Hello, as many of you know the game is full of gathering bots, and despite the “ban waves” we keep hearing about, it just keeps getting worse.
These botters make enough profit in 1 day to buy a new botting account once the ban comes, it makes no difference…
Since Shadowlands launch every time i go gather herbs i see way more bots than players, and i have seen so many that yes, its easy to know the difference ( sharp turns + 180º instant flips, if you folow them, every couple minutes they do the “coordinate dance” when the bot is deciding wich herb or ore to gather).
The market has crossed the path of no return long ago, bots have been alowed for far to many years in the game and the damage is beyond repair.
All this are not news, so why am i making this topic? Because bots have evolved…
Since a few days ago some of the bots are programmed to instantly stealth if targeted, this way they are never reported. I have folowed them and they keep doing it, every single time i target them. So if the report system is now starting not to be an option, and since Blizzard does not accept reports through tickets… Then what will they do about it? Nothing as usual?
Imagine the damage this bots will keep doing to the servers economy, especialy the 40 man multiboxing bots, not just a multiboxer, but a multiboxing bot, i see so many of these still and now multiboxing is not even alowed, imagine both multiboxing and botting at the same time… Its ruinning the economy of the game and Blizzard doesnt care.
I have indeed sent a ticket report of a botting multiboxer recently, since the same guy has been farming the exact same zone for 1 week with god knows how many accounts are stacked there, and each of them from a different server… saying i have screenshots proving it, i can even film them if needed, proof is so easy to get… and the response i get form Blizzard is " Use the ingame report system " , but they now stealth upon targeted! Blizzard has to at least do something when undeniable proof is presented to them right? Maybe not it seems…
Maybe writing this was a stupid idea, it wont make a difference, and i am ready to read comments from the actual bot users denying all of this as usual…
Well all i have to say to the Bot user readers who dare to comment is… Shame on you… Shame on you for ruining sush a beautifull game.
Thank you for those who had the patience to read this far and have the same concerns.
What if… Instead of just clicking a node for gathering the herb/ore/whatever, you were thrown into a mini-game that a bot can only hardly manage to do correctly.
Then, in exchange for the increased difficulty, that if you succeed in the mini-game, the node would reward you with more ressources than usual ?
That would be great! Like one of those fast progress bars where you just have to hit space once it hits a certain colour. That alone would make botting significantly harder ^^
The bot would have a significant advantage in that if trained properly.
Yea, I was more thinking about something like “click the herb/ore”, in a picture that is almost indecipherable by any kind of AI.
For example, spot the dog here:
An AI can easily spot that if it is properly trained. Neural networks have come a long way.
Not really.
You could just add some noise, invisible to the human eye, and make the AI believe all these dogs and cookies are in fact rocket riding camels.
You could also just add one well placed pixel, very visible to the human eye, and obtain the same result.
It would be kind of fun, in fact, to have an AI that produce images that cannot be classified by an AI. Look up for adversarial machine learning, basically.
Multiboxing IS allowed, bots certainly aren’t allowed!
If you train an agent with images that have noise, then it will learn to detect those images as well.
For example, if a reinforcement learning technique is used, it can learn from experience to detect adversarial machine learning.
Reinforcement learning is very interesting. It is mostly applied to games to display how it works and the results are very interesting. I’ll be implementing one soon as well in my course.
I doubt you can train an AI to handle any kind of noise. Maybe you’ll train it to decipher my rocket riding camels, but certainly not my cat shooting rats.
Reinforcement learning is nice, but… How do you really want to apply it in that context ? You can go into technical details, I have a PhD in machine learning.
Besides, you must keep in mind that the issue is not exactly if an AI could do it or not, the real question is : can an AI be trained in an amount of time short enough to be useful in that context ?
There’s a good paper that goes into the details of how reinforcement learning can be used to combat adversarial attacks.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332081573_Adversarial_attack_and_defense_in_reinforcement_learning-from_AI_security_view/link/5c9e5aa192851cf0aea0b145/download
That’s a very interesting area. What did you work on for your PhD?
That’s a valid question. It would all depend on the problem at hand and what the context would be.
Semi-supervised learning in the context of spectral graph theory and powerlaw distributed data, basically.
you can laugh but there are games that do exactly that
All of those dogs are called Spot ?
In Ryzom, when gathering resources, you need to not only harvest, but ‘heal’ the node as well, if you don’t heal it the node explodes and kills you.
Would love to see something like this introduced, it would make it worth while just watching them.
In fact, if we want to get rid of gatherers who multibox using command broadcasting, all we need to do is create a different instance of a mini-game, when clicking on a node, in a such way that resolution of each mini-game require different commands. This is enough to make broadcasting useless.
Regarding bots… Not sure how many bots really use complex AI to do the job. But designing a bot-proofed mini-game could be really challenging.
I guess its time to add recaptcha to each and every node.
Select all warlocks.
you mean everytime you gather something you need to solve a puzzle captcha like click in all red traffic lights 
Would probably work to help stop ‘most’ of them… but I’m completely against it. I do not want to be messing about with a minigame every time I want to gather a node. It slows them down but it will slow us down too.
But if you get rewarded for the extra trouble, it would be the same to you, you would be getting the same herbs per hour
While still technically just as profitable on paper, it would make farming a lot less pleasant to do.
I like the mindlessness of gathering. Move, spot, right click, move, spot, right click… So relaxing. Almost like meditation. Makes it the perfect activity to do while watching a TV series or a YouTube video.
By introducing such systems, gathering would require a lot more thought and effort which would make gathering too unpleasant and boring for me to do.
I’m not seeing that many bots to warrant killing off gathering for me. Just investigate bot reports quicker and we can get rid of them before they can cause any harm, without punishing fair players.