Well firstly, i think to discourage cheating making a game that people want to play for hours and hours is a great start. Have a game that offers content as a reward is what ive noticed keeps me playing a game actively and thoroughly, Even if a grind just unlocks another grind. Also have a game that requires you to be present, player interaction, trading, PvP, etc etc will make alot more people present in the late game rather than endless paragon and primal farming alone with 0 interaction options other than a leaderboard and powerleveling people.
Also, dont have a end game built around exploits. Not so much in the term of eggman who just got rank 1 from a exploit, but more so things like powerleveling, paragon boosting, free bounty materials simply by just logging into somebodys game who has completed them. Currently there is no competitiveness as a solo diablo player, and in the top ranked players on the leaderboard, it is hard to pickout the botters, the people who have just been fed everything (XP, materials) and the people who have actually no lifed the game… so i think creating a game that is multiplayer that is equally solo is an idea, or having two separate leaderboards to recognize the solo players is another idea.
As for security, i think they should go to Jagex(Runescape) and swing them a little amount of $$$ for an insight as they have a great automatic bot detection/banning system, even when no software can be detected. Then in theory it would keep everybody off blizzards back to “do something about cheaters” constantly, and give actual human beings more of a reason to keep playing instead of always being rank 2 to a bot.
Just my opinion though… would be hard to incorporate all of that into diablo 4 i guess.
To counter bots, one method could be to simply monitor the game play data of all clients, however the expense of such a system both monetary as well as resource wise would probably not be very efficent.
By making a bot, that monitors a characters behaviour, and then reports when a character goes beyond the parameters given to it.
Monitord things could all be from content, movement patterns, afk patterns, skill rotation, summerising it into something like an, effective gameplay time divided by total session time.
So if for example a player is online for 2h, and have an effective game time of 90%, that would be rather resonable.
However a player online for 12h, with an effective game time over 75% you might start questioning what’s going on.
For some types of cheats, that works. For others it just lets the bot maker know Blizz changed things - and helps them pinpint how Blizz is doing the detection.
They could add puzzles into dungeons that are really simple but have a random order. (Think of activating the Cain stones in D2)
This would work as a simple CAPTCHA against bots whilst keeping the theme of Diablo and adding slight bits of non monster killing progression requirement into the dungeons.
Making engaging monster fights that require specific strategies/responses, it will make the gameplay better and also significantly increase the time it takes to make effective bots (discourages development of the bots)
If they add in a penalty to your endgame progression for death/failing combined with complex (but not necessarily “difficult”) content then bots might become too ineffective or even so bad they push you back in progress rather than forward.
Don’t you think that would actually be good? Like for a company if they really cared about their game they would do both wait for the bot site to deploy a new patch that is “undetectable” again and what would blizz personal do? Download the bot and reverse engineer to find out what they changed on it. I mean it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. But on the other hand I question myself at what point would they do that? with ban waves they already got the botters hooked up on the game to the point that if they get banned they buy a new account and start all over again… Plus I don’t know to which extent that goes because it’s simply unheard of a company be so passive about their own product like on this case happens because it has been years and years already of that with no major security being implemented. I start to wonder if the bot develop doesn’t even belong to an extent to the company like making $ side by side. Ban wave = money, sell bot = money. I’m not accusing anyone but considering that they are passive even to talk about that let alone to take action that makes one wonder.
In some ways it’s not a problem to the company as they get more sales, yes it pisses off the competitive people on leaderboards and some other ways if trading get out of hand from Gold-Item Sites.
So one way maybe to make trade open up after X amount of content is completed, something that combines this with comments above like random things in quests.
Saying level should be capped to prevent botters from cheating to gain more level is like saying income has to be capped to prevent people from cheating from other people to make more money…
There are argument for level caps for sure. But cap level to prevent cheating seems like a horrible one.
Game design shouldn’t be compromise to prevent cheating.
Human nature is such there is no way to stop the way people choose to live.
If you ask any prison warden that has held the job for over 10 years they will tell you there is no way to stop the men/women from:
escaping and trying to escape.
creating weapons from plastic, toothpaste, toilet paper, food, etc.
circumventing any and all means to limit them in every way.
The experienced wardens know it’s about communicating and finding the flaws as they come up.
That is exactly what Blizzard does, except they are very poor on communication.
It is kind of like a prison on the forum and in general regarding this great game!
Making it esports oriented and competitive? No matter what you do for D4, it will have a portion of players that cheat, making it pure competitive would only wipe that image.
This would be awesome if it was actually doable. I bet Blizz would get some serious playtesting/bug extermination done if these cheaters were locked in a sealed room and played on Blizz controlled PCs.
It’s rather simple. Remove the loothunt. Remove trading. Remove expgrind. Suddenly there will be no need for cheating.
As long as one of those things are present there will be cheaters. Is it worth getting rid of all three? Definitely not.
What I feel can realistically be done is design a competition in a way that doesn’t scale out of hand with bots. This means a big NO to endless expgrind as that is the biggest offender. So lets say the keyed dungeons are the endgame in D3. If gear and skill is the biggest factor in clearing the highest dungeons then the only advantage botters will have is getting the gear faster. But eventually any dedicated player will have the items to clear the dungeon, and if he is more skilled then he will prevail.
If you can grind exp for all eternity then you will see leaderboards similar to those in D3.
My pervise post was more of a way to flag what would looks like Bots to narrow them down, as for the average player after the first time we get past the X Content its unlocked even when a new season starts.
A bit like adventure mode is not in D3.
This thread is not about how to stop cheating. That is impossible. The key words is “reduce” as in reduce cheating and reduce incentives to cheat. Security will be handled by Blizz and this thread is not asking for security suggestions to Blizz. This thread is asking for ideas on how games can “reduce” cheating through game design and how game design can “reduce” incentives to cheat without destroying the enjoyment of the game or eliminating competition entirely.
Can’t really stop it or discourage it. People going to find a way. Cheating is just really a way of life in everything now (IRL and iG). As long as people feel entitled to it, they’ll cheat. Hell even driving IRL has cheaters all the time cause theres just not enough to police it.
You can add all the security into a game, its still going to have people finding ways to cheat in it. Really the biggest things “limits” and such you put on only hurts the legitimate player and turns players away from your game. Need 4 factor Auth to log in and to auth your log in every 30mins. Sure it’ll help against bots but I don’t want to have to deal with a “You must Auth your account every 30mins” Put upper limits on things, great but again does nothing to the bots and affects legitimate hardcore players.
We should have had you as the game director for RoS, we wouldn’t have had the uncapped paragon 2.0 system
True. But it’s better to have only the “just because” crowd cheating, as opposed to major game features incentivizing cheating.
I don’t think cheating has much to do with ego, not in this day and age anyways. I mean, if a person with big ego is so bad at a game to the point, that he has to resort to cheating, even if he were to sucessfully deceive others, he would not be able to deceive himself.
If it’s all about ego, the person would either sit and learn the game, or not play at all.
The way I see it, the people who resort to cheating nowadays do so, because:
They are not happy with the product to the point, that they don’t care about whether their account gets banned or not, so they extract a laugh or two before they end up getting banned.
Monetary incentive. We live in a time, when if you’re really good at a game (or at least appear to be), you can amass substantial following on platforms like youtube or twitch and make money out of that.
But obviously, not every player is as talented and/or skilled, so some resort to cheating in an attempt to appear good.
I mean, in recent years there were even examples of people pretending to be paralysed and unable to walk, acting as if they are bound to a wheelchair in an attempt to trick people into donating money to them. I do believe twitch banned at least one person for faking disability, after he miraculously forgot he’s “paralysed” and stood up and walked.
