A Love letter to GGG about how to detect and stop (RMT) bots from a botter (not in PoE)

[Grumpy Old Gamer]

For the record let me state up front that I do not nor have I ever run a bot in PoE. I have run bots in other games and I work in artificial intelligence. Most of what I will mention is probably not new but I think more people need to understand the logisitcs of botting so more realistic and successful measures can be taken to control it in whatever way a games developers wish. I am neither aqdvocating nor condemning botting but opening a frank factual discussion of the issues involved as they effect botters themselves.

First let me state that the vast majority of botters I have known are not evil real money traders looking to make a game unfun. They are mostly programmers like myself that have reached the limit of what manual playing can provide enjoyment wise. Most are more than willing to play within the rules in all other aspects and mostly just find ti enjoyable to write the code that can beat the game. Just like writing a program that plays chess.

Then there are the problem botters. The ones that will have an entire datacenter running bots and selling game items for real money. Those are the commercial botters and I hope they die choking on their own bloody vomit.

It is possible to differentiate between these two because the RMT's will generality run a large number of bots where teh account traffic is comming from the same datacenter or even router. We are tal;king more than 8 instances from teh same location, running 24 hours a day for periods that are beyond human endurance. Days, weeks months without a break. Its also possible to detect them by their mouse and keyboard use patterns, clicks will be very precise, keystroke patterns will be repetitive. often the hardware the bots are running on will have a lot of identical hardware at the same location, coming from the same ip address or subnet.

And then there is the kicker. It is possible to run a bot on one computer that controlls a second computer completely by sending keyboard and mouse movements through a custom hardware interface based entirely on the audio and video output of the frist computer. Completely undetectable by any scan you can possibly write because it is a completely legitimate signal coming from a real keyboard controller and a real mouse controller.

So now what are you going to require a unique webcam image so your facial recognition software can detect if its a real person or not. not ever the TSA can afford a system that simple dithering wont throw it off.

If you want to truly stop botting, you cant. Its like copy protection, all it does is effect legitimate players. The botters just program around it. Run more bots. Bots are cheap. If it was cheaper to hire people to play te games they would, and some Chinese companies do.

What you can do is reduce the amount of RMT botters by attacking their revenue stream. take away the profit incentive. Hear me out on this, make a bottting league, with official support for botting as long as its kept in that league. Limit to one bot online per household at a time, but unofficially allow up to 8. Provide an offical GGG C# project for compiling a basic bot. C# because you can limit the system calls that the bot can access.Or possibly just have them write a script in C# which is compiled at trun time, ala space engineers and others. Since every real player can now run a bot on their own the RMT's will lose money and maybe stop doing it.

[Aetik]

Meanwhile you can gather that Data to locate botters on the normal server to finally clean up with em. Man thats pretty smart.

[Jinga]

Bring some insight to the table. Best to avoid games that are designed to attract botters. I mean this game is already designed to populate with bots if the server pop dies down to minimal thresholds. Kinda feel like the steam charts were inflated with bots recently anyhow.

[Grumpy Old Gamer]

Originally posted by Uncle:

Best to avoid games that are designed to attract botters..

Which is basically any mmo. Rarity = scarcity = opportunity for the RMT's and hence botting. The insight is that just like banning drugs, its just drives up the profit margins and increases the number of bots. Finally when all the real players get tired of the RMT bots ruining both the in game economy and server performance, they leave and the bots go away because of .... DECREASED DEMAND. But now you lost all your players.

So to decrease the demand for RMT loot without losing your player base let the players themselves run the bots. There will be fewer bots. I know it doesnt make sense to the average player, but professional botters arent players, they dont care what effect their bot farms have on the game as long as the profits flow. GGG is trying to fight bots like they are people. They arent they are programs. If you make drops 1000 less common the botters will just run 1000 times more bots. Its a program. they dont to pay licensing fees for it, they just run more copies on their server farm. Most of them are running custom clients anyway so a 42U rack can run 1000 bots easily.

People need to get the idea out of their heads that botters are some pimply faced kid in his basement running a bot and there are just too many PFKs. The problem is professional botters This is what they do for a living, to pay bills, and their mortgage and send their kids to college.