In my attempt to propose a SSF option for seasonal, a large % of the resistance posts were based around bots ruining it.
So it makes me curious, are the bots just spamming regular rifts to farm loot/paragons? Or are they advanced enough to actually push high GRs too?
It seems like instead of trying to catch them and ban them, maybe there are ways to make them less efficient than actually playing the game…
IMO we shouldn’t talk about bots in detail here, which may arise people’s interest in using them.
lol every post on this forum about them is talking about them. One of the biggest and most active threads is about a requesting a banwave…
Not in details. I’m not saying you can’t mention bot, just don’t advertise bot.
I’m trying to figure out if there could be ways to make the game interact with players in such a way that you would need to be at the keyboard and verify that youre there enough that it would make botting not lucrative.
Well a simple and short answer is no.
Actually some MMO games did that by sending captchas to players. It worked for a while until soon bots can read captchas.
There is no efficient way for a machine(server) to tell if someone is machine(bot) or human. Here efficient means it needs to be easy enough for human, hard enough for bot, and doable on server.
Also doing that is stupid because it even affect the players who don’t care leaderboards and thus won’t be affected by bots nomally.
Jepp I allways fail on those damned captchas. 
They don’t need to push higher GR’s. Let’s look at the SSF option:
You play for 6 hours a day for 3 months. You have to farm keys, do bounties, do fast gr’s for paragon, and then push your GR’s to get those higher gem augments.
The cheater turns his bot on for 18 hours a day for 3 months. It farms keys, does bounties, and runs fast gr’s for paragon. For 6 hours a day for 3 months, the cheater actually plays the game. All he needs to do in those 6 hours is spend 15-30 minutes sorting what the bot found, then do higher GR’s for augments and run gr’s for paragon that are higher than what the bot was running.
After 3 months, you and the cheater both actually played for 6 hours a day average, but the cheater has far more paragon than you, better gear than you, and higher augments/gems than you because he had the first two. If you two have the same skill level, the cheater will have a distinct advantage over you because he didn’t spend any of his play time farming (because the bot did all that), while you have to spend a significant amount of your play time farming.
Cheaters win, that’s why Blizz needs to ban them.
Bots can solve those types of puzzles.
I was just thinking if the game could detect that youre spamming back to back rifts, not looting anything and at randomly spaced intervals on the hour or two it would tell you in a message while in town to do some random action that would be easy for a human to do, but a lot of effort to program it to do.
If its running all that stuff and looting theres no way it wouldnt be completely full stash in a very short time, and if it does loot, it would have to know what to keep and what to recycle, it seems insane to me to go to such lengths for what? bragging rights? i dont get it?
Spam back to back rifts/gr is literally the thing you should do in game.
You spam rifts there you basically one-shot everything for fast keys. You don’t run off to loot chests.
Then you spam gr that you can do in under 4 min for gear and exp.
Bots know exactly what to keep and what to salvage.
idk, anything in game that made you do a random action in town like go stand by the blacksmith and press your potion button, would require so much tedious coding that it would never get implemented at this point. The only thing I could see would be to put a cap on daily play time like WoW used to have with xp gains(rested bonus) but obvioulsy even capping it at 10 hrs per day would have lots of people arguing against it… idk… it just sucks that people have to suck, this is literally why we cant have nice things.
No thanks. We need less time wastes in game not more.
The bots do loot. When the cheater sets the bot up, there is a spot to check what you want to keep (basically the 13 pieces for your build). It auto salvages everything else. I’m pretty sure they can set it up to pick up mats too. The bots in D2 had this, so definitely the D3 bots have this.
As for why people cheat, there are a lot of reasons. Some don’t want to put the time in. Some can’t put the time in. Some losers get their thrills on making others feel bad. Some people like doing certain tasks, but don’t want to do other redundant tasks. Some people are hyper-competitive and are always looking for an edge.
So how would you like it when you are pushing that new record gr and you get a message that says “Please go stand by the blacksmith and press your potion button in the next 10 seconds or else your account will be locked”. Or you went afk for 3 minutes to use the bathroom, come back and see your account is locked because you missed the question.
Blizz would have this system automated, so there would be a set amount of tasks to check for cheaters. The bot makers are making a ton of cash off these things, they definitely will spend a few hours to code this in if they are making a ton of money off of it.
Time caps, Captcha’s, all these weird limits are only going to slightly mitigate the cheaters and aggrevate the legit players. Blizz needs to enforce their policy and ban the cheaters.
i know none of this is gonna happen, im just brainstorming. just voicing my frustrations. From the sounds of it, banning does nothing because they just get another account. Thats why I thought maybe there could be other ways.
This has already been discussed to the max. There is no good solution.
We are not sitting here just to shut you down. But everything you said had been said before.
I’ve seen a pair of 3 bots running rat runs early season, so no to answer your question.
Rested XP in WOW is a system used as a catch up for players who could not play as much as others. The longer you were logged out, the more double XP you would have.
On topic: I’ve seen Botters online running GR 105s at all hours of the night.
105s … bots can get paragon 5000 in maybe just a couple days…
that isn’t possible, but yes they can climb paragon levels more quickly then human players.