-2006, since then I've been playing L2p and some other MMO's. Until recently I played on a C5 private server for 14 months (unnamed...Aionsource rules ). The head dev made his own emulator and encorprated some anti-L2walker and multilienting stuff that worked 100%. Had no donating for stuff in game and it has also hit 3000+ players practically every day for the past year...so its not some scrubby L2J one.

However, atm I'm playing WoW with some of my Aion guildmates.

[TheWired]

Originally Posted by Calindor

I played Bartz in 2004-2006, since then I've been playing L2p and some other MMO's. Until recently I played on a C5 private server for 14 months (unnamed...Aionsource rules ). The head dev made his own emulator and encorprated some anti-L2walker and multilienting stuff that worked 100%. Had no donating for stuff in game and it has also hit 3000+ players practically every day for the past year...so its not some scrubby L2J one.

However, atm I'm playing WoW with some of my Aion guildmates.

Oooh, i see. I played Sieghardt myself from the beginning to around last xmas, i stopped, played WoW for a few months and quit because i got bored. I'm just waiting for Aion nowadays, not playing anything in particular, a few RTS/FPS with friends (mostly Supreme Commander and Unreal 3 atm). I never tried any private server it never sounded appealing to me, guild and PvP/politics kept me pretty busy for some time.

Anyway, sorry for disrupting the topic, always good to know ^^

[Calindor]

Cool, yeah I'll just play anything with some friends, I've known some of my guildies for like 2-4 years now, and we always just play games with each other. We have no official game right now, the last one was L2, we're scattered over like 5-6 mmo's right now, but when Aion comes out its all going to be about that.

[Rolus]

I dont think there can be any automated bot detection system, im pretty sure the cheaters will find a way around that. I do think that there are a few ways to make nc need considerably less manpower to find the botters. I read about that handcuff system a few posts back and i think that actually could work pretty well. A player sees some1 else and suspects he mights be a bot or he doesnt suspect anything at all but he just likes to be annoying (that'll work just as well, as long as you may only give 3 handcuffs every 15 minutes or so, and also add something that prevents a player from getting cuffed again after succesfully responding for 10 minutes or so and disable it from working in areas where bots cant be used for grinding like in towns so it wont get too annoying) and he handcuffs the guy. That guy will then recieve an image from the server the moment he performs his next action (as to make sure he's not just afk).
The thing with that image is, that no botting program should ever be able to interpret it, so you cant just be sending an image from a set of images that never changes cuz botting programs will know them all and pick out the right response out of a list of preprogrammed responses, unless that list of possible images is very very big, say unlimited. That would pretty easaly be done by just employing some1 who's job is to come up with a new image every so often. I dunno of there's any software that can interpret these generated words that you need to reproduce, else you could send questions like "Im wearing a dress so my gender probably is:" textbox. Add a few possible responses like 'female' 'girl' 'woman' and if the answer is incorrect send a 2nd question, if still incorrect move them to some kind of hotlist. Another employee can then check it out, mayb try to start conversation with the person as to why he couldnt give the right answers or send him new images every time a new action is performed at regular intervals. If you do this right from the start and warn about a botdetection system like on the loading pages, i think you can keep said hotlist pretty small so you would only need a really small group of employees to find every bot. A list with the names of people that got banned recently on a website like mentioned b4 would be a good addition to that, not so much to encourage reporting but to scare of potential cheaters. A breaking news page like wow has on the login screen would help too, cuz people tend to read that and you can encourage people to report bots if they seem to have dozed off and dont pay attention anymore after a while. All you need then is appropriate action against the botters, like a severe money/xp penalty at first offence increasing to a permanent account ban at some point or so.

I dunno if there's any way to post suggestion to the aion dev team, but i thought id first post it here to see if it can withstand your scrutiny.

[eidolonnight]

Originally Posted by Calindor

Personally I think the best way (I know I've said it before) is the L2p server I play on. The head dev coded the bot programming into the game emulator (l2walker, and 1 other bot program, i cant think of the name). It makes your game always think the bot program is running, so when you try to run it yourself it says its always running. It seems like a simple solution, but its tested and true after 15 months of the server's life....I even have a guy in my clan with a degree in Computer Sciences and he couldn't find a way to get around the coding (the game wont let you connect with any altered files except options), however he did find a way to get out of game (you cant see what's going on in the game) botting to work, but that is extremely risky, because all it takes is 1 player to see you, alert a GM, and you lose everything....When I was first moving to the server my clan had about 60-70 people coming, when they realized they couldnt bot the number dropped to about 20 :O...I have been playing there for over a year, and have never seen 1 single bot.

I just wanted to write in a correction here. Although the above is a good idea it is a simple hack solution that can be simply undone by another hack. Let me explain:

The reason the bot program fails to initiate is because its memory space is already occupied by the bot program built into the game. There are two problems with this solution.

1) Using this solution on a mass scale would use up an absurd amount of memory.

2) A simple modification of the bot program would allow it to use the already claimed memory space. In fact, it is likely, unless the private server owner is skilled, that the bot embedded in the game is running a seperate process and could simply be disabled. In either case, the solution is easily undone.

Now, why is it that you haven't seen any bots? Well, for one, private servers generally have less bots anyway because it's simply not worth the trouble. Second, if modification of the bot program is needed then most people won't have the skill to do so (and since it's a private server the bot writers aren't going to bother patching the program just to run on some back-alley private server).

There will always be bots and work-arounds to get them to work. The best way to combat these is an active staff and allowing players to issue reports. This pretty much the route taken by Blizzard in WoW. They also have a process monitor to watch out for bot programs, but they also have a ticket system in place. Now before anyone brings it up, the annoying gold seller problem is easily solved by downloading an addon that ignore all whispers/yells/etc. from lvl 1 characters.

It's a constant battle but what makes the difference in the end is an active and involved staff running the game.

[Calindor]

Yes it will eat up some memory, but the 2 servers im talking about from the private L2 company both hit populations every day that peak higher than 7 of the 11 retail servers...The head dev for the server is extremely talented, he made his own emulator, it took him about 6-12 months of work just to do all the coding to get the game ready, its not just some cheap copy priv server. About the bots less common in priv servers, I have to disagree...Everyone knows L2's many faults and why private servers has boomed, its not cause people want to play for free, its because retail L2 is not an enjoyable game, yet it so easily could be...Like I said someone in my clan has a computer sciences degree and has been botting/playing L2 for 4 years...he spent some solid time trying to crack it and never could since the server wont let you connect with anything but an altered l2 options file.

[Xenicide]

Bots never effected me that much on retail L2. Infact, they were some of the best people to fight. They always have someone monitoring and if people are messing with them, they'll get a few people back and start fighting. It's really funny when two different bot groups would start fighting and you'd help one and afterwards they'd invite you to the group :P Got ez money and exp.