Have a random captcha that occurs for some people at the beginning of games. If you fail this captcha, your account is suspended for 6 months without any appeal. I use suspension over ban to offset the potential risk of innocent people losing accounts over simply doing the captcha wrong.
Suspended for 6 months because of a failed captcha? That is not a good idea.
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Do yourself a favor and study the history of Captcha.
It never worked in the first place, and has only gotten LESS relevant with the advent of AI - which, by the way, is now on at least the third iterative generation; this is particularly relevant because AI was being trained on Captcha back in 1st gen, and assisting with its enforcement and creation of it in the 2nd.
We’re now at the point where AI programs can unilaterally modify their own code, params, and perms, to extend their life cycle. We’re WELL beyond Captcha being a useful deterrent.
Yet many sites still use them. Do yourself a favor and study the difference between assuming and actual trial and error. My point is there are things that could be done to authenticate someone: link a phone number to an account (burner numbers wont work), have an authenticator app, require a credit card and a monthly fee. I have played 90 percent bots in the past week on this game. If I wanted to play a computer, I’d play pacman.
Edit: The current state of bots in hearthstone is only getting worse and is going to be the downfall of this game for sure. We need something to happen before everyone uninstalls this game and grows tired of the lame red hovering of charachter portraits, names like SleepyTurtle and RedRaven, super long plays of coining out a loothorder. Been playing this game since 2014 and it saddens me to think that bots are now acceptable in a game that once was all about the human interaction.
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Yes, and many critical infrastructure companies still use Windows XP as well. Hospitals, banks, law enforcement. Hell, just look at the recent Crowdstrike fiasco - a single unhandled null reference exception brought thousands of businesses down worldwide for DAYS. Security has never been about what “works.” It’s always been about “reasonable deterrence.” You don’t lock your car doors and home windows because it “prevents break-ins.” You do it because it makes it just inconvenient enough to deter your garden variety criminal wannabe’s.
Captcha’s never done that to any degree of effectiveness. Bots have been circumnavigating Catcha with around 85 to 90% accuracy (depending on the study, captcha type, and bot/ai software used) since at least 2014:
https://merchantriskcouncil.org/learning/resource-center/member-news/blog/2024/paypal-captcha-evolution-and-effectiveness
It was never intended to be the ONLY way to solve the problem, yet many sites and companies rely SOLELY on it, hence the reason why you’re facing “90 percent bots in the past week.”
Implementing it now will only frustrate the end user (“barcoders still plague arena yet now I have to click on every space with sidewalks just to log in”). It will do literally nothing else, because the root problem isn’t easy to fix.
If it were easy to fix, Captcha would have fixed it circa the mid 90’s when it was invented.
Solutions, yes. Implementations, no.
The best possible solution is to engage in a worldwide player boycott of Blizzard products. At the very least, no HS whatsoever but I’d argue it should be company wide. No Diablo, no WoW, no CoD, even break out into some Microsoft products (it was, after all, Microsoft who sub-conned their security updates to Crowdstrike in the first place). Make it more expensive to ignore the problem than it is to fix it. They’re a for profit company - you’re never going to “propose” your way out of that. It has to be profit-based. It comes down to $.
That solution will NEVER happen though.
A somewhat more reasonable pseudo-solution would be on the micro level: stop caring so much.
Literally, find something else to play.
The problem will still exist, but it won’t be affecting you because you’re not engaging in the games that have those problems.
“Head in the sand” doesn’t work for important stuff, like food or water, but it DOES become incredibly effective on amenities. If you don’t NEED this game, stop SUBJECTING yourself to it.
Short answer is we don’t.
Turing tests, such as Captcha, haven’t worked for that in decades. And we haven’t even gotten to the Singularity yet. We’re VERY close to a Bladerunner-esque dystopia. (Or Terminator, take your pick).
I was going to comment further but it seems you’ve deleted your post in the time it’s taken me to type this out. I’ll end by saying I don’t have any hard feelings here. But, all the same, Captcha is NOT the answer for this.
It’s not. Just beat the bots and move on from those ranks to play humans
If you can’t, well, then you’re no different than one.
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I’m in legend. I’m punished for playing good.
What? There are no bots in legend
There are for me. Sleepy Turtle and PurplePossum say hi.
Legend simply means you won more than you lost on your way up TO legend.
It has no bearing on skill or even cards played, necessarily.
Did they use the standard bot decks with bad minions? Or meta decks?
Meta…mostly druid for me
So how can you be sure those are bots?
Shouldn’t be possible, in standard
Maybe there’s a small probability, but I doubt it
Bots use the names you automatically get if you don’t choose your own name. I’m playing against a few such names even in high legend, but they’re far from bots, lol
You can always tell a bot is a bot by the way they move and hover over character portraits as if the algorithm says to keep the cursor idle over me on my turn.
playing since 2014…trust me you can tell and it isnt always the name that gives it away
Says the guy who thinks Captcha would stop them.
Look, at this point you’re just being stubborn and I’m getting way too invested in some rando’s incorrect opinion. Have a great day, sir.
Well, if you’re right, you won’t play them next month, since you’ll be starting the ladder with 10 stars
Even if a few of them made it to legend due to some small probability of playing each other too many times, and get 10 stars, there’s still many more humans with 10 stars to get matched with
I never said it would stop them. A deterrent as the other guy mentioned would be effective solution as well. Reduce if you cant remove. Skip the ad hominem and offer me a counter solution.
If you are playing bots at any rank it’s because you are equally skilled to that bot because match is by mmr now.
That said, you can’t pick out a bot by the name alone.
I haven’t seen a single bot in standard or wild since the change in match making.
Dude, I’ve won over 14 games in a row today and am still playing bots. You can easily tell a bot right away because they always hover over my character portrait highlighting it red on my turn.