Quiz. How do people easily recognize bots?

Community Discussion
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Quiz. How do people easily recognize bots?

On the other hand, in the case of AI technology, it is not easy to recognize. Bots should be harder to spot, isn’t that strange?

Because it’s Hearthstone’s mechanics.

It is easy to recognize because 1 mana, 2 mana, 3 mana, and 4 mana are the same. Try an experiment. If you deliberately create the same situation (especially if you lose, before),
it will happen again.

The opponent has the corresponding card in their hand, or if they do not have the corresponding card, they receive the corresponding card through draw.

bots are not the problem. Victory and defeat are not the problem.
Paradoxically, as bots become rampant, problems with Hearthstone’s mechanics become more prominent due to bots.
The way the (best) correct answer is determined also makes it easier to spot bots.

Blizz can’t fix a balanced system. So, instead Can create a card that neutralizes bots?

I don’t think that simply catching bots will solve the bot problem.

Instead, people will act like bots.

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Only if the AI was trained to act like a human, which is not the case.
Bots, at least the current ones, are just trained to play the game, not to simulate a human playing the game.

The first few steps to recognize a bot start even before the opponent started playing :
-the username
-the hero skin
-the deck and cards they use (ok this one they started playing but the decklist has been made before the game started)

Bots will often have a generic username (or on the opposite spectrum, they have nonsensical names), a default hero skin, and a lot of core cards in their deck. Having the 3 does not mean you 100% face a bot, but that’s already suspicious

On the playstyle, they either play extremely fast, or have the exact same delay between each of their actions.
One good way to spot a bot is waiting a bit before ending your turn (making sure all actions have fully resolved) and check how fast they play once you click the end of turn button. Of course some actual players will play fast once their turn begins, but bots are extremely consistent. They play their card frame 1 when their turn starts.
The last thing you can notice is the way they surrender. Of course their algorithm can change, but last bots I encountered all had the same behavior : they won’t concede if you don’t have lethal on board, even if it would be obvious for a real player that you’ve won. And when they conceded, it was always at the beginning of your turn (maybe to allow end of turn or start of turn effects to kill you)

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The unimportant parts.
Bots these days are Fast.
And the frustration doesn’t come from the user name or hero skin.

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You asked how we recognize bots
These are part of how
I explicitely explained myself that these are the lesser important elements that you can’t only rely on but that have their relevancy when cumulated

There’s also all the other elements that I provided…

I don’t understand what you ask when you reply like that to the answer of your question

This wasn’t part of the question

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The word ‘quiz’ is like a metaphor.
And even the quiz doesn’t ask how to find bots.
I talked about something more essential.
Source of annoying. why? Important things. Why it is not resolved.

I think, u are talking about a lot of trivial things.
That’s not what I consider important.
If you have your own opinion (or argument) you want to assert, you can write your own new post.
Why do come and cling to me?

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That’s not what that means
Even if it was metaphoric, a metaphore is just a parallel imagery of something else
If a quiz is a metaphore, what it’s parallel to should ressemble some sort of question

:thinking:

Quiz. How do people easily recognize bots?

:thinking: :thinking:

I’m just a user that saw an open question and tried to answer.
Apparently the question is not open, or doesn’t want an answer.

If you don’t want users to answer your question, why do you even ask ?
What is the meaning of this thread opened and titled with a question if that question is to be ignored ?
Since you want to people not to answer you and ignore what you wrotte that’s what I’ll do next

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This has nothing to do with it. Bots aren’t cheating, or manipulating the draw.

It’s the other stuff stated. Most obvious is playing with odd, core cards. The name. Never pausing or searching through their cards to figure out what’s next. A few of them last fall also got bogged down if there were too many minions on board and would run out of time halfway through their moves.

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is my view on bots: I think the biggest problem is that it accelerates the practice of forcing correct answers. It seems like some people want to make it sound like bots are annoying because they’re easy. Well, I don’t think so. tired. Bots are tired because of their patterns, but they are more tired because they cannot tolerate mistakes or orher idea. The matching system also brings in bots. If you create your own new deck, you’ll have about two games of fun playing it. However, after completing 2 games (especially if you won one-sidedly), you will encounter bots and need to create a tier deck. In this case, you cannot win on deck power. Hearthstone is a some paid game, so that part is understandable. In the end, users create tier decks, and users also become like bots and act like bots. What adds to the fatigue is that the same build and the same combo are repeated + encountering bots when losing consecutively + no mistakes allowed + having to play a certain way = users also increasingly act like bots.

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I’ve noticed from my Wild ladder experiences in the last 2 days that bots are incapable of handling the Whizbang “Gifts” cards (e.g. Malfurion’s Gift; Jaina’s Gift etc.).
If a bot has one in hand on turn 1, they’ll play it and lose the temporary card. I even faced a druid bot who did Malfurion Gift, Innervate and Coin on turn 1 but still never cast the temporary card :man_shrugging:

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This is a public forum. Did you expect NO ONE to have a rebuttal to your claims? I suggest not posting if you wish for silence here… on a FORUM…

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I think that’s just you with RTX 2080, mate. Every bot I fight ropes harder than an MLP fanboy after being told a noose is a portal to Equestria. Those Japanese named bots might be faster but the Engrish Alphabet soups still take upwards of 15-20 minutes

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It’s refreshing to see someone discuss the topic, without parroting the same misleading garbage leading to thinking that every opponent must be a bot. I agree with a lot of this, though some differences…

Username:
Do you remember some years back when we would see “Unknown” come up as the opponent’s name a lot? It didn’t help that when Blizzard was briefly inserting their own bots to address the queue time problem, but that’s how the names for those bots were formatted. I’d wager that’s where the generic names like (not sure if this is a real example) JadeDragon are coming from, now. It’s just a mask for that older bug. I’ve seen players running meta decks with names like that, those are more likely to be humans, given how the card collections for the bots are usually produced.

Hero Skin:
Not everybody cares about skins (I generally don’t) enough to swap them out, and the same is true for card backs. A lot of players stick with the defaults. And I’ve been against players I think you and I would agree are bots that did swap their skins.

Deck:
You’re not wrong here, but I’d be careful what decklists to assume are bots.

There is one new decklist I’ve seen playing Wild this month (and is probably in Standard too), where it’s the identical neutral-only cards coming out, independent of which class, and following an obvious script. Those must be bots; too many of them. But, I would caution against generically applying that to anybody in a Core deck; that’s all new players have to work with.

Occasionally, I bump into someone playing an OTK deck; the opponents running out of time to do their combo (or just barely get it off before the rope is gone) are definitely human. The ones still going several seconds after the rope hits the end are clearly bots; no human can play that many cards that fast because of the way the animations blocking targets, stops to pick a card/target, necessary finger/mouse movements, etc. slow all that down.

Last week’s Tavern Brawl, where Blizzard still hasn’t patched around the 0 mana Soulfire deck code was a prime target to send a bot in to exploit. But even then, a solid chunk of those were probably humans too.

Play speed:
Frame 1 is a strong hint when it’s a combo/OTK opponent. I’m not sure I’d agree outside of that scenario.

Players experienced in TCG/CCG games plan their plays several turns out, slowing down only to decide how to mitigate the bomb their opponent just dropped.

Most bots I’ve seen take forever to make their plays because they’re reevaluating from scratch every turn. Unfortunately, this can also be seen from inexperienced players. Humans do know where the “End Turn” button is though, and are generally quicker to hit it.

Many bots will rope out if they don’t have a play, or even after they’ve made the play. Others will wait for the rope, then start executing their play, to avoid the rope at the start of their next turn. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Bots don’t concede. Ever. The goal here is to get the human to decide they either don’t have time for the long turns or decide the bot isn’t worth their time to play against and be the one to concede as early in the match as possible.

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Both the title you chose for this thread, and your first sentence, are a question.

Of course, people are going to give you their opinion. That’s the point of asking a question. I’m sorry if you feel upset by this response, however it was well-intentioned.

I’m assuming English isn’t your first language, and I will give you a little slack here, though. With that in mind, I’m rereading, and I think I follow what you are trying to suggest. A lot of this does play into what one would need to consider when designing a bot for this (or any) game. But, there are some flaws.

I’m not sure where you were going here, but yes and no to this. Teaching an AI to play a game is easy. Just feed it the rules. Teaching an AI to play like a human is a much higher order of difficulty.

It is not impossible. IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer managed a win against world champion Chessmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. Its successor, Watson, became a Jeopardy champion in 2011. The point is, that’s the scale of computing power necessary to accomplish those wins, and it’s still well beyond the capabilities of a game farming operation.

As for the rest of it, I agree. Understanding the game mechanics is part of the calculus to determine if a player is a bot. Again, so is understanding how humans make use of those mechanics, which is far more complicated than I think you’re accounting for here.

I’m starting to wonder if I’m talking to a chat bot right now. :rofl:

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This is incorrect, and I’m guessing you play mostly on your phone. The mobile experience and desktop experience are different. You are able to queue up more actions without necessarily being interrupted by animations when playing on desktop, and it will sometimes look to the opponent that you are going over the turn timer limit because of animations that were queued within the time limit

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Nope. PC mostly. Tablet with a stylus, if I’m traveling (which is actually easier IMO).

If there is a way to turn off the stupid, completely unnecessary, animations I have not found it in 10 years of playing.

If it were one, maybe two things after the timer ran out, maybe I’d believe that.
Sitting there for a solid 2 minutes, after the timer ran out, while my opponent cycles through the deck, not so much. It’s a bot.

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It is not. Bots do not play otk decks or have any abilities to ignore turn timers

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I’m not discounting the possibility, but what were your indications that the player was a bot? (Also, hilarious if true. I’ll have to keep an eye out for it.)

The play you described could have been somebody desperate/dumb enough to try for a turn 1 Wild Growth and got stuck with one of the 3 drops instead.

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I never said they were ignoring turn-timers. You said it yourself, it’s possible to queue up enough plays that could collectively take longer to process than the timer allows.

And yes, that’s how you tell the bots from humans when your opponent is playing any combo deck. Human opponents will either flub, or just barely get it off in time and rush to make that lethal hit as soon as they have it.
Bots keep going until they run out of cards, and in doing so queue up enough cards that you might as well get up to have a pee while you wait for it to finish processing.

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I just seriously don’t think bots play combo decks when they can play aggro decks that are way easier to program

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Are they though?
Playing in a fish bowl is WAY easier than factoring for an opponent and, consequently easier to program a bot to do the same.
(Not that this isn’t giving the majority of bots too much credit.)

Have you ever noticed how when there’s an OTK or other combo deck in Tier 1 it seems like EVERY opponent is playing it? (Sn1p-Sn4p was a prime example.) Yeah. A lot of those are bots.