A solution to the bot crisis invading games new and old

[Dippy the Ghost!]

Hello, I have an idea that can solve a lot of Bot problems that have been ravaging a lot of your games like TF2, CSGO2, etc. as well as indie devs. I feel it could solve problems for majority of Steam, and doesn't even require updating the games individually.

Try to hear me out on the full thing;

I believe a great idea is to make it so GameDevs can opt in to have their games require a Captia from users to launch said game. That way it's not forced across all of Steam, and can help gamedevs who can't handle their security against bots. It can help old and new games alike.

Most bots can't even understand imagery they're looking at and Captias have proven to be effective for years. Some games have even started puting this into the main menu of their games, causing immediate positive outcomes when they do.

And also, incase there is bots that do understand imagery, you can use similar technology to what Glaze is using. It causes the information of the Captia images will be just complete mush to the AI, but will still be very clear and understandable to actual humans.

Bot creators will become forced to log into every single account manually, do the captia for them, and launch the games for them. This will be an extreme deterrent and cause a drastic drop in bots as a whole.

[Gwarsbane]

Got some really REALLY bad news for ya... bots have been beating CAPTCHAs for many years now.... how long? Almost the same time CAPTCHAs have been around. And yes we know this as a fact because Valve tried CAPTCHAs to stop bots from sending friends invite spam, but that lasted a whole hour at most before the bots were blasting through them. We humans had to deal with them for a week before Valve finally removed it. After that point, they made it so that only accounts that added 5 bucks to the account could send invites.

The only thing that gets slowed down or stopped by CAPTCHAs are humans.

Bots inside of games makes no sense because all you would need is a human to sit there and do the CAPTCHA... though again thats rather pointless.


All you have to do is google search (or any search engine) "CAPTCHAs are useless against bots" or "bots beat CAPTCHAs"

So what are bots even doing in games? Are you talking about the cheaters? Thats not bots. Are there spammers in the games, cause that seems rather pointless as people are not usually paying attention to the chat.

Also the bot creators won't be forced to log in, it would be the bot users... but I also don't understand why anyone would be using bots in games... please explain what the "bots" are doing in game.

[76561197963519852]

The bots are account farming.

[Dippy the Ghost!]

Originally posted by redacted:

The bots are account farming.

They'd still have to launch said game

[Gwarsbane]

Originally posted by Dippy the Macro Ghost:

Originally posted by redacted:

The bots are account farming.

They'd still have to launch said game

So just to fake like there is game activity? Then they wouldn't even have to bother with the CAPTCHA in the game then because they all they need to do is launch the game and leave it active.

Heck they wouldn't even need to launch the actual game. Here is a little trick you can do... take a copy of notepad.exe. Put a copy of it in your games folder. Rename the games launcher from game.exe (or what ever it is) to game.exe.bak (or something else) and then rename notepad.exe to game.exe. Now tell steam to start up the game and it will launch the game... but notepad will open but Steam will think the game is running. I've known of this trick for decades... I'm sure others do too.

Steam only sees that the game is running, it doesn't know anything else thats going on in the game.

Run SAM now and then to add an achievement at different times and bingo, it looks like someone plays the games.


So unless there is something else the bots are doing, again CAPTCHA would be pointless and even if Valve were the ones to use the CAPTCHA just for the loading of games (which btw would be VERY ANNOYING) the bots would be programmed to bypass it within an hour if not minutes as the code needed to do that is already out there for them to use if they are not already using it for other stuff.

Seriously, CAPTCHAs are pointless and only annoy humans.



Edit, here are a couple of posts on the forums from 2015...

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/discussions/1/622954302102366593/

Originally posted by Gwarsbane:

It will only annoy the humans with CAPTCHAs, while the bots won't even notice them cause the bot makers can add in CAPTCHA bypassing code.

New versions of CAPTCHAs are only good for a few hours to at most a day. The ones on steam are already being bypassed by bots.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/how-are-robots-beating-my-captchas/

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/10/617336568079193319/

Originally posted by Gwarsbane:

CAPTCHA has been broken a long time ago by bot makers. they tried CAPTCHAs here a little while back and within a week they removed them because thats how fast bots were reprogrammed to bypass it. Only the humans had issues with it.

Just google CAPTCHAs broken. https://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=captchas+broken&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&gws_rd=ssl

Heck just use the search in steam discussion area and look for CAPTCHA and you will see others asking for CAPTCHAs and others saying same thing I'm saying that its broken already.

I'm also pretty sure not too many blind people are playing games on steam, so I don't think thats a big issue. I could be wrong, but seeing as how its mostly a gaming platform and most games are of a visual nature, I just don't see most actual blind people playing them.

6 pages of me (and many others) mentioning how useless CAPTCHAs are....
https://steamcommunity.com/id/gwarsbane/posthistory/?q=CAPTCHA&p=6


So if you think CAPTCHAs are doing something for a game against bots.... they aren't other then driving off humans who are annoyed by CPATCHAs.

[Tito Shivan]

Back at the highest peak of Steam account hijacking and item scamming, when accounts were stolen and stripped of its items by bots left and right Steam tried to curb bots by forcing ReCaptcha in order to complete trades

It took only 24h for bot developers to render the measure useless.

Captchas reduce some bot volume, but it's not the silver bullet you believe it is. F2P games low entry barrier and what it means for cheaters and griefers is a very large can of worms that unfortunately has no simple solution.

[Ben Lubar]

Even before Steam was a thing, games like RuneScape (before there was a distinction between RuneScape and RuneScape Classic, and long before OSRS) tried using captchas to prevent bot farms.

The thing is, the farmers found an easy solution: pay one person to watch over thousands of screens and solve the captchas all day.

And nowadays you don't even have to hire someone directly. There are captcha-solving services where you can get thousands of captchas solved for a dollar.

[Dippy the Ghost!]

Captias are not obsolete and are just a front AI bros push so that they're utilized less often. Companies I have worked for have seen fantastic results when they start offering even the most barbaric solution or hassle to bot creators. https://developers.cloudflare.com/turnstile/ there is also many alternatives that are very effective such as Turnstile.

The point is Bot creators are lazy, and not very skilled to begin with. Once something is enough of a hassle, they deem something not worth it. Currently, Steam offers 0 hassle in any shape or form whatsoever.

[Ben Lubar]

Originally posted by Dippy the Macro Ghost:

Captias are not obsolete and are just a front AI bros push so that they're utilized less often. Companies I have worked for have seen fantastic results when they start offering even the most barbaric solution. https://developers.cloudflare.com/turnstile/ there is also many alternatives that are very effective such as Turnstile.

The point is Bot creators are lazy, and not very skilled to begin with. Once something is enough of a hassle, they deem something not worth it. Currently, Steam offers 0 hassle in any shape or form whatsoever.

Turnstile just checks to see whether the computer has enough CPU and RAM before deciding whether to show a captcha

You know what else provides proof that someone is dedicating a chunk of RAM and some amount of processing power to an endeavor? Running a video game client.

Turnstile also checks to make sure the web browser has features that are common in web browsers. The game client has all the features that the game client has because it's the game client. Bots don't rewrite the entire thing from scratch.

[Tito Shivan]

Originally posted by Dippy the Macro Ghost:

The point is Bot creators are lazy, and not very skilled to begin with.

That's going to depend a lot on the reward. And games like CS offer a very high reward for the effort.

[MonkehMaster]

no thanks

legit users should not be punished and require more nonsense to go through just to play their games, all over bot/cheater nonsense.

that being said, captcha's are a broken mess to deal with and would likely cause issues with people even being able to launch their games, just like we see people complaining about steams captcha bs.

the real solution to the issue is, steam needs to stop allowing users to run multiple accounts, then the issue would be drastically reduced, imho you only need a single account.

[[N]ebsun]

Bots are better at solving captchas than humans...

Money is the only thing that will prevent it - make the game cost money, or make an extra tier that costs money - something like a non-free tier that server operators can selectively allow / disallow the free tier, make the free tier ineligible for rewards (no more incentive), and make the price of the paid tier relatively high in the $30 - 60 range

[Dippy the Ghost!]

Originally posted by RANGER:

You deserved a clown award for this thread, you literally feed and train AI by solving CAPTCHA (not captia, you clearly don't even know how to type it)

And you think it is impenetrable? Reverse Mastermind.

This provides nothing to the topic. Thanks for the free points I can spend, though.

Originally posted by Ben Lubar:

Originally posted by Dippy the Macro Ghost:

Captias are not obsolete and are just a front AI bros push so that they're utilized less often. Companies I have worked for have seen fantastic results when they start offering even the most barbaric solution. https://developers.cloudflare.com/turnstile/ there is also many alternatives that are very effective such as Turnstile.

The point is Bot creators are lazy, and not very skilled to begin with. Once something is enough of a hassle, they deem something not worth it. Currently, Steam offers 0 hassle in any shape or form whatsoever.

Turnstile just checks to see whether the computer has enough CPU and RAM before deciding whether to show a captcha

You know what else provides proof that someone is dedicating a chunk of RAM and some amount of processing power to an endeavor? Running a video game client.

Turnstile also checks to make sure the web browser has features that are common in web browsers. The game client has all the features that the game client has because it's the game client. Bots don't rewrite the entire thing from scratch.

If this is the case what would your alternative be? Because as it still Stands, Valve has offered 0 trouble to bot freedom among Steam. And again, the point is a deterrent is very much needed and deterrents tend to drop numbers quite a bit in most cases. Captias have been consistently, to this day, a good deterrent most bot creators would rather not deal with. I see these threads of people saying they do not work, but I have firsthand seen results of it helping companies because people would just rather go to the next easy thing instead.

Yes bots do still get through, but it becomes more manageable. Perhaps with Steam it wouldn't work as well since it's extremely popular and stealing accounts receives a ton of money due to inventories, but there needs to be something and I'm not seeing anyone share what a better idea would be.

[76561197963519852]

They need to address this along with the accounts being sold after bots level them up.

I feel like, detecting bot activity should be easy.

[Dippy the Ghost!]

Originally posted by MonkehMaster:

no thanks :disapprove:

legit users should not be punished and require more nonsense to go through just to play their games, all over bot/cheater nonsense.

that being said, captcha's are a broken mess to deal with and would likely cause issues with people even being able to launch their games, just like we see people complaining about steams captcha bs.

the real solution to the issue is, steam needs to stop allowing users to run multiple accounts, then the issue would be drastically reduced, imho you only need a single account.

This does not work as most bot creators understand websites have tried this workaround. Bots will all seem like they come from another location/person/source, for lack of a better word.

[Dippy the Ghost!]

Originally posted by redacted:

They need to address this along with the accounts being sold after bots level them up.

I feel like, detecting bot activity should be easy.

And we've had working, functioning tools for a few years now that can detect bots with ease just from App or website usage! There's captias that only require you to click on a blue button and move on that have been extremely effective because it goes through a process to detect if you're a bot the second you come online. Infact, most captias do this now a days.

It's so easy in fact, users have plugins on Team Fortress 2 to DETECT bots automatically in PUB lobbies, and it uses only SOME of the same methods modern captias use to detect a bot! That is how insanely easy to detect bots. Steam has no such systems in place. From what is seems Valve will only pickup a bot once a while, trace its origins and then whipe them all out after a few months. This is a terrible measure and has proven to not work at all.

In fact, we even started utilizing AI for the sole purpose of detecting other bots with a ~0.001% false positive rate.

They detect your behavior and it's pretty hard for a bot to not act like a bot.