How to get rid of botting

General Discussion
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I think good solution would be giving power to players because blizzard is simply not capable of dealing with botters on their own.

What i do mean by giving power to people? Introducing private servers where owners would be paying to blizzard every month. You would be paying based on number of online players.

Owner can use own modded game to run the server. It would work similary as minecraft realms. People could of course still play on classic basicly unmoderated servers as now but have option to play mods or normal actual version of game on private servers.

I think its interesting suggestion for blizzard as it can generate some money. It would be amazing for players because we could have our own sanctuary on servers not plagued by cheaters and play the game as it was intended to be played.

I think that majority of player base have no clue how much better is game play on clean server without cheaters. I had opportunity to play on few in my time of playing of D2 many years back. And my best memories are from these times, not from battle net. And i had opportunity to be in position of normal player and also owner of server like that.

Do people cheat on private servers? Yeah few lost souls tried to bot or use maphack/pickit and they were swiftly dealt with, deleted/banned because control on small server from mod team who actualy care is far better than on server managed by blizzard and their anticheat.

I think that D2R is in proper place to do something like that as we get less and less from blizzard team for d2r in term of content and also bot situation.

And hey, we could have our own special pvp server just for pvp with modified patch made for that.

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Wait a second. You want to pay Blizzard a ton of money because they are not doing their job fighting bots?

Wow, that is like you buyibg your cheating wife a new car, so she can have great sex in there as well with the other dude.

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how about they support modding for free?

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its a great thought…just judging by the player population right now…where it’s hard to find any games in norm-nm …wouldnt private servers thin the pop even more?
well…it’s a nice dream…where d2r servers are full, without botters, multiboxing and d2jsp…

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You would be paying for own server with your own rules and patch of game you choose. I dont see anything wrong with that. When i played on private d2 servers, we were doing the same thing. Also paying for hosting because battle net was full of cheaters.

Not really lol, thats weird comparison :slight_smile:

We know answer to that question. Thats why i made reasonable suggestion.

Well obviously populations would be smaller but that means it takes longer to reach boring phase :slight_smile: its harder to get items, they sell well. But it depends what servers you pick, some could have improved loot. I have been playing on servers with around 100 people and its totaly fine and its often better as you know everyone.

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If the botters bother you too much i suggest singleplayer. Blizzard is a crap company that does below bare minimum effort.

Just look at the state of wow and d4. I played at prime time of wow some days ago and there were 20 m+ groups up. Used to be 100s. I would argue they killed wow so hard they should remove the monthly cost and live of their microtransactions.

Being the greedy company it is they won’t do that and they sure won’t do anything bigger in d2r than changing a line of text at this point.

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Wow, what an amazingly stupid idea. Have players pay blizzard for modded servers? It would promote players to come join their super hacked, modded drop rates, goofy level 99 skill trees in an online multiplayer setting where only the unknown paying mod could ban you. You think it would keep it clean but it would actually be a huge poop fest of hacks and bots. You think you do, but you don’t.

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I have been on servers like that as player and as mod/admin and you are very far from reality. Unlike you i have experience with it so i know that your reaction is just bunch of nonsense.

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Unlike me, you have brain rot from 8000 posts on the d2 forums. I’m an actual d2 player. Last night while you were typing 90 new posts, I did acts 1-3 on normal, single player, players 8 with a fresh sorc and zero gear. I play the game it’s supposed to be played. You are over here saying players should pay blizzard just like in Minecraft! Get a grip. The game is 25 years old. It’s not changing.

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Congratulation to your life achievement. Nobody asked what you play so i am not sure what you talk about that. Anyone can do that :joy:. But keep thinking how you are special.

Your math is wrong Mr. Troll.

No, those who would like to have and host own server, owners of these servers, not the players playing there. And it would be completely optional. Normal battle net server full of bots would stil exist so dont worry.

Why are you so angry about the idea anyway, you play offline. Not like anything would change for you.

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The only realistic tool I can see Blizzard, or any gaming company for that matter use to combat cheating is by employing real-time analysis and profiling of players “human habits” with the use of AI.

Microsoft is heavily invested in AI, so maybe, hopefully, eventually after the merger happens, they might investigate some form of use of AI to detect cheating/botting. I’m not counting on it happening any time soon though, as AI is still a relatively young and emergent technology which also happens to be expensive.

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Wow, I’m surprised, yet sadly not surprised, at the train of bizarrely toxic and negative replies to your perfectly reasonable and interesting idea. :man_shrugging: It’s another example of why the company treats this forum as a radioactive waste dump they refuse to interact with.

I’ve never played on a private server, but one reason I like the idea is because it creates a testing ground for different ideas and approaches to the game. Having a well moderated server for a change is one such idea. :smiley:

Having a separate PvP server would be nice too, those people can finally get what they want without bugging the rest of us to death!

There could also be one or more servers to provide a place for the pathological whiners and cheaters to sequester themselves away from the rest of us.

As for any kind of quality control, I think it would naturally sort itself out. People aren’t going to keep paying to run a server that no one else wants to play on because it’s trash. Meanwhile, the good servers would attract a larger player base and make it more worthwhile to keep maintaining.

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Hardware ban would be more effective than anything i’ve seen proposed and if they had gone this route earlier we’d probably not be in the position we are now.

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Botters will keep finding ways around detection. You got hit them where it hurts, profit margins. Either raise the cost of l the game or make rune/keys drops higher during seasonal play where the majority of customers play.

Most legit players already own the game so no harm done;)

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i personally have no interest in anything but the official servers and my own offline mod
but i see no problem with people having the option to rent and manage their own little bubbles
my question is, has blizz ever done something like that?

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the amount of infrastructure needed to make this possible would never justify any kind of revenue they could hope to make. it is vastly easier for them to just silently allow us to host our own private realms.

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Let’s import the worst idea out of fallout 76.
Leaving aside the utility of having those private server please explain how those block botters and maphackers?
The only difference is that now banning people is entirely on the user’s shoulder and without any of the anti-cheat that blizz has at his disposal.

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The “Official” unofficial servers will be displayed in the normal realm browser and the same old botters will be access them. Now you some how think that there will be magical tools available to these server owners to detect people cheating that blizzard does not already have ORRR you think that just because private servers that were small pop and a niche before had no hackers… that making it mainstream and easily accessible will have the same result…

I have way more experience with this than you and was a fequent visitor of the site which cannot be named and theedgeofnowhere which is what it transformed into. As well as being a frequent visitor of ragezone.

The biggest issue with what you are suggesting however is that this would give cheaters potential access to server source code which means they will be able to look for exploits a lot easier…

Private server source code is usually reverse engineered and because of this the exploits on them usually do not persist to the official servers.

This idea is just not really well thought out at all. I would just run my bots on as many servers as I wanted and the popular unofficial ones same thing I would run bots on them as well. Explain to me how private servers would be able to better deal with bots in detail and I might give this a little bit of credit. You will however also have to explain how allowing developers access to the source code will not result in more exploits on official servers.

Also these private servers if given access to the current anti cheats would give developers access to the anti cheat on the official server. Unless you added another layer between the unofficial servers and the client which essentially ran the anti cheat.

Now if you are suggesting that server owners do not have access to the servers directly you are essentially just asking for servers to be run that players can pick and choose from a list of options to be set for said server…

You also speak down to people a lot in here citing your experience on the subject but after reading all your posts I understand your experience entirely and am not really impressed what so ever…

What server software projects have you worked on at Ragezone? I really do not care if you were an Admin on a server… that means absolutely nothing when speaking about this topic. It is literally like asking a receptionist at a doctors office about what your test results mean instead of speaking to a doctor.

People who should speak about this issue are people who have experience working on server software as well as cheats… they will give you the best insight into what would happen not an ex server admin with no understanding of the subject.

Go play Squad and tell me what its like to be on a community server platform. They are forced to use things like EAC and other public anti cheats which have numerous global bypasses.

The only platform remotely setup for this is Steam btw not Battlenet what you are suggesting is costly and risky with little to no reward for one of their lower priority products… it is in absolutely no way viable at all… sorry to burst your bubble

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Microsoft has similar model for minecraft.

I dont think so.I have been hosting servers like this in past for D2. Wasnt hard at all and didnt require a lot. And that was like 15 years ago. Its same game still pretty much.

By my experience it worked far bettert than on official servers which were plagued by cheaters, private serves were mostly clean with cheaters being promptly banned.

Really? Because it worked in past for D2 and it was even just amateur level on emulator of battle net. We didnt have some amazing tools to detects cheaters, but comunity and we did care and pretty much catched every cheater who tried. Because if you have small server you have a lot better control. Most importantly its not automated control but there is human element involved so catching cheaters is a lot more sofisticated than automatic system.

We used emulated Battle net. Worked quite well.

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Wtf is this idea? Form killing economy to have 0 economy? U can play sp for self found items

1 Like