There would have to be continous tuning to find a design that adress both needs; boxer-friendly while botter deterrent. There would be quite a bit of learning after launch. I think a key element is that it has to be done without logging out, it could be as simple as opening a browser from ingame (functionality already in place), and do the pictures captcha we sometimes get (functionality already in place). Then trim arround with the time frames, to develop a practical model. It is important that it is flexible, because behavior will change. For example, a scenario could be imagined with the 4 hour window that was running for 6 months, and if botting perception changed significantly, it could move to 6 hours, and see if it still is enough to deter boxing.
Yay, lets add more ways to grief people. I can think of many ways you could grief people with this. (I don't want to input a captcha to play a game I'm paying for - so it starts with a grief point to begin with). I do think something should be done. I'm as against these programs as I think many are. But I think this is a poor idea to solve it. Beyond actual GM investigation and a serious ban-hammer I cannot think of a good solution though.
Requiring any sort of input really just isn't a feasible idea. As was said by another, the required input will just end up being automated for those the solution is supposed to target, and the non-automated, real players will suffer for it. There are also plenty of players with disabilities to consider for this type of thing. Just taking the captcha example, I'm sure many players have been in intensive fights lasting longer than 2-3 minutes. I know I have. I can just imagine a knight spamming buttons trying to both stay alive and keep aggro as they tank a large amount of mobs and then receiving a request to solve a captcha. One way or another, it wouldn't go down well. Those would be the times where you would see people abusing the feature as well, targeting individuals in those scenarios. The other problem with captchas is that algorithmic solutions have become much better at solving them than humans. That's why, in addition to user-friendliness, Google moved in the direction of measuring indicators of bot activity rather than requesting input to solve a captcha. They reduced input from captchas to "no captcha" i.e. the "I'm not a robot" button which would provide a challenge only if it wasn't sure enough that it was a human and then even further to simply calculating a score for bot activity with reCAPTCHA v3 that the developer could handle as they see fit. Even if a solution is decided upon that requires user input and either doesn't require an immediate response and/or can't be solved easily through automation, those using automation could easily set up a counter solution where they receive alerts to notify them to remote into or go to their computer to provide the necessary input. Sure, you may catch some of them, but in the end, you're more likely to negatively affect honest players.
I think that would be the optimal solution too, I just hope that DPG someday wakes up, and start enforcing it... Maybe they could "upgrade" guides, to be able to help out with the investigation and proof-gathering part, and leave the banhammer-decision to actual GMs. Another way, could be to make the problem so visible that DPG HAVE to do something: One player with a youtube account(or a streamer) goes around an record the botters, and everyone else gives him so many views, that it would either ruin everquests reputation online forever, or serve as a viral warning to botters(depending on what DPG-does about it). We just have to also record and publicize the actual bannings, when they happen(the bannings would give the good kind of advertising that EQ needs). When a company "sweeps a problem under the rug", you remove the rug, and force them to visibly address the problem...
How about they issue guides with the ability to silently give you a special clockwork-illusion in your buff/song window, that has a 12 hour counter but a permanent duration. it has the flavor text : "The banhammer is hungry for bots, maybe you should stop looking like one!" The guide will /report the player, to inform the gm about the suspected botter and its /location. The Illusion should be made mount-compatible(it doesn't have to look pretty), and should give no emote warning that can be handled by a bot script(it only alters your appearance and sound effects). When there is only 2 hours left you get a big flashing target circle(like the one from the skyfire drakes in RoS). Once per day a GM enters the game, and bans everyone that hasn't clicked the illusion away within 12 hours. (I assume he can inspect the buffs, and confirm the counter has expired) Bonus point, if the GM wields a gigantic hammer...
Thats why they would be given enough time to answer it. keep it up in the corner of the screen for 10 minutes 15 minutes or 20 minutes. So there is no worry that while fighting you would have to answer the captcha puzzle. You definitely need to give folks time to respond. As for those with disabilities they are playing eq if they can manage that I think they can manage a captcha. The problem with monitoring activity is that I think it would increase server load substantially if being done for every toon logged in. I could be wrong on that though. Good idea and maybe something like that can work though.
I guess you missed the part where I ask for suggestions to make it less of a griefing tool And I did suggest it could be a GM only tool.
DMs are supposedly to be a kind of Judge Dreed. Instant justice, no appeal. If you can find DMs that are perfect Judges like Sly, then it might work. But in the real world I am pesimistic. There are plenty of comoditized technology options, that only require that the user experience is well thought through, that can nudge large parts of the population away from botting. And DPG is a technology company, and used to continously nudge its playerbase, adjusting the user experience. It is from my chair evident why a technology option that nudges the playerbase towards better behaviour, smartly and patiently, is a better solution than lone rangers that bring swift justice to town... But that might be a cultural difference. /ducks If one policing solution feels “meh”, and only have incremental long term effects, and another is swift, immediate, and irreversible, then you should always go for “meh”. Systemic “meh” -solutions will, added up, and over time, erradicate many orders of magnitude more unwanted behavior, than the archetypical Clint Eastwood character... You got to bore the badies away, tediuosness is mightier than the sword...
I guess my only fear on purely technological intervention is past experience. My memory may be off but didn't Sony try automating bans or suspensions of some sort that cause a lot of false positives? Maybe things could be done better now though? False positives would be less of an issue with a captcha though. Irritating yes but workable. Since the dividing line seems to be afk or not not whether you are using software I am not sure how a purely technological option can differentiate between the two. I guess using a captcha that is activated automatically might work. I just think that based on how Daybreak handles things now the thing that has to be determined is whether someone is at the keyboard even if they are rarely hitting keys. It would be easier to detect automated game play but the actual thing that has to be detected is whether someone is at the keyboard or not.
Do they? Since they started using them I see far less spam ads from ad bots in forums I use other then daybreak. *shrugs* If they are easily circumvented I am not sure what the answer would be. Whatever it is I doubt it can be labor intensive for Daybreak as I don't see them putting a lot of GM hours into it.
That's the thing though. As I mentioned above, they're moving away from using them because it doesn't solve the problem. Take this very site, they're using reCAPTCHA v2 (they should upgrade). It just has a "I'm not a robot" button. Go to a site like Dropbox, and there's nothing at all aside from a message saying it's using reCAPTCHA (i.e. v3): All you'd be doing at that point is annoying honest players. Those running automation would never have to deal with it. It'd pop up, be solved (they could even put in a delay so it's not instant), and they'd continue as if nothing happened. They already have solutions to do Overseer for them and play their characters for them. You think a puzzle is going to do anything except hold them up for a little bit while they implement a solution? Unless you have unlimited resources to combat this type of thing, you're playing a losing game. The development team is paid to work a number of hours. They're a limited resource. Those fighting against them do so for fun and can take all the time they want. If you use an existing captcha solution, they can probably do a search and find a solution. There are browser extensions to solve captchas for you. If they decide to use a custom solution, it'll probably be weaker, as they'll have less time to spend on it, and that just means it'll be easier to solve for automation. It'll probably take multiple months for the development team to get it into the game between finding/building a solution, implementation, UI work, and testing it, and in the end, you've wasted a developer resource and only made it more complicated for normal players to enjoy the game. No, not really. The first thing that comes to mind is that there are people with vision problems, both poor eyesight and color blindness. People are constantly struggling with the in-game font size as it is. Here's an example regarding captcha readability straight from this forum: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/dont-know-where-else.250627/ Remember people blowing up over the Comic Sans font change on April Fools' Day? Just wait and see when they have to read captchas in game... https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/changing-font-type.248362/ https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...s-the-fool-with-the-silly-font-change.248371/ And here's a bunch of complaints on this forum regarding the login captcha: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/captcha.266622/ https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/that-ignorant-recaptcha-crap.247357/ https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/crazy.252441/ https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/your-capcha-program-sucks-hind-side.250567/ https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...op-of-changing-passwords.250335/#post-3685500 https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/your-capcha-program-sucks-hind-side.250567/ It's just not a good idea.
Exactly. @Corwyhn Captcha? Really? The most annoying thing on the internet ? /facepalm Yes, it can be skipped by bots. And you really want to have some stuff popping up in the middle of your screen because random_annoying_guy_or gal_0038 decided for whatever reason to target you and /captcha ? In the end, with that kind of crap system, you'll p*ss off legit user, and make botters laugh. So back to square one ... but with some new poopy icing on the cake.
A captcha by itself is not what is preventing bot activity on websites. The technology being used nowadays takes into account other factors. That's why, as I mentioned with reCAPTCHA v3, they don't even show a captcha anymore. They're calculating a score as to whether the connection is being made by a bot or not.
If it would have stopped buffs I would have been fine with stuff popping up on my screen. But we talked about it. Folks pointed out it won't stop things. And I am done. *shrugs* I just figured since daybreak got into catpcha rather late in the game that it must work. My apologies if I offended you.
No offense at all hehe . I do agree, something needs to be done against the bots, but not captch, please , not the captcha What about? ...
If banning is not the goal, then there is a lot of room for semi-automation of bot-boringification, and developing the approach and user experience. I do believe it is as you say: automation is not the key issue, unattended gameplay is. I don’t buy in to the argument that it can be circumvented, “because all captcha is circumventable”. Most technology has some kind of vulnerability, but technology is not vulnerable for everybody. Just make it a larger hazzle to circumvent the barriers than the circumventers can be bothered/afford in the long run. I wold assume that Captcha is a service they buy, and that there are options to vary it very easily, so that the speed of changing captcha is faster than the few devs really wanting to bot. I work with a lot of devs; if they are hard core enough to circumvent captcha, they are very good, is my somewhat educated guess. People of that caliber can earn quite a bit more developing than botting EQ, I suspect, and for sure they would grow utterly tired should they continously adapt to this week’s flavor of captcha. Devs are not without ego (understatement), don’t provoke them, instead just make them do boring repetitive tasks, and they will leave quite fast . Just to be clear: at my workplace we try to do everything we can to do the opposite; we try to make the tasks varied, and interresting, and meaningful! even doing that, and more, retention is no walk in the park. Also I note that you said it should not be fully automated; completely agreed. Let us say that there are two levels of captcha-request, one just on autopilot, for example once every 6 hours played, within a 1 hour window, the other with the same frequency, but spread out, so that each hour, one toon needs attention. Deciding which groups do what could be DMs discretion. No need for proof, because the consequence is minimal, yet an effective deterrent... There is a fair chance this would be embraced by the automation community, because it would change their risk profile, for when they are using tools attended. This could further nudge people away from botting. Think of Automaters differently than Botters, and include Automaters in the culture and community. Soon botters will be without coders to maintain the bot-exclusive codebase. I believe it is called the long game in english. Basic strategy.
There is already a very good solution in game already. But the GM's have to investigate. If said mini raid/ group has been sitting in one spot, for weeks on end, chain pulling and warping. The GM can make them go away. It's up to us to report. It's up to the GM's to do something about it.
Every time eqgame.exe is updated, the Macaroni program has to be updated. I don't know what all has to change to make it a hassle, but if you wanted to actually make it difficult for that program to be used, the EQ devs could start there. If they can make small changes, even automated every day, to the eqgame.exe, you could annoy the Macaroni devs enough to possibly hinder the program. Make a patch every 24 hours to offset the code. It would "annoy" the playerbase ever so slightly to have to patch every day, but would make life more difficult for the devs of the cheat program. That is your solution to getting rid of the program. When the patch launches on Test server a week early, there is already mostly the fix programmed for when the patch goes live. That is why immediately after patch you see very few bot armies and a few hours after launch and servers going live is when you see them all log in.. they're all waiting for the update to the program.
