Just ban players who do more than 12 hours a day on avg over the course of a month. It’s a simple solution. Anyone who plays that much legitimately probably needs an intervention anyway, but this will drastically limit the advantage botters have over legit players at the very least
Some peoole play a lot, and for a living.
One could argue that you spend too much time making troll posts and should be banned from the forums if they were to use the logic you are presenting here.
I would agree with that group though. Everything you post is absolute trash, and you need to be removed.
Flagged for trolling.
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Name 1 streamer who does 12 hours a day 7 days a week
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He was absent for an extended period. Makes me wonder if he had a long lasting ban and it just now expired?
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I was not playing Diablo. Regardless, it’s inappropriate to falsely flag threads because you don’t like the OP or post
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I don’t flag posts or people.
I’d say send them captchas at that point. Also, send them messages and ask what a current stock price is, or something. If I had the keys, bots would be gone in a matter of days.
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If there is a time delay, bots will be programmed to play for 1 second before it expires, or a minimum amount to allow save and avoid the clock limit. So, that is no solution.
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I might have an easier proposal to tackle botters, since Blizz is clearly lazy about upkeep here: eliminate the leaderboards.
Bam! Gone is their odd sense of fame, accomplishment, and entitlement.
Pretty cool eh?
In all seriousness though, why do people bot? I have people on my friends list that are clearly botting. There is no way they just randomly set “away” status for 18 hours a day running GR130s constantly, and then remove their away status for 1 hour to fish for a good GR150 and clear it. I don’t really care what they do, but I have noticed my peers that I suspect are botting are at least 1k paragons higher than my account, and I’m sitting above 1.5k paragon.
To be quite frank, I’m so bored with the season already that I don’t blame them for botting… it is the only way to really grind your level higher, since that is the treadmill of D3. It is a shame the devs won’t implement new game modes that are interesting and captivating. There have been good ideas suggested on these forums, all heard by empty ears.
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Congratulations on making all botters limit themselves to 11 hours 59 minutes per day.
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So as others have said, cheaters now run 11 hours 59 minutes a day.
It is still no solution. It simply mitigates some of the the bot’s damage. If legitimate player plays 4 hours a day, every day for a month, and a cheater plays legit 4 hours a day, then cheats for 7 hours 59 minutes every day for a month, the cheater still has a significant advantage over the legitimate player.
Time gating is never a solution to botting. Identifying and banning the cheaters is what needs to happen.
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While this thread is an obvious bait, I’ll bite. A little.
As mentioned already, time gating solves nothing. Botters just adjust their gameplay time under the limit. Zero punishment to botters and other cheaters, while legit players suffer.
Also it has been stated many times, players can’t be punished based on playtime alone. Blizzard needs 100% conclusive evidence of cheating in order to swing the ban hammer. The daily playtime is not conclusive evidence. It’s still just circumstantial evidence and even though it is a major red flag, it alone is not enough to issue bans.
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Give XP only 4 hours per day. All overtime will not give XP. It’s not the perfect solution because the bots also gain loot but it’s a solution for the paragon level.
Honestly, I don’t believe there’s a solution. At least not one that doesn’t also harm and/or impede legit players.
It’s obvious the correct answer is there will always be bottom feeders in every human endeavor, games included. I just ignore them, don’t like them but I don’t want to start impinging on my game experience either.
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It’s not as simple as you think.
A strict criteria like 12 hours a day, 7 days a week can easily be defeated. For example, 11.9 hours a day. Or 16 hours a day, 6 days a week. The combinations are virtually endless.
Even if it’s modified, say, lowered to 11 hours a day 7 days a week, the bots will run 10.9 hours. Keep lowering it and it will eventually reach a point where it starts snaring legitimate players.
If there was actually a true solution to botting, every gaming company would be using it. The reality though is that there currently is no solution, simple or not.
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Regardless of hours you have potential of snagging legit players, is it likely that a parent/child combo plays 24/7, no, but it’s not impossible so a system that operates solely on time played is a garbage system.
Yeah, you would lose a lot of ordinary players as well, I for one would retire any game that had such intrusive methods of hunting bots.
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A good bot could answer that faster than a human. Especially if you know the general types of prompts that would be coming.
Stock prices are actually a pretty bad example, because that’s already something people have a vested interest in automating. The yfinance module in python can get current prices (and a bunch of other stuff) for any stock/fund listed on Yahoo! Finance.
I have a python script that runs once a week and grabs the price history for the couple of index funds I’m invested in. I wouldn’t call myself a python expert, but it’s only a few lines long and took me a few minutes to write. Automating stock price retrieval is an absolutely trivial problem.
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Solutions can vary from game to game but in some cases, it’s not a matter of whether or not there is a true solution, it’s a matter of “Is the solution cost-effective?” Remember when Blizzard had great customer service? When you could talk to GMs and get real responses and solutions to your issues before this garbage ticket service that gives you robot replies? Paying a bunch of people to solve problems vs having a robot do it isn’t as cost effective.
There are companies that know they have a problem but either choose to ignore it or accept the level of failure occurring as acceptable within their capability. For all we know, Blizzard may have ran some studies and determined that they are ok with the level of cheaters there are.
Regardless, yes, playtime is not a good determining factor. It “sounds” simple but it’s been proven that there are several gamers who in fact, do play a ton. The statistics on that can be debated to death. An MMO I used to play tried doing playtime to combat botters. There was even a point where if you were doing a certain activity for more than 5 hours, you were banned for botting. There were people who would grind for 8 hours at a time and got hit with the hammer.
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There are true solutions, just not cost effective solutions. That is to say, gaming companies don’t value those solutions over the amount of money it would take to implement them.
For example: When a user hits a threshold of hours played (in a day or consecutive or some such), they get a “Are you a bot” detector, something like ReCaptcha or some proprietary tool. They can even make it a game that earns you some sort of reward, maybe a quiz or something, I don’t know, but something that requires human intuition to answer. Can it be bypassed? I am sure in time, with effort, but at least it is attempting to stop the problem and not just giving up on it.