I’m sorry you don’t seem to want to engage on the larger issue Icamp. Look you can get a new card but the billing info on the card will still be you at your address. I’m not a professional in the industry but your EU ID or USA SSN is not the only way to determine who you are.
Without gaming companies breaking away from the way they’re doing things cheaters will remain an infinite account problem. Cheaters need to be IDed and excluded. This is the only way to move forward and allow games to offer us all the things they can’t in a world where cheating is a fact of life.
For Blizzard to get my billing adress on my credit card they would have to hack my bank. You don’t seems to understand the difference between what needs to be done and what can be done.
Of course we need to fight botters but your way is just wrong.
I want to clarify something I don’t think was completely understood from my first post. I am a game hacker/modder. I do make cheats/hacks/bots/etc. for all kinds of games. I think my post hinted towards it but I did forget to actually mention it. My work consists of various types of modifications to games, ranging from things seen in games like Skyrim where modding is desired, to full blown bots. Majority of my focus is on things that are similar to the tune of TurboHUD though as I hate writing bots (it’s super boring). (I wanted to clear this up so it helps people understand my point of view better when I respond to specific things.)
(Also I do want to reiterate, I do not hack/cheat on Diablo. I haven’t played in a while either. Feel free to check my profile, my stats and lawl gear should speak for itself that I didn’t bot/cheat. And no, I didn’t use TurboHUD either, I don’t feel like it adds any useful information/gain to this game to warrant its use.)
I see that you are very passionate about your idea based on your responses here and seeing it in other threads, but from my point of view, it just isn’t a good idea. It does not fix any issues/problems and it does not remove botting from the game. It does nothing but add another layer of inconvenience to legit players, as well as adds another level of security that Blizzard is then required to invest resources in that they otherwise shouldn’t have to. They are a gaming company after all, not a bank or other government agency where that kind of information is required.
Forcing people to ‘verify’ also just stagnates the community even more. I can guarantee you the majority of the player base is not interested in handing over all their personal information to a gaming company for the sole purpose of seeing their character name on a leaderboard. You will get the small handful of people that don’t care who has their info on a leaderboard that will hold even less value after this kind of thing is implemented. The playerbase will adapt to this kind of change and run their own leaderboards. (Your profile shows your top run and time so why care if it’s in a specific place on the game when it can just be done on a third party site instead?) You push people away from the game doing things like this without solving the actual targeted issue at all.
The issue is not related to giving an account purpose, it is that there is [nearly] nothing in place to actually detect and ban botters in this game. Blizzards own anti-cheat (Warden) is extremely easy to bypass which at this point is almost the only line of defense this game has besides the occasional manual review we get, if we are lucky, 1 time a season. Generally, that manual review is only against specific parameters which almost always falls in line with play time. Which is why so many people get away with botting in this game, and many others. As long as you make yourself look legit, you have a very high chance of never being banned.
In terms of botting in basically any game, some general rules of thumb are:
Do not bot 24/7.
Do not bot for more than a normal amount of play time.
Do not bot during hours you would normally not play.
Do not bot multiple instances of a game from the same IP.
Do not bot public games or with other players.
Do not bot leaderboard based data.
Obviously the last one here is not adhered to because people don’t care. There are tons of other things to look out for, be cautious of and so on to keep yourself from being banned, but this is not the place to discuss that kind of thing.
I have a handful of friends who bot this game, and have botted it since launch. None of them have ever been banned. All of them follow the general guidelines of botting/cheating in any game and avoid any reason for themselves to be labeled a botter. They play solo majority of the time besides 4 mans for exp grinding, they never play out of their normal game play time, and they never bot / play for more than a normal amount of time they’d play normally.
The issue then comes down to other factors for detection:
Client Sided
Server Sided
Client sided, we have Warden in Diablo and other Blizzard titles. However, like I mentioned above, it is so braindead easy to bypass Warden, that this has little to no purpose in this game. With Warden bypassed/defeated, it leaves everything up to the server side. (For anyone wondering, it takes 0 effort and 0 code to disable Warden. The reason anti-cheating is a joke in this game is because of how weak Warden is.)
Server sided, it comes down to how much resources Blizzard is willing to put into this game. And honestly, from launch til now, we all know how little that is. This game has never been their focus or a project they have ever put much care/resources into. The best thing we’ve seen happen was RoS, and then again, the game was abandoned.
Right now, everything related to botting appears to be manual review just based on how poor the management of botting is. It’s pretty easy to tell that Blizzard is basically just running some basic database queries to check for some general conditions and banning based on that information. There does not appear to be any automated learning systems in place to detect some basic / consistent repeated operations by players and either flag the account to be reviewed/monitored more.
As a bot developer myself, looking at the videos of the main bot people use for this game, there are a lot of things the bot does that could be easily detected for automation. I am not referring to how it handles gear / drops, or how it salvages/keeps items either. I’m more focused on how it moves, how it paths certain parts of the game, how it deals with certain situations and mobs. There is a lot there that they could monitor for and flag accounts for but they don’t.
Giving Blizzard my SSN, CC info, copy of my ID, etc. will not solve any of this.
I didn’t miss it. Just not putting any hope into it.
I’m going to assume you are new to the game if you still have that kind of hope and excitement towards any news posts made about this game or empty promises they make. ‘Core’ or ‘Big’ changes are words they’ve used for a while now and never deliver. Game has been in a state of ‘maintenance’ for years now with all talk and no show. So most of us that have been here from the start know not to listen as their words mean nothing anymore. Actions speak louder than words, so until they actually back what they say with actual changes, it’s nothing but cheap talk like usual.
After the disaster that was BlizzCon last year, we got another empty promise in the form of a blue post by Nev saying ‘we hear you’ and that they were going to be more active and so on. That was yet another empty promise. Blues never posted after that except in topics that were basic questions that had nothing to do with the community or the future of the game.
Then they suddenly cared enough to shift the forums to this new system so they could burry all the hate and backlash. Was the change of forums coming? Sure, but it certainly wasn’t that much of a focus until after all the BlizzCon hate. The games forums were full of negative backlash, Blizz wanted to burry it.
This is not true at all. Being verified doesn’t stop anyone from botting.
It doesn’t remove bots from the gameplay at all. See my stuff above.
Also not true. Not everyone bought the game from Blizzard directly. Buying from a retailer, or any other non-Blizzard owned site means your info is not given to the company. Or if you paid cash at a store like Walmart, again no CC used, so no CC info given. Along with Walmart not sharing your CC info back to Blizzard.
Sorry but no, this is already bypassable using throw away credit cards you can get through sites like Paypal. It is way too easy to get a 1-time-use card to get around any of these extra annoyances making them completely invalid and pointless. Botters already do this to avoid companies from ban-waving their credit card. (A lot of MMOs do bans this way where they will ban every single account linked to the same card. So people will get throw aways for each account to reduce the loss of accounts on a banwave.)
Again, using a throw away card defeats this.
You are implying this is a means of anti-cheat, it is not at all. It is an inconvenience at best, but does nothing to fix the actual botting because it does not do anything to detect botting/cheating. People that bot will just adjust their playtime and other parameters to adhere better to a normal player and continue to fly under the radar while verified.
This wont fix botting issues as most botters play solo anyway. (Or with other botters specifically.)
It’s 2019 and we still don’t have cross-play from Xbox to PlayStation because of money and greed. I’m sorry but if you think companies are going to start working together for the greater good which will result in less profits, you’re sadly mistaken lol.
The way that Blizzard maintains bans right now for D3 is actually profitable in their favor. The game is dirt cheap and goes on sale regularly. Along with ports to consoles, Switch being the latest, it pulls in more and more chunks of players each round. If they ban wave 1000 players, it is a high chance most of that 1000 that were banned will rebuy the game and come back when it’s on sale. It creates a cycle where they are technically not losing players and still gaining profits. It’s a business method a lot of companies use and abuse because it works, it’s legal, and no one ever mentions it.
As a developer of mods and stuff, it’s a joked about thing on the regular though because we see it all the time. It’s more seen in major titles like WoW and other big MMOs where they never put effort into making anti-cheats better because they know it will hurt business in the long run. It’s more profitable to slack and ban knowing the banned players will likely rebuy and return. (Rinse and repeat. It creates a much larger income per player when you can cause them to spend hundreds on a game that costs $30-60.)
Exactly! I went to a pizza restaurant last night to dine in with some friends. As I stood at the counter to place the order, the first thing they asked me for was my phone number. I thought, “What?” Next, they asked me for my name. I asked them why they needed this information? When all I wanted to do was order pizza to eat at their location. I asked if they needed this for a club card? Their response; “We don’t have a club card. It’s for when you call-in orders so we can find you faster in the system.” I replied, “I’m standing here to order a pizza to eat in your restaurant. Do I look like I am calling in?” I refused to give them my name or any other information. All I wanted to do was eat pizza with friends while getting out of my house for a short while. The need for “big brother” to have our information is getting out of hand. I almost walked out of the restaurant at that point. But they gave in and took my order. I was so pissed off.
Indeed! Pay attention to when Blizzard has Diablo 3 on sale. It usually follows a ban wave. It’s just another way for them to monetize the game or profit off the botters.
not sure why you quoted me in this breakdown, this was a response to someone suggesting i try the community made SSF league , and it was mostly sarcasm about a crappy alternative to having a search filter built into the game.
I can’t say often enough, apparently, that I don’t give a sh*T about the botters, but all the people that have argued against a SSF leaderboard won’t stop using it as some counterargument to its viability.
I would take the option to compete against bots that cant group at all, over bots and 4 stacks of no lifers that are all grouping all the time to PREPARE to run a SOLO GR push… every time.
That’s a huge breakdown atmos0s, and it’s yet more info that the community should see.
Stepping outside of the “how” we could verify what do you think about it hypothetically if we could? If an account could be linked to a player, and if that player were caught cheating by conventional means and then barred from making a new verified account, would that be a problem for cheaters and botters?
I don’t see you addressing in your post what sort of impact stopping account rebuying would have, and I’d like to know what you think.
Wow, this idea, and Cody, are like the Walking Dead; no matter how many times it gets killed, it. Just. Won’t. Die!
We can’t stick eagle wings on pigs and make them fly, but what do you think about it hypothetically if we could?
Yeah, valid criticism there, he only explained multiple times why stopping account rebuying doesn’t work because it can be easily circumvented, and yet he had the audacity to not imagine a world where it could work and nobody cheats at anything ever and there’s rainbows and unicorns for everyone!
It’s only OK if girls hypothetically farts rainbows.
Om a serious note. This is exactly the thing we can’t open the door for. What if your grocery store decides to you have to freely give them you personal ID just to be able to buy none rotten food? Everyone could have you “freely” give them your unik personal info to get something better than the ones who doesn’t give them info.
Spacecadet13, really man where is all the rage and hate coming from?
I’m out here trying to talk calmly and politely about an issue that affects us all. For a guy who has claimed not to care as loudly as you have, you certainly seem to. I’ve even gone to the trouble of seeing this issue from the botter’s point of view, and taken pains to classify you as “non-legit” / “non-conventional” gamers with a right to enjoy the game as you see fit. A right that should be respected, at least where it doesn’t hurt others. Yet at every opportunity you rage off in some anti solution post without raising any solutions of your own, other than letting things be as they are. That sort of rage isn’t healthy bro.
Am I stopping you from having some other discussion? What keeps you rage posting so frequently in direct opposition to my calls for a dialogue about alternatives to the ineffective way we’ve dealt with cheating so far in online gaming? No matter who rebuts my proposal as stated the core Idea that the way we’ve been doing things has gotten us nothing remains unchallenged.
You perhaps suffer under the misapprehension that I care about credit or whose solution solves the problem that has spawned millions of angry forum posts about cheating. I do not. I merely seek, for the common good, to push this discussion in a direction that can affect change for the better. That I do so against the winds of those who’d prefer the status quo, for their own interests, is to be expected.
Your jibes and rages will not silence me sir. If you wish to do that you’ll have to raise you discourse to the arena of ideas and ideals. If that upsets you then perhaps you should consider why.
And that is a noble attitude to have ethos, but you should consider that the ubiquity of cheating shapes games before you even see them. The RMAH is a great example in this game. Why don’t you get to use it?, cheaters. Tell me you haven’t dropped an FPS title because it’s multiplayer was invaded by cheaters.
We need to end cheating, botting, and trolling once and for all. Nothing less should be our goal. These problems have grown larger than our games and begun to infect our politics. Our very right to self determination is at stake here. A solution to botting and trolling in games could even translate to a solution in social media.
We, as gamers, number 2.4 billion world wide. We span every language, race and religion. We are more numerous than the Chinese. We are in the best position to deal with this problem.
Like others, I bought at a brick and mortar. Blizzard knows as much about me as they are ever going to know. If I have to give personal info to a company just to play, I won’t play. I won’t buy future games from that company. Bots annoy me, but not enough to go through some of the steps suggested here. I think blizzard has a pretty good idea how many followers they would lose by getting too personal. It is, after all, just a game. My list of priorities is income, shelter, food, utilities, clothing, transportation… the list goes on and on and at the very very bottom of that list is games.
Wrong, again. The RMAH was closed a) because it was bad for the game and was disliked by a majority of the playerbase, and b) because the IRS was starting to take a long, hard look at the unreported real money transactions, and instead of requiring individuals to report their tax liabilities on the transactions (which everyone who used the RMAH agreed to do when they accepted the TOU) were going to shift the burden of recording and reporting said transactions to Blizzard. Compliance would have cost them a fortune, (almost as much as participating in a real -ID verification system…) so, no more RMAH.
If you were to check the profile of some of the players in seasons I am sure that you would find the following.
Some do bot 24/7.
Some do bot for longer than a normal amount of play time. 20+ hours a day for months in a season is more than normal amount of play time for anyone.
They do bot when they normally wouldn’t play.
They do bot in public games which is why some players have been in public games with a bot.
Not sure about the rest though. So don’t say that the players that bot in this game are smart. They are not, heck there have been streamers that have been caught and banned to to leaving for a bio break. Their followers watching the stream seeing his character still playing while he is afk.
The easiest way to catch botters is to manually check the time players play during both season and non season. Anyone playing more than about 16+ hours a day for more than a month’s time is botting. Only someone botting could possibly play that long.
Years ago at a Blizzcon they said they would give us a way of unlocking stash tabs through seasons and they done just that. I wouldn’t put it pass them to pull through with what they posted in that blog. More so if D4 is announced at this years Blizzcon.
Just think about it each season from season 19-25 we might see more than just a season theme. Each new season could also be dedicated to a class. Where they add a new class set and legendary powers that would primarily help that class. Plus they might revisit existing sets making improvements where it is needed. One class per season would mean that for about 2 years we will have something to keep us busy. Perfect timing for D4 to be announced so that when the last class is taken care of there will not be too much longer before D4 hits the shelves.
This means that I do believe that at Blizzcon 2020 they will not only talk about seasons going forward for D3 and any QoL upgrades they want to talk about. They will also announce D4. Then they will talk about Diablo Immortal as an afterthought. That they they can make amends for the disaster that was last years Blizzcon. That way they can say see we haven’t forgotten our PC/Console players.
Yes it is damage control but a wise business decision none the less.
Since it was in this topic, I figured you were aiming it towards this discussion regarding botting/cheating. I’m all for official SSF game modes though, at least then it would be able to be enforced that it was truly SSF and not someone secretly playing with others here and there to get an edge. Plus with how little this game gets in terms of new things, it would be a welcomed thing to have more game modes added.
Like I said before in my post above, I don’t see it working or catching on at all. It will just push players away from the game or force them to focus on their own community made leaderboards that are maintained on third party sites. Verification does not fix botting, so it has literally no value to be done and no value to players to give their info over for a stupid blue checkmark like on other sites (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) that implement verification. (Those sites have actual purpose/value to verification though unlike a game.)
Also, like I said above, even if I was a verified player, I can still cheat/bot.
None of the verification stuff stops it from happening. You are not adding anything to combat botting/cheating.
It wouldn’t have any impact on the player base. Players wouldn’t care because this system wouldn’t catch on to begin with. The amount of players that are actually verified vs. the ones just playing like they already do today would be so disproportionate, it wouldn’t matter to the majority of the player base because they won’t be affected.
Like I said above too, the verified leaderboard would be a joke and not taken serious because of how little it would be used. The majority wont be on it because they wont give their info to Blizzard.
The impact this would have wouldn’t be on the players, but the game itself and the developers/publishers (ie. Blizzard). Ban waves surge sales. They would be greatly killing off a huge part of the games income, which would cause D3 to be shut down faster than it already is.
The game already is down to basically 1-2 developers and has been for a long while.
We do not see new content ever. We do not get any updates worth mentioning.
If you cut the little money stream that this game does still make in half or more, you are going to just kill the game.
I get that you are passionate about your idea, but sorry, it will not work and it will not fix anything. Your idea does not fix the actual issues of detecting the third party tools or combating them, it just adds another layer of information that Blizzard has to put more resources into protecting, vs. putting that money into the game itself. (Granted they don’t do that as it is, so it’s a lose lose regardless.)
No one is disagreeing with the need to remove cheating/botting from the game and to cleanup the leaderboards. People are simply disagreeing with you because your idea is not good and does nothing to fix the actual problem. It’s fine to be passionate about something and to share your opinion/ideas, but at this point everyone disagrees with you in every thread you bring this idea up in. I think you should take the hint that it is not going to catch on because no one likes it.
Like usual you don’t read peoples posts and just want to argue how you’re right and everyone else is wrong. I’m not wasting my time with you. Be the “e-hero” you want to be in your own mind, but I’m not going to waste my time responding to you ever.