I know - so youre against it just because it may be a Google-derived system? Even if it is not analyzing personal internet behavior as Google would otherwise be doing on the internet browsers? And as Solo just said, there are other sources. Though the data theyd be analyzing - D2 gameplay - would be categorically different from internet behavior…
And Herr means Mr. in German, I wanted to inject some minor silliness - for shame!
If Blizzard uses their own tool and not Google’s I’m a lot more fine with it.
Google in particular can go get bent though.
I’m still 100% against traditional captcha and OP’s extremely insulting remarks about disabilities, though.
I removed my keyster comment.
Group Hug.
Moving on…
You sure like your commas, sir.
This is an example of the paradigm or “model” that Blizzard could use in combatting bots using advanced AI or a service that provides AI-based anti-botting. This is on the web space side but does provide a framework for anti-botting with apps. The problem is finding a company and solution that provides SDK or plugin that’s more generic for Blizzard to use if they don’t want to roll their own.
This is android example but other companies do PC apps, unix apps, etc, depends on the company. You basically just integrate the SDK and it will capture user input events and send them to the bot detection API. The other thing is that you may need to “train” the system but once trained these systems are apparently very accurate in distinguishing human behavior and bots interacting with your system. Blizzard should also be able to fully integrate the end-to-end solution on their own servers without needing 3rd party if they could run the “bot detection” server/service on their own HW. With some companies, it looks like you are sending requests to them with data and they respond with detection results - that model would be too slow imo so Blizz would need to integrate fully on their own HW but some companies do provide that all-in-house model.
No all around… Blizzard has plenty of tools to detect most bots, they just need to actually dedicate some resources to anti-cheat personnel who can analyze these tools and press the ban button more often.
The proved it this past D2 reset with the ban of thousands of cd keys for using Sonic. The issue wasnt the detection methods, the issue was the consistency in the enforcement, they only did 1 wave and once the botters switched cd keys, they were up and running again.
Fact, bots can get around captcha, bots can get around games per hour, click speed detection, pretty much every automated restriction they put in…
Going after legit players to go after botters, isnt the answer.
Please delete this post, its nothing but trolling legit players and putting more BS restrictions in place. I want to be able to do 50 pindle runs non stop again if I want to, but I cant because they listened to ideas like this.
If you don’t change your OP text to remove CAPTCHA and include non-invasive AI-based bot detection, you’re going to keep getting WeirdChamp DidntReadComments responses. People aren’t going to read comments and will just reply to OP etc. Older CAPTCHA is legit garbage.
The authenticator is good. I do wish Blizzard would add support of Yubico Keys for 2FA.
Authenticators are good to prevent your account from being hacked but do very little to help against bots, sadly.
I play this game flawlessly so your weird AI is gonna false flag me for sure.
Except those systems have been broken again and again " A CAPTCHA is considered useless if it can be cracked by a machine more than 1 per cent of the time. George and colleagues found their new AI was able to beat Google’s reCAPTCHA 67 per cent of the time, after having just five training examples per character."
That’s funny. You claim to be a dev and yet don’t understand that any security software can and will be cracked. It’s why we have so many cheaters on PC online games in the first place. No matter what you do someone is going to break your security. It’s just an arms race between the company and hackers and the hackers always end up winning.
This is an interesting comment and it’s worth spending time on because it’s a prevailing thought in the gaming community.
That comment is not true. It’s a wive’s tale. For example, Diablo 3 has never been cracked. it’s security has held up for 9+ years. The statement “can and will be cracked” is not necessarily true and a significant amount of expertise and effort has been spent trying to crack Diablo 3 over the years and Diablo 3 is still sitting there just fine.
When you design an online game and distribute critical game code to the server-side, there’s no getting to that code because it’s on Blizzard servers tucked behind all their layers of corp security.
In other words, by designing an online game such that potentially cracking the client would never result in a functioning game, you’ve solved a major part of the cracking problem. Add on proper DRM, encryption, some client-server communication to ensure game integrity, etc and your game can wind up on the uncracked side of the ledger.
With botting, D2 and D3 bots are very simple - in fact with Kolbot/Sonic right now, going to it’s github, there’s a big warning that D2BS is not safe from detection etc.
Detecting the current set of D2/D3 bots is actually very easy with the right software and expertise. It’s highly doubtful that the amateur hobbyist Diablo botting community would spend the effort to defeat a state of the art AI-based bot detection system for example.
Another factor to consider is that Blizzard may have manual verification in their current process so they don’t false flag and ban people for botting in error. Doing bans in waves may also be much more efficient for them it seems.
But if they started insta-banning with a newer AI-based bot detection system on 100% confidence cases, it would be night and day. A botter would get on, crank it up, and be insta-banned once that bots profile of movement/behavior was detected. That botter’s not going to burn money on a million game purchases of D2R to do trial and error on somehow circumventing that. Those newer detection systems also adapt and improve as they run with machine learning and reinforcement learning.
So Blizzard, if they stepped up their game, could actually do something decent. We know that money and expertise solves problems. The same is true with these problems.
Diablo III Has been hacked tho, Even before it came out the item houses were running cheats, There were several item houses that were renting out beta accounts by the week, And after it came out item houses were selling items, People actually hacked and stole accounts a few of them stolen even had authenticators, So don’t be so confident ma man because your wrong, And Blizzard/Buzzrd/Activision is known for not going top end unless and until they have to…After all they don’t wanna short Bobby Koticks paycheck 
So let’s review a few completely distinct areas:
Please tell me what you’re talking about because some of us are specifically talking about 2 things:
You’re mixing up apples and oranges with account hacking, authenticators and whatnot.
I’m not saying Blizzard itself doesn’t get hacked. They do.
I’m not saying multiple individual accts don’t get hacked. They do.
What I am saying is that a properly designed DRM online game isn’t crackable on the client-side because critical code components are remoted to server etc. D3 has never been cracked. That’s a fact.
Since you didn’t mention bots you get a pass on that 
Plus you get style points for Kotick
so friend, close your bank account and keep money under your mattress, because for you, nothing is safe on the internet. Try to help adding, charging the blizzard banning boots and hacks and not vik here and stop troll.
Dream on simple answers here #1 Blizzard/Buzzard/Activision Just doesn’t admit to failing here , Just as they don’t admit to players dropping out and or losing interest for years #2 "Simple answer manpower or budget.
Let’s take the game csgo for instance this is a game which is extremely popular. There is prime and non prime matchmaking.
This is a system implemented to reduce hackers however some slip through and can run rampant for days. For a hacker to be banned at least 2 people have to watch the entire game and provide a verdict on what sort of hacks a person is using if any. This shows limited manpower.
The other main reason why hackers can’t be caught quickly is because of budget. It would be absurd to believe a small indie game can have the budget to implement a system to detect hacks. They already have spent their money on their game and usually don’t have enough to implement a system to deter hackers." #3 "So many websites exist offering hacking tools/aimbots/cheats for online FPS’, MMOs, etc. Why are the hacks so rampant and why is it so difficult to keep people from hacking in online games?
Any technical explanations are welcome, I’m genuinely wondering why there are no foolproof anti-hacking solutions out there." #4 " Part of the problem is that in order for games to feel responsive, a lot has to be calculated client side. If your aiming was handled entirely by the server, the controls wouldn’t respond until the server caught up. It would be sluggish and frustrating and unplayable. Aiming is just one of many things that have to be done by the client.
The other thing is that the client needs to know where certain things are in order to tell the player. The server tells the client there’s an enemy at position y. The client now knows your position, the position of an enemy, and the geometry of the map. It’s all the information needed to feed an aimbot. How are you going to prevent that? You really can’t. Only thing you can do is try to control what reads and modifies the client’s allocated memory. That doesn’t actually work too well." I could go but why bother your not worth my time any longer
That response does not contradict these points:
Notice the UNCRACKED part of that image
We’ve never been talking about one-off hacks, in-game exploits, hacking in general, account hacks, authenticators and so on.
Edit - The only reason D3 not being cracked was brought up was because someone said that all game security was broken which is false. So I think it would be better just to focus exclusively on specific botting and bot-detection otherwise it gets off into the weeds.
That’s a stupid comment. The truth is considered trolling, the true sign of the ignorant. Sure, let’s inconvenience only legitimate players with a stupid captcha that will still end up broken anyway. By the way, nothing is truly safe online and if you really think any different then you are a bigger fool than I thought. Even some of the biggest companies with the most money have been hacked. That should tell you something. I’m all for Blizzard getting rid of bots, but I got news for you. Even D3 has bots. It might not be as bad of an issue as it is in D2, but it still exists. Again the hackers will always win. Period.
I wasn’t talking about cracking the game. I was specifically talking about in game security. Show me one popular game on PC with no hacks. I’ll wait.
Edit: Also for the record there are hacks for every one of Blizzards games and you expect them to be able to completely stop bots on D2:R?