Thread: Botting - why?
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Old 04-24-2012, 03:29 PM   #29
dentin
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Re: Botting - why?

Kavir,

My best guess is that it's actually impossible to completely eliminate botting. This is an area I've invested a lot of time in, and I've seen bots that are more lively than real people who simply enjoy grinding. I've snooped bots and guessed they were people, and I've snooped people and guessed they were bots. There's just too much overlap.

That said, AA's approach has been a combination of most of the things in this thread. We have a lot of quest based once per character content, as you mentioned; but much more importantly, the code is set up with extreme amounts of diminishing returns to make botting less palatable. Botting is also explicitly allowed, so long as bots follow an additional set of rules to prevent them from causing problems with other players.

If someone writes a bot that follows the rules and is good enough to work around the diminishing returns, then so be it - I know of at least one that does this, and it's constructed so well that I do not believe I can defeat it without penalizing many real players. However, as you mentioned, nearly all bots are end-game bots. At lower levels, the game is simply too variable, and the gains drop off too quickly, to make investing in a bot worthwhile.

In summary, our setup is roughly:

1) Bots that interfere with other players or obviously damage game play are prohibited via a small set of rules, while all others are allowed. See for examples;

2) The code is set up to rapidly decrease the effectiveness of most repetitive actions;

3) The code is set up to automatically identify the worst bot behaviour and subject those bots to additional penalties;

4) Most areas contain one-shot content which cannot be repeated.

I think that allowing bots and having tracking mechanisms for them has probably helped the game in general: anything that quickly and readily becomes used in a bot is something that probably needs to be changed, or at least investigated for sanity. We have found many non-obvious bugs by looking at what well known bots were doing.

Explicitly allowing bots has also been useful from an administrative standpoint: players are much more willing to adhere to a small set of 'make it legal' rules than they are to not bot at all.

I don't feel that it's necessary to eliminate all botting. The barriers we have put up are primarily to make it more difficult to construct a working, useful bot. Most people who try to create bots aren't smart enough to do this, so they give up and play the game instead. This takes care of 90+% of the potential bot problem before it even starts.

-dentin

Alter Aeon MUD
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