Like everyone else, I’ve grown weary of bots running wild on the servers, and I’ve seen a lot of suggestions for getting rid of them. One was to employ some sort of Captcha system to verify that you’re an actual player and not a resource-hogging script. An easy-ish way to do this would be to make players answer a simple captcha puzzle (an alphanumerical sequence in jpg form, for example) when they attempt to list items for sale at the shop. Seeing as how the bots whole raison d’etre is to farm and sell goods, preventing them from actually selling anything would be a good way to force whoever is making these things to rethink their strategy. Maybe after so many failed attempts to solve the captcha you get some other more thorough way of determining whether or not you’re human? I mean, so long as the captcha system is fairly unobtrusive (a few quick keystrokes) or immersion-breaking it could be a way to get rid of these damned things! I’m sick of seeing YRRROOO and MM2200202 running around Windsward already. lol.
I think they will put a person to solve any form of captcha.
I mean, it’s possible, but I get the impression that some of these guys are running several bots at a time. I don’t think they’d be able to keep up with each ones’ visits to the store. Anyway, what’s the point of a bot if you have to babysit it? I think very few of these guys do, as we’ve seen with the wall-runners and guys stuck trying to get around the “winter tree” in towns.
No one in their perfect state of mind would use captcha in an online mmorpg.
This is just the most stupid idea I have ever seen.
If you wanna Piss of Players captcha is a good Idea.
Result will be, Same amount of Bots, less Players.
Well come up with a better solution (besides “GMs” which I doubt they have any plan of implementing). Typing in a 4 digit reply to a prompt when you enter the store would really be the straw that broke the camel’s back for you? You probably just spent eighteen hours farming mats for a bloody tuning orb. Three seconds of inconvenience would be the thing that does you in?
2 types of bots:
1 is communist-run countries having a person or two tending many machines running the game to mine, get gold, sell gold, extract currency from target countries into their own hands - this is a form of cyber warfare & is real & is in some way similar to mining blockchain in a way, though far more nefarious because it is shrouded in an in-game economy.
These people will simply enter the captcha while captchas will only piss me, a player, off. A captcha means everyone has to enter it - a sure way to kill the game. SO it is a terrible, terrible idea that is not going to stop them.
2 is the type of players who use bots on their personal accounts. When you see bots at level 60 in a faction or company, they are not just some gold farmer, they are a player AFK’ing to get the “Chores” done automatically that you work hard for while playing. They are the equivilent to aimbots in an FPS; you work hard for your headshots & KDR, someone else downloads theirs. Same thing.
Those players are the ones who are harder to catch because they do play the game when not botting. They will not be affected by a captcha because they will simply just eliminate that part of their automation.
Remember: When you buy gold from illicit means, you are attacking your own currency. It does not matter how much you hate your country, you hurt yourself whenever you buy gold far more than you hurt the people who run your country. You or your kids are who are going to be sent to fight these people or die when it all adds up (all forms of this cyber warfare & other causes, including anti-your-own-country movements of all kinds, which are all run by other countries as well, using your own citizens against your own country), not them or theirs.
They need to ban obvious bots & investigate less obvious bots. When many SOCIALLY-UNCONNECTED players are reporting the same person as a bot, it is not hard to investigate & ban that person. When all the same company or friends-list-connected people are reporting, then it can be harder. They can afford to pay a few people to go in & watch reported players if they have to. It is not hard to ban bots. Even at merely 40 dollars, quickly banning bots AND the players who buy/trade with them will end it quickly.
Especially banning the players who trade with them/receive wealth from them in-game. They are the ones buying the gold. When you ban the user right along with the dealer, quickly & efficiently, making the entire illicit coin-trade useless in your game, it puts an end to it.
If the players will not buy the gold, the botters will not run their farms. If the players are scared they will get caught, they will not buy the gold. Ban the players that buy the gold, BEFORE you ban the confirmed bots being used to gather it in the first place. DO it regularly & do it fiercely - announce it in the global chat every time it happens - “xyz has been banned for buying/farming gold” so that they can not lie to their friends & say “my brother do this” or say they were falsely banned. Problem solved. Happy players, banned bots & gold buyers.
You can say “they will just buy new keys” - does not matter. Eventually, that will not be worth it to them anymore.
Failure to handle these bots causes people to suspect Amazon itself of being in money laundering & cyberwarfare activity, so they really should handle this problem. They already have appear to often practice very questionable politically-driven moderation in the game; this only looks worse, when viewed in that context, even from a neutral or unbiased perspective.
I hate f* tuning orbs bro
just improve security code no need for captchas, wtf
AH is already a pain in the ass and you want to make it worse. To sell my entire warehouse of useless itens I would lose at least 2 - 3 hours due to its awesome design. And yuou want captchas. Nice, Now I’ll spent 5 hours in front of ah. Lmaooo
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