I know botting has been around forever and from time to time there has been bans on botting.
The health of this game’s games economy relies on the amount of effort put in to make sure the game is in a spot that makes magic finding fair for every player. It’s not good for the games economy and I’d like to see some effort going in to combat cheaters in the future.
I’d really appreciate a Blizzard employee answering this question on what their plans are to combat cheating in the coming ladder seasons. This is about keeping the integrity of their game in check.
Thank you.
(I play between 10 and 15 hours a day and I still find Magic Finding to be an utterly worthless endeavor because the stuff you try to afford requires 24/7 Magic Finding to afford)
Battling bots/cheaters is a never ending cat and mouse game… When the anti-cheat advances, the cheats advance to counter the anti-cheat. Sure, a handful of accounts are banned as a result, but they just pay the piper and get new accounts. Anti-cheat is a forever-investment with zero return and non-perfect results, which does nothing but burn money… Shareholders, board members and CEOs don’t like burning money that could otherwise line their pockets. It’s all about that money, man.
The economy is fine. Your shako is still worth a shako in all situations. Sure to some effect it economy is affected, but even without bots the economy always will go to the dumps because there is no item decay in the game for the most part.
As for a blizzard employee answering you, there is no chance one will even see this post with almost 100% certainty, and even if they did they’re not going to respond with nearing that same level of certainty. They have no plans to combat cheating because it simply is not a profitable venture to combat cheating in a 20 year old game that was remastered as a marketing piece for D4. It would be a waste of time. The amount of people who MIGHT get offended enough to not buy another title from their company simply don’t matter to them, and they’re already received 99.9999% of the money they ever will for this game. So there is no plan, this is coming from a non-blizzard employee. Now maybe at one point they’ll do a ban wave because it would be easy, but a ban wave is not combating botting, just them taxing botters. They’ll be back online within a day or two.
I’ve asked this question a billion times, can someone show me an arpg that ISNT rampant with bots? I don’t care if is for experience, for paragon, for items, it is all botting and I have played all of them, it is rampant in all.
No one gets how expensive it is to fight botting. People make it sound like some intern can write up a $10 program that catches & bans the proper folks along with all the customer service crap they have to deal with.
This is life. Accept and move on. Play for yourself or go hire your local politician who believes in implementing social credit so all those botters can’t get hired into good jobs, now they’ll think twice about botting in d2r so your experience is optimal!
Another thing, even if they removed botting, chinese farmers will still dominate the “market” groups of players can make some serious yuan due to ridiculous conversion rates… since d2r is global server vs separated realms in classic, you should see how pointless these requests are…this isn’t supposed to be a serious game, there ain’t money on the line to get worked up over unless you’re selling items
Well they could start by banning anyone that play more than 12 h a day … Right there it would slow down botting by alot and also ban the first botting group without warning, As for the players who were playing 12 + a days ? well it just going to be good for them aswell since gamming 12 h and more a day is really not good for your health. This would at least close the gap by half right there.
There is botting in CS2 for 5 cent weapon crates, that someone would have to then pay an additional like 2 dollars to open lol. They’re a HIGHLY profitable game, and even they cannot stop cheaters or bots.
Ahh yes let’s just arbitrarily put a time limit on what someone does to prevent botting which could just put in a threshold and avoid that scenario all together. Meanwhile a player who can only game 1 day a week will be capped and the only person who might face a temp ban.
Even if they would limit the playtime to 12h per day it wouldn’t change much. There so many items in the economy that they could feed the community 2 or 3 times.
And how long everyone want’s to play is each their own thing.
Well you can easily get around that … By looking at the average time played … If someone has a avg time of 12-24h per days all week you can pretty accurately ban him as a bots or as a no life with no job and still would be beneficial for him to stop playing… If you see an account that has like 16 h but only the weekend (OR) from time to time well that another story.
What you’re doing sure it affects the botters and probably mostly affects the botters. But it is a few lines of coding for them to avoid going over the threshold. Sure it limits them a bit, but clearly botters are profiting and thought their current amount of accounts were worth buying. If they’re limited, as well as normal players, they’d simply just double the amount of accounts they’re running.
While time spent playing is certainly a factor worth looking into, putting an arbitrary limit be it 12 or 16 or 20 or 8 hours doesn’t matter. You run a much higher potential for causing issues for real players than a bot, as botters existed during the realm down phase of the game, but the people most affected by realm down were the actual players. It is an idiotic system to put in place. Sort of like how when they made an attempt to bad people based off how many games were created in an hour, and they only got actual real trav farmers.
This simply isn’t a proper way of dealing with anything, it is an awful half-measure. If they’re going to take it seriously, then actually do the job and figure out who is/isn’t botting and ban them and try to stay on top of it. If not, then you’re most likely better off doing nothing.
The only feasible possibility of reliable bot detection is with player profiling using AI. The current problem with AI with the scale that would be needed is the expense… Up to $40K just for a single AI compute card.
Even if it was cheaper, would they implement AI profiling in a 2+ decade old game? Very likely no… It sure would be a great test bed though.
Agreed mostly. There probably is potential profit directly monetarily by simply having one AI type card working 24/7. They’d only need to catch 2000 bots to partially justify the expense, though obviously the threshold would be higher because 2000 banned bots doesn’t gain you +2000 new accounts until they purchase the game again.
Though in all honestly there is probably partially ways to go about it without going crazy, but the impact simply wouldn’t matter except a few bonus dollars in Blizzard’s pocket. It isn’t like a few million in sales means anything to them simply because a ban wave happened on a dead game. You could purchase the bots as Blizzard, and find ways to flag/ban, then you could also create a program that would flag accounts for a variety of reasons just based off raw data, not any sort of AI calculation. From there one intern could detect many botters per day even if your anti cheat didn’t detect them just based off simple observation of the data. Not even to mention the easiest flags of all time where an account running 24/7 is 100% breaking the rules no matter what, and while I wouldn’t release the fact that is a consideration for a ban, I would classify it under program detected instead. Because either way you are either sharing an account or botting, obviously there would have to be an activity requirement, but those botters would meet that.
But the reality isn’t simply profitability. It is simply why bother for a dead game. Sure you might wind up making a few million after spending time and energy and hiring people to develop these processes. But all that time spent working on the next game is worth billions more. It will never be comparable.
