I feel like using that quote from Die Hard about knowing how many of the bad guys are in there before we can start celebrating.
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Then let the disease run rampant and eventually kill the host? Sounds like a great plan! Oh wait, that’s exactly what’s happening.
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I would literally rather play every single game against a bot than have to do captcha as part of the Hearthstone experience
well give this game about another year and this’ll be Hearthstone. A bot filled “game” with only the whales and fanbois keeping it afloat.
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Don’t act as if captcha is the only solution for bots. And definitely don’t act as if captcha is a solution for anything whatsoever.
I never said it’s the only option
and don’t act like it’s not an option.
I couldn’t care less if Activision fixes the bot problem or not. I hope they never fix the issue. The more they do little about it, the more players will be driven away and eventually, this game will fade into the void of forgotten games.
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If not a captcha, what about using the authenticator to verify players as human? Need it to log onto your account (at least everyone should have one lol). So before each match, authenticate that you’re human.
How about NO EXTRA STEPS before each match. I’m not going to authenticate five times an hour.
How about if this instead: a new Battle.net account costs $1 USD, and when they ban a bot account they also ban the credit card number
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That’s an awesome way to drive players away and keep new players from playing. Excellent idea! I think you got the company confused; this is (well was) Activision not Electronic Arts.
As much as I liked the authenticator, they made it linked to upgrading the backpack in wow which was the scummiest move they could have done.
After years of promising players they were going to give people the backpack upgrade…they then gate it behind the authenticator AND TFA.
The real problem isn’t HOW they address the bot problem, is that they don’t have the will to act. Just like in wow, the company enjoys whatever amount of money they are getting from botters. And until the hit in the wallet is greater than the money they are getting from the botters, they won’t take real action.
Along with “oh wow, we took 300000 bots out of the game” which might mean something if we knew how many bots were in the game. I posted this elsewhere, but based on the amount of bots people are encountering (not the actiblizz bots), it’s clear that’s a drop in the bucket.
The fact that everything about how the issue is so opaque shows both they aren’t being upfront about the issue AND they aren’t (or won’t) taking the issue seriously.
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Realistically speaking, if you make every game annoying (by adding captcha or whatnot) then you don’t have a game because all the players leave, and if you make a game 100% free to play then it will be plagued by bots and there’s no way around that. It correct that adding a $1 charge would drive away all of the F2P purists but that’s actually a good thing because they weren’t going to ever spend any money anyway, good riddance.
I don’t want a free to play game. Because I don’t want the bots that come with that. Cheap to play is cool though.
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More importantly, at what phase in their life cycle were they removed? If the botter already sold the account off, and the buyer already did the Arena run with the deck that was farmed with the gold, who cares if it was deleted? It was already used up and discarded.
It’d be like an exterminator only taking credit for killing pests after the pests have already had the opportunity to reproduce. You’re never going to put any real dent in the pest population that way.
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But they still advertise it as such. I’ve argued that it’s moved away from that, and has for some time now. While it’s not entirely related to this, even paid games had bots (wow was an example of this) I think adding more paywalls isn’t the answer.
This, or taking credit for a bunch of dead bugs they found while checking for the nest.
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It’s definitely not the entire answer. It’s still necessary to take additional strong anti-botting measures. But without some kind of paywall I don’t think any victory over botting is even possible. If the cost to create a bot is literally free, then it doesn’t matter how many bot accounts are banned, the regen rate is for all practical purposes infinite. With no paywall you could literally ban every single bot on the entire server and they’d be back tomorrow. Ban numbers mean nothing.
Even if the creation is free, the labor/maintaince factor is a consideration.
Even a trillion free bots need to be generated if they are banned. That costs time, money, and resources in the real world. Like any server/computer farm. Plus all the resources gained from those accounts are lost.
Forcing those operations to start from scratch enough times will make them shut down.
Hitting them in the wallet is an effective solution, but actiblizz is most likely enjoying some money from the transactions (based on how the wow botting incident went down, complete with forced labor).
Idk. I kinda assume forced labor or something similarly nefarious when it comes to botting operations. I don’t think the people at the top of botting organizations assign a lot of value to the time of their “interns” (I’m trying to keep my words within the code of conduct here)
Let’s just say I think an additional $1 charge would represent a more than doubling of their costs