I would like to clarify something. Some people think that bot detection is hard and bots will always be present on battle net.
That is not true at all. Bot detection only depends on how serious issue it is for you, how much you care about it.
I used to play on several private D2 realms, i even had one myself. We had attempts made by cheaters also, to use pickit or bots. Since me and other admin care about having clean realm, we eliminate them pretry fast and made example of them publicly so others knew that cheating will be punished.
How did we catch them?
You obviously cant use only automatic systems and detection because bots use sophisticated ways how to avoid it. But real presence of someone behind the automatic program cannot be copied by the bot.
Bots always failed when facing human operator trying to find out if thats real player or no. There are ways how you can test if real human is behind the bot. And we had clean servers because of it.
So if blizzard is serious about eliminating botting, they need to hire few people who will have job to catch cheaters. Actively with human aproach, not just to use aumatic system or read reports. Also fear is important part of dealing with cheaters, fear of losing money or items. Cheaters need to be banned instantly, not in ban waves so they are able to accumulate wealth before they are banned. If they have enough time, ban means nothing to them as they will have enough to buy new account.
So what do we need to have clean realm? :
Reporting system
Automatic detection based on patterns
Automatic detection based on checking in game filed
human operators checking reports and public games also
human operators with ability to join password protected games to check players( with option to be completely invisible for player)
Frequently posted list of banned cheaters
cheaters being banned when detected, do not wait for ban wave.
They dont need 20 opetarators as full time job to help to hunt cheaters. Just 1-3 persons would be good start.
All of those measures will be excellent, let’s hope they get enforced. I think Blizzard investing even just a small amount on a small number of human detectors working with AI could be excellent and go along way.
As much as I think, you are right, it is apparent, that Blizzard does not take the necessary steps to avoid bots as much as they could. At least you can see in the D3 forums, that bots are an apparent problem, which seems not to be taken care of.
I think, the problem is really, that Blizzard does not earn money with players in D2, D2R and D3. They can earn money with those, who do not yet play these games. But as soon as a copy is sold, Blizzard doesn’t really have to care a ton about the players anymore from a financial point of view. There is no benefit in holding these players.
Exactly, that’s what they do with D4 and I think, it is really important to make sure, that the company earns money with active players for these reasons.
But for D2R I think, it just doesn’t work. MTX doesn’t fit into the D2 world and people would hate it.
Lol catching some “hackorz” on your private realm and detect groups making money from bots on a server platform used by thousands of players is a total different thing.
Also i would be pretty pissed if some battle.net moderator would pop out of nothing, demanding to proove myself human. Maybe would even assume that it is an scam and don’t answer at all, which would get me banned unjustified.
Unless there is one guy supervising multiple bots to response when needed. As soon as money is involved everything changes. You just can not compare it.
Like to see what the broad playerbase (not the pre order hardcore fans active here) thinks of “little discomfort”…
Yes, because they have huge resources compared to private realms. Its not about catching all of them its about catching enough of them to make difference.
MrLlamaSC: “One thing, shifting back to the online play here, I know there’s definitely going to be questions around security. How are we handling duping? How are we handling bots? How are we handling, you know, just anything around that, round-downs, and all of the disconnects and all of that good stuff that we deal with online. What’s being taken, or what action is being taken there?”
Rob Gallerani: “So, moving over to modern Battle.net helps us with a lot of those types of things. To say it’s, you know, lock-tight, I wouldn’t dare do that. That’s like throwing a gauntlet down to the community to try to break it. But all of that should be far more secure now. Now, we do still allow you to play offline, right? You will need to authenticate that your copy is legit, but after that you won’t be bothered. And so, there’s a reason why we leave those characters quarantined away from online.”
Andre Abrahamian: “I mean, yeah, we have a server team working on it and these are some of their efforts. We want to stop the bots, stop duping as much as possible. There’s a lot of strides happening in the back end of things.”
Diablo III have cheaters aswell and that game has “Bind To Account” and pretty much limited trading system. But still using bots.
Every Online games have cheaters (Sadly.) If we want to eliminate cheaters then we have to remove online play and play single player.
Best thing to do is to mass report cheaters on D2:R, and hopefully Blizzard will react and ban them permanently. IP ban! Not everyone knows how to change IP.
I hope Blizz can protect us from those bots/dupe. Many people waiting for this more than 10 years so Blizz plz don’t let those 5% cheaters destroy ur 95% good customers.
It wouldn’t change anything, as the majority of bots are botting on private games and these bots are the most destructive for the game.
Removing all the botters from a game is impossible, tho if Blizzard would try they could cause that using bot wasn’t not worth it. If Blizzard keeps strong hand against bots at the start then most botters will be scared and won’t even bother launching their bot and risk $40 cd-key.
Zax, I am sure you caught plenty of botters and hackers, the ones using the public programs who thought they could tweek a few lines in the config file and fool you…
Big difference between them and the private, true coder bots that are out there, you will not detect these.
Sure you can join a private game that only a mod has access to and ask them if they are a bot, but if they dont answer, they are auto guilty? That is a ton of resources to dedicate. I would leave my private game if some random joined all of a sudden too, not answer them if they were asking for personal details.
Lets say you did though and your TOS says they have to answer, these coders will just program them to answer enough and beat your checks.
Blizzard will never know or detect these bots, they are out there and will always be out there. If they are limited in quantity with bnet 2.0, and a guy like Yoginator no longer has 300+ running on his private server farm, then I can live with that.
You are missing the point. The difference was that we could find them without automatic detection. We had nothing like that. Bot can fool the automatic detection, its much harder to fool human operator.
Look, they have much better resources and most likely they are able to detect some stuff. Lets say there will be 1 person who will have full time job to find bots, he will check detection soft and have list of account which are logged more than 10 hours for example. He will keep checking them one by one, join and watch what they do. If you are human and your game is password protected, you would be actualy suprised someone joins dont you think? You would for example stop and ask who that its, its natural reaction. Outcome might be different, but that would be most likely most common one. Bot would not react and keep doing his job. You could also watch him find way to where he is farming every time which would indicate maphack. I mean there is many ways how to check stuff and dected if its bot, I was using many methods. Its not always same aproch as i described it, sometimes you have to be creative and use different ways how to check if char is bot or person.
Some people might not like it but if you want to have clean server without cheaters people have to sacrifiace something.
I do not think Blizzard wants to do this, especially as laws vary across countries. To my knowledge in D3, the only time that this naming happens is in China.
