some players… not all.
1 Like
A fundamental problem with your anti-botting plan is that I don’t think that your solution would actually impact bots. It would make botting less efficient than it is now, but it would still be useful for anyone who wanted to play less than 8 hours per day to bot the remaining time. All it would do is make it less obvious from looking at the hours played in a season who is botting. The main beneficiary of this idea is people who bot but don’t want to be obvious about it.
Also, it would really spoil the fun for anyone who likes to pull an all-nighter when the season starts. I mean, I’m old an need my sleep so I’m not one of them, but I recognize that for some people that’s the highlight of the season. So, yes, your plan has significant negative consequences for legitimate players.
Personally, what I think Blizzard should do is be more proactive about clearing botters off of the leaderboards quickly. I realize they have reasons for doing it in batches, but I think that waiting has a significant impact on the moral of legitimate players. As that’s the main negative effect that botting has on legitimate players, it needs to be a higher priority.
1 Like
Incorrect. Ban the cheaters. That in no way hurts legit players.
These crazy, convoluted schemes to try to mitigate bots in actuality do little to bots and generally hurt legit players, somtimes even more than they hurt the cheaters.
2 Likes
So, regardless of whether you play for 8, 12 or 24 hours, you get 24 hours of XP / materials? How does this in any way combat botting when the botter will just bot for 8 hours at triple bonus, for 12 hours at double bonus or for 24 hours without bonus?
Trying to punish botters/cheaters/thud users in anyway OTHER than flat out banning them impacts legit players.
Blizzard has the software needed to find botters/cheaters. The fact that they actually do ban a handful of token botters is proof of this.
There needs to be stricter impacts on the people that do the cheating and not blanket impacting the entire server.
The fact that we don’t have large ban waves or even IP Banning the people they do ban is proof that blizzard really doesn’t care much about this problem. Or at least they care way less than you do.
1 Like
i doubt blizz will ever allow modding their games, but even if they did that would not stop all of the threads about botting/cheating that happens on this forum.
It depends how advanced the bot is. If it is a modern AI that can beat any real human player then the benefit would always be present. If the bot equals say top 500 player then smart game design “beats” botting and the top players won’t bot as long as it is not profitable to do so aka time spend is important for the LB.
Again, another convoluted idea that does nothing to stop botting, and little to hamper the effectiveness of bots.
Legit casual player who plays 1-3 hours a day has no impact on their game.
Legit competitive player who plays 8+ hours now makes sure to only play 8 hours a day, because if they go 9,10,11 hours a day, it is not as effective as running 8 hours. In those 8 hours, they must run GR’s, run rifts, AND run bounties. Legit player cannot take a day off, or half a day off in order to max out their efficiency.
Cheating competive player turns on his bot for 3 hours running rifts for keys (which bots are just as efficient or more than a legit player), then logs on and runs GR’s for 5 hours. The entire 8 hours, the cheater is running one or more bounty bot accounts. The only time they stop running GR’s or rifts is to collect the bounties, they never, ever have to run one. Cheater can take a day or 2 off, because the bot will still run the 8 hours for the cheater.
In the end, the competitive cheater is still way ahead of the legit competitive player since they will have more paragon because they didn’t need do bounties.
The casual player is still be light years behind the cheater because the cheater
cheated for 3 of their hours.
Cheaters still win.
Yes, now cheating wouldn’t matter, because the game would just be like console offline. Buy an account, mod 10,000 paragon, mod a 6 socket weapon that does 1 million damage, mod jewelry that can hold 3 legendary gems each. Cheating now doesn’t matter because everyone will be solo speed running GR150 in 2 minutes. The only problem is, now you have a broken game where no one plays.
Come up with a good suggestion, and I will upvote it. I upvote posts all the time. Come up with bad suggestions, and don’t be all upset that people are telling you that your bad suggestion is a bad suggestion and why.
How about if Blizzard actually enforced their EULA and banned botters / account sharers? That wouldn’t benefit botters.
Heck, I covered this for months over on EU. It’s incredibly easy to look at the in-game leaderboards and view the profile of another player, and view the amount of seasonal play-time they’ve amassed. Knowing the season’s start date and the current date, you can work out how long the season’s been running. You can then work out what percentage of the season the account’s been playing for. There are lots of accounts highly placed in the leaderboards where this is over 20 hours a day, for entire seasons, for multiple seasons in a row, for years.
Now, clearly, Blizzard have access to the back-end database tables that the in-game leaderboards / profiles pull their data from. It would not be difficult to create an SQL query that created an extra field in a database table that showed what percentage of available seasonal hours an account had played and flag any over a certain percentage for review by a human. The SQL stuff is trivial in terms of creating the query, scheduling the query to run at scheduled times and flagging accounts. The problem comes with the amount of man-hours that would need to be invested in the human investigations of the flagged accounts.
I don’t like botters or account sharers and if you came up with any suggestion that didn’t punish legitimate players and/or didn’t benefit botters, I’d up-vote it in a heartbeat and also reply to the thread to say so.
1 Like
Once you open the game to modding, you lose control. There will be no limits to it.
How can you install brakes on a car speeding down a hill at at 200 miles an hour?
1 Like
Best thing you can get against botting is social invite regulations, especially in softcore. Bot owners harvest crafting mats by getting invited to the finished bounty games by a bot, then return back to GR pushing. Doubled rewards on first few hours don’t impact anything, also doubled mat reward only would benefit botters and no one else.
Check facts before making bold claims.
As for double xp, it’s nothing different than a model of experience decay and I think this can be fine. As long as legit players can group up for massed benefit, I say why not. Botters will be obvious if they group up if that’s the case even system itself can boot them off.
So why does this apply to putting resources into setting up modding with all the boundaries needed, but doesn’t apply to putting resources into banning botters?
It is always interesting when someone comes up with a bad idea and gets flack for it, they immediately jump to the “you guys hate everything” card. For every one good idea, there is at least 9 bad ideas. You see so many posts get flack because 9 out of 10 are bad ideas. Those threads are filled with pages and pages of why the idea is bad, but some people can’t get past the “Special Snowflake Syndrome” where any idea they come up with is the greatest idea in the history of the universe.
There are a lot of threads on this forum that are well thought out, quality ideas with a lot of information to support their idea. Those threads get tons of likes. If you do not believe me, go look at the main barb threads. Come up with a good, well thought out idea, that is not full of holes, make a thread and I’ll like it, until then, just realize your idea isn’t as good as you think it is.
1 Like