Hello there I got an idea and I am curious about your opinion.
We know bots are really annoying. Guildless, non-interactive npcs trying act like players.
Banning them is just complicated fight.
But what about some captha system?
Every time randomly between 45-70 minutes captha appears on display. Like some image puzzle with 1 or 2 steps.
When you solve captha you are good and keep play.
When you fail captha it gets more annoying like 3 steps maxed for 10. When you fail captha for last time you just get disconnected and suspended for 1 hour and captha steps reset. After 3rd fail attempt, account is suspended for 24hours. After multiple fails… it could lead to permanent ban without any possibility of refunds.
Some rules:
When captha appears you have like 5 minutes for their solve. You still can get experience, loot, quest credit.
After 5 minutes your experience and loot and quest credit locks and you must solve the captha.
this captha can’t appear in:
Raids
Under PvP event
Dungeons*
*When you solo them, you need to verify by captha.
I think this could help solve some kind of problem especialy when some Farmers using like 300 accouts at the same time. Because each captha is unique generated image. Propably only direction solve
I think its a good idea there two problems with it:
The RPG lovers will tell you that you braking the immersion, which is understandable.
Most important one, blizz dont want to solve the bots problem, if they wanted they could do it in no time.
They dont need captha to see that its a bot, as admins of the server they have all the data to analyze it and see who is botting.
I agree with you.
Every system have some downsides.
I know bots are some source of income for Blizzard. In example when some “company” owns 300 subs at the same time … This is a lot of money.
But why not let them play few hours… And let them spent their money but after some time just disable their ability to trade, AH, mail etc…
For example if you put your phone number to verify Blizzard account you can use trade, mail, AH without restrictions.
Everyone have phone number. And only one unique can be attached in to one account.
Imagine their pain work to attach 300 phone numbers. And these numbers must be supported by legit operators.
Also Blizzard can keep their money as they violated Code of Conduct. Unfornately they propably won’t return. So they lose some monthly profit. But i think bots aren’t the reason why is this game great and alive.
Maybe i think there could be solution. Propably captha can’t be client side but server side. The game displays only data from server which would be protected with some encryption. So bypass would be nearly impossible.
I agree in times of AI, there is hard to make it unbypassable.
I remember my old child times when we make some private servers for metin2. So we used captha systems for protect our server against bots and it worked. But this is long time ago.
But would be challenge to see some tests of these systems. I think Season of Discovery is good place to do it.
I saw on US forum idea about attunment. Was great but downside is… This time gate content for new players especialy in phase 2 i think no one will run BFD.
Bots aren’t able to clear raid but also newcomers too.
Oh yes.
I remember days when GMs were gods. And everyone likes them.
It could be good job for them and they could even work remote.
But idk how is about their salary. But i know in for example Czechia.
We have some average mothly income +/-42000 CZK which is equals to +/- 1700 €.
But in 90% professions this income is irelevant and they work propably for 19000 CZK or 25000 CZK which is 771 € to 1015 € per month.
In Czechia a lot of ppl will take this job even for 800 € / month just for 8hours of work / day for 5 days at week.
Also we must count with some taxes.
35%
So one GM would cost 1080 €/month.
I think this is really cheap compared to salary in US etc…
But question is what they get in return from players which could increase their profit.
Im trying to think Blizzard is company with succesful business model which needs to be alive and make money and i completly understand.
A lot of miss information and “read it on the internet” comments surrounding AI and Captcha here.
Captcha can take many forms and it is not easy to “break” especially in-house developed engines. To date there are a couple of famous examples of Captcha being broken, namely the AI tricking the human on Fiver(I think it was) as part of GPT’s tests. The second was a guy named Adrian Rosebrock who used AI to “learn” an open source versions images.
Again, there may be other examples but this is far from common place and far from things that are easily available to the average Joe.
Most of you might not understand that this WoW client is very old, very accesible and very light when running on modern system hardware. It won’t take you long on google to find the forums that a lot of these bot programs are both discussed and sold. My point being is that the people using these things aren’t required to have any kind of advanced skills or knowledge. Think of it this way, botting old games like WoW is as documented and “easy” as playing them, everything anyone needs is out there simply because it’s old and “solved”. Now, is AI breaking CAPTCHA so easily accessible and documented? No.
Anyway, just highlighting the opinion that CAPTCHA is currently “solved” is way off. A few sensational stories surrounding AI and people put 2 and 2 together having never worked or experienced either.
I work with CAPTCHA pretty much every day with various API’s and am willing to have any kind of discussion around it anyone would like to have. You are wrong if you think it’s easily bypassed by people who buy bot programs and bot paths to run 8 of them on a modern i7.
Yes AI is here and yes AI is here to stay. In the next 5-10 years things are going to change (and have to) massively. Now that people are becoming more aware of that and reading or hearing all kinds of stories they tend to have this notion that everything is now defunct. Well…it’s not.
TLDR; The overwhelming majority of bot users/farmers do not have access to tools powerful enough to just declare CAPTCHA “pointless”
Great, I am currently tanking Lady Blaumeux and watching my stacks — oops, a popup with a captcha … yes, no, no, yes … done … back to game: dead.
No, this won’t work as it will annoy legit players more than bots.
But can this problem be solved by:
No … bots will just enter Dire Maul in a raid instead, and they are off the hook.
I do not need solutions that degrade legitimate player experience and that won’t really last.
Quite frankly, even besides an AI - people who run this shizzle hire watchers for pennies who could very easily enter these captchas all day long. It’s like in that infamous video where there was 100+ clients running and there was some upkeep guy at the counter playing solitaire.
So instead, he’d just do captchas all day long and problem would still not be solved in any way.
I think this word hurt the naive botter (home alone guy letting his PC run overnight) whereas it wouldn’t hurt the industrial botters who can just employ a guy or two to keep solving captchas. It certainly would increase their costs, though.
Instead of popping automatically, it could be bound to reports, so that regular players aren’t affected. It would be really awkward to have it pop every now and then.
It’s kind of easy to see who is a bot anyway. Follows routes / stays in place too much, basic fighting, sometimes broken gear, simple rotation.
Even players can be flagged as bots - in classic anyway, grinding games are designed for bots. But they break several of the above, such as move between zones, out of boredom, doing quests after all, and such.
doesn’t matter what tool to use, they just don’t want to ban bots. It is very simple - more bots - more subs. WoW nowdays is just for milking money, old blizz is gone, new blizz doesn’t love their games, they just love profit
I think this is a ridiculous statement. They most certainly ban bots and a lot.
It’s not some secret Blizzard conspiracy here. You don’t have some bunch of execs sitting in a dim room around a candle-lit table cackling about how they make $$ off bots.
It is as much of a pain in the butthole for them as for us, because last thing they need is their key product have its credibility shot.
It’s just a case of incompetence or not enough competence.
You are just blind fanboy, swallowing whatever they say. Back in the days, before they fired all gamemasters, this could not be possible, bacuse it is not a big deal to ban bots when they are not even hiding.
But paying GM salary is not profitable, either banning thousands of bots
to attach 300 phone numbers. And these numbers must be supported by legit operators.
