I did not play the last ladder for long since bots ruined it within few days.
I saw that Blizzard did a good Job on banning them later on, but the damage was already done.
Now I did some research on the current status on botting, since I would like to have a good Ladder this time: My Chinese friend told me that a certain Chinese bot is still running well and that the hordes of evil are ready for ladder.
I registered to a couple botting discords and it seems that they are already done with the preparations:
This is from G.I.D bot discord
phan — 27.08.2022
We’re running 1 key vs 1 subscriber role considering resource distributions like bot version updates and so on. So if someone buys the licence key for you, you should tell the buyer to inform us. A few ban reports shown that people ran the old version bot due to packet mismatched. So for the safety precautions, you’re adviced to turn off the game’s auto update functions. Our bot version is confirmed the latest, hence, no worries in running it. In the future, the update versions will be posted in subscribed-only section. @everyone (Bearbeitet)
August 2022
phan — 28.08.2022
We’ve received lots of help requests recently which outnumbered the key sold here. Well, it’s okay and wish we could help. I have never estimated I have to make this announcement here.
I know that you guys found some keys cheaper. As I said before, I’ve tested lots of d2r bots and claimed myself as a bot reviewer. You guys may not know how the Chinese thing goes. Where you may receive the same bot client. However, the licence keys you got aren’t as simple as you thought. They determine which bot sever you connect.
A crowded server with heavy loading. Which encrypted scripts you can gain access with. Those secrets the resellers won’t tell you. I wasn’t planned to tell you guys too. You could treat the keys we’re selling as premium or tailor-made keys with high priority in connection with bot servers, which perfectly matched and tweaked with our bot clients. That’s why someone’s bot acts weird which is unexpected to happen here. You entered the key from other resellers in our bot client, which is not recommended because those weird acts induced will get you flagged. That’s why you guys ask for help here but not your key suppliers. And that’s the reasons why I get involved in reselling with @smallfox but not others. I started getting noticed when some people asking for the 8.26 version which doesn’t exist. It’s not just about price but safety issues, good luck. @everyone
Think about it, crowded chinese servers with heavy loading? And this is not even the biggest bot.
Please Blizzard, be smart this time, pay someone with Chinese language knowledge to investigate the biggest Chinese bot and do banwaves BEFORE it is too late for
a change.
(1-2s time a few days before ladder, once like 5 hours in and every 2 days after would be a good strategy in my opinion)
Update:
smallfox — 20.09.2022
Release GID2.574 , upload file in subscribed-only channel 1.Add Autoleveling Bone NEC 1-90lv EXPANSION; 2.Fix some bug of Autoleveling BH paladin 1-90lv EXPANSION; 3.Improve and Perfect the Autoleveling Blizzard Sorc 1-90lv EXPANSION: make it more smooth and faster during act1 to act2 ; improve the stats and skill during autolevel; improve the autogear during autolevel test 1-78hours in 24hours (ping=100)
I’m not going to touch on things said on the internet as far as the quotes you mentioned but this. If they ban, they ban what they sniffed out, they don’t mutate their code every few hours to catch new guys. Some just don’t get put on the same ban wave.
It’s a cat and mouse game, once they show they sniffed it out the bot makers go at fixing it. Then the bots fixed, then blizzard goes about trying to find a way to detect it.
The turn around time is not going to be hours but weeks/months.
Yeah and that is exactly the problem.
Chinese botters have tons of hacked very cheap keys at their disposal and the new bots
will rush new chars to a high level within 1 day.
Weekly banwaves are not enough to deal with this.
We need one ban before and one few hours after reset and not a couple days in!
They could hire 2 interns and have them work part time. They could log in and ban bots manually once or twice a week and that would save this game. It would cost them nothing, and take almost no work.
There’s no excuse.
I agree 100% this game got destroyed by asian botters and it is time
to claim it back.
Please Blizzard, you will gain back a big part of the player base if you wage
a real war on botters. Please don’t let them run free in the first days after reset.
@Sparka It is far too many to ban them manually but the fight could be won if Blizzard just wanted to.
Ideas on the topic:
1.) create some fast click captcha or riddle that you have to solve before interacting with NPCs
that sell potions/scrolls.
Bots can not run without them.
2.) Detect similar walking patterns. No human player will walk to the exact same locations in town more than 1-2 times.
If Blizzard could detect the bots repeating walking patterns it would not matter what kind of software they use.
3.) Perfect attack timings
A bot spams attacks with a certain timing that a human player can not keep up consistantly.
4.) mix up the locations for stuff that the bot wants to interact with
5.) Look into private bots
Yeah you got to buy a license and take a look at the code. Should be no problem at all to ban it then since
there are 100s of points in the code that you could use to identify and ban a bot.
Solution to bots is personal loot and way better drop rates.
D2R is a video game not a job, legit player can grind 4 months and not even get one +45 Life Cold Skills Charm for example. This is why botters abuse this and some people want D2R to remain the same.
Great input Ufurani
I disagree Zahramar:
It is a big part of the flair of d2 that some stuff is very rare
Would be boring if there was a huge inflation
I remember a time where yellow rares and certain blues were best items on many slots, It was so much more exciting. Sure these rares were insanely hard to find, but you could have items in use that noone else on the entire server owned! I disliked the change to runewords that made all these rares and magics trash!
You know, if I were looking to narrow down the list of accounts that might be cheating, I would start at the ones that have auto-updates turned off. Certainly some people have it off for perfectly benign reasons, but it seems like something all cheaters would have turned off.
There isn’t already? How did they get a super high end item such as Infinity, Enigma, etc. for a whole team in the first 48 hours of the Ladder again? How did they reach Level 99 in only 2 weeks (if not less)?
No such thing as rarity of items or even an “economy” when there are shady third party trading platforms, botting, exploiters, etc. and there will never be either. You can not stop them and they will always be there. This just punishes legit players.
The first 48 hours it is the streamers that are gifted the items and a few more folks spending FG perhaps. But most folks did not get stockpiles of FG by buying stuff early. Legit players are the ones farming up that gear early on, and take advantage of the “economy”, bots eat our scraps later. Most players cannot do a week in game only breaking for meals and the toilet but there are some farmers that can. I go pretty hard the first month. I found a SOJ, a prefect anni, an ohm, and a lo in the first 4 days this season, x 1000s of folks that are better than me at it.
Until it does not help. There are at least 5 addons, and AI subroutines that are anti-captcha already. This is possibly why you do not see that many in the modern internet.
For this ladder it is too late blizzard will never come up with something captcha like in this short time. I think if it would be done well and asked ingame randomly it could save this ladder tho
Asked in game at random? Hahaha no. Are you mad, imagine in the middle of a fight a pop up asks you a Captcha. If you stop bots, the only way to do it right is do nothing to players playing legit. That is not nothing. That would be super annoying. I think they read memory when you start a game. This is all they need to know whom is botting.
I ment like randomly on npc interaction not just when being out there slaying
Like a collection of random captchas that you get asked when interacting with important NPCs
1: If the method for attempting to control bots interferes with human players in a game, then it is not acceptable.
2: CAPTCHAs are able to be defeated by bots, they have been for some time. They’re not perfect, but they’re getting better all of the time. So if CAPTCHAs were to come to D2:R, they would end up being a problem only for human players.
The best solution would be specialists looking at the bots that are out there and wage war on them. I do not believe that it can’t be done in an extent that solves the Problem, but so far it was never enough. Remember the old days of D2, botters always won the war on the long run because Blizzards made rather little effort to battle them and just did so every couple weeks.
Back then it was not an issue for Blizzard because players kept playing and buying keys,
but now it kills the player base very fast because there are enough alternatives like
Path of exile.
Most players don’t want to play a ladder where bots ruin the trade market within days.
If we would get a bot free ladder most of the old players would hear from it one way or the other and come back!
The best thing Blizzard has to work with is human error and patterns. Even the best players in the world are susceptible to minor errors in mouse movements, timing during and between key presses, and the occasional mis-click/keypress. The wonderful thing about human error is that it’s random, and can vary from day to day, depending on the player, how much sleep they got, whether their electrolytes are low, maybe a bit dehydrated, didn’t correctly recall a map layout, a frickin cat hair got caught in the mouse eye sensor, they’re distracted because of annoying spam calls/texts on their phone, family member(s) being annoying, they pause for a brief moment to take a drink, they take a small break to eat something, etc.
So what would be needed is monitoring and logging of the in-game mouse position and control keys, feed it into a computer to analyze for inconsistencies based up on those randomicities and the patterns and compare them with a history profile.
If a player who plays the game themselves and also runs a bot to play, there are going to be stark differences in the playstyle, the randomness of errors and patterns of play, and thus would warrant further and a more detailed investigation.
Blizzard of course would have established profiles for the various bots in existence for the game to compare to.
AI computing has made humongous strides over the past decade. Maybe it’s time to put it to use.
