Okay just hear me out. You know those “are you human?” captcha you see in websites?
I think AGS should add a feature not exactly like that but similar, where a player that is reported to be a potential bot needs to do it. To prevent this feature from being abused, the one who is issuing the report should also be made to do the same thing or something similar.
If the suspected bot doesn’t do it within 5 mins it will be forcibly brought back to the menu and a login cooldown starts, let say 4 hours. The only requirement for this to work, however, is for the captcha system to be very good.
One suggestion would be having a global/help message automatically say “I’ve been reported as a bot, and I need people to vouch for me that I’m not within 5 mins” and then the suspected bot needs to reply to other people’s messages properly,
or just chat. If the replies checkout and people are convinced that he’s not a bot, they can click that person’s name to vouch for him or not, and be rewarded 1 umbral shard for participation. After 5 mins the results will then be pooled and if it’s above 50% he’s not kicked out of the game.
OR, the bot will be forced to chat to the one who issued the report, and the issuer needs to determine if he is indeed a bot or not.
If the issuer doesn’t participate within 5 mins, he will face the same consequence as the one he issued a bot report. To prevent the issuer to grief a player one-sidedly, the conversation can be broadcasted to a specific channel so others can see it,
and they can report the griefer.
For me the only way that we can solve the bot problem is to let the community handle it, because I’m sure more than 90% of
the community are more than happy to get rid of the bots so they can just enjoy playing the game.
Sure it’s gonna be a pain to code from a developer’s standpoint but I think solving the bot problem once and for all is worth it.