[UI] Anti-bot attention check

I knew that there were a ton of bots running on DO, but until recently, I didn't know just how many that was. I've heard estimates of up to 80%. I know that in the past, BP has banned users who used bots, but I haven't heard anything about that for 5 years. BP claims to be "working hard" to get rid of these botters, but in the meantime, I have an idea.

An attention check. As I understand it, usually an external program runs DO while the user does something else, like play a different game or even something completely unrelated such as washing dishes etc. Since the user is not usually watching the screen while the bot runs (that would squish the entire purpose of a bot), that means that there is very little to no interaction with the DO game page from the user. So my idea is something along the lines of:

• If there is no direct user interaction on the DO play page withing say, 5 minutes (pressing key, clicking mouse etc), then an alert pops up and asks the user to answer a question.
• If the user answers the question incorrectly multiple times or doesn't answer the question within a time limit, the system automatically logs them out.
• This would only apply when the system thinks that someone is playing AND there's no user interaction, so that leaving the page open while you do something else won't be a problem unless a bot is running.

I know that botting is a big problem on DO, and I don't expect this to solve the problem. But it would make using a bot very inconvenient and discourage people from using them in the first place.

Give any constructive feedback that comes to mind and tell me what you guys think!

 

Personally, I think its a great idea.

 

I second the thought that it's a great idea, but the only issue is that bots operate as a player would, don't they? They move the ship, click the screen and whatever else. This would mean the message would only pop up for players actually doing nothing. This type of system would be best implemented on users reported or suspected of botting. Maybe this message should pop up for every 4 active hours of a player's ship. If the ship is active for 4 hours, the message pops up. If the player fails to answer the message 3-5 times in a row, but their ship is clearly active, then that would cause a report to be sent and the action to be taken.
From what I know, players who use bots don't ever think they're going to get caught. Most run the bot 24 hours a day, maybe even 7 days a week.
The message prompt would not appear if the player is active in chat. The timer resets for every message sent. This would prevent a typical player who has been playing for 4 hours from receiving a message.

**The 4 hours was an example time. This would result in 6 total messages in a day. Alternatively, if a player is active for 8 hours, fails to answer, a new message will appear in 4 hours, fail to answer, 2 hours, etc.
If this idea is implemented, I believe the time should be staggered so that a player does not catch on to the message appearing every 4 hours because then they just have to set a timer on their phone or something to watch their screen.

 

If I understand what you're proposing, I think it will work, and sounds like a good idea.

 

I think there is a click bot

 

It could always use a trusty recaptcha system.

 

Bad idea.
First you proposed for the people to be active on the Game page. This means every so often, everyone will have to leave the client's fullscreen, go to the page, click random option, go back. It's tedious and annoying. Kinda like your offer for people to refuel.
Second - Message in the client. Still annoying. But that's the smallest problem. You see, there's giant problem with the whole game, which is the reason why this game is dying and why ppl are botting. The game is the most grindy game I've ever played. It's so, so repetitive. It's pay to win. There's no PvP protection. For you to progress, you need to play only this game and to have no life, no friends, no gf/bf. Only this game and a job. Bigpoint tried to ban all the botters once, and you know what happened? -They almost killed the game. People literally just quit. They didn't want to play the game. Because the game is SO not worth to play without either spending so much $ in it or using a bot. You think they can't catch them or something? They can, they know everyone who's botting, it's so easy to see a botter - absolute precision in all their movements, kills npc, immediately clicks on the other one, doesn't matter if there are 5 other npcs on top of it, perfect circling, insane reaction time. The simple fact that they're playing for 40 hours without stopping or going afk for 5 minutes. BP can delete them all, but that would just kill the game. And if you wonder "well why don't the make the game better?" Well, the company is greedy. They shut down other games, because it's insanely long to progress, oor you can pull out your wallet. The only reason this game is not dead yet is because of botters and wallet warriors. It's also really hard to come up with something interesting, because the game hardly has any mechanics. The main mechanics consist of switching your formations in pvp. The rest is grind. What you're offering, is literally "hey guys, why don't you kill your game" you think they'll do that? No.

 

I literally couldn't have said it better myself, 100% spot on my friend good job.

But I also want to add that this idea is actually moot anyways because of the simple fact that the bot has many, many features that use the backpage anyways, for example they can spin build and activate your gates. So in reality if you put this idea in the game the only people who would actually see it are legit players because bots use the backpage constantly for multiple purposes. So this whole idea is redundant and moot because not a single bot would see it.

And on top of that the bot developers are very active so he could literally just build a feature to circumvent this new system in literally one day, thus rendering this entire idea even more useless and only will target legit players.

And to put a cherry on top, the bots nowadays uses a custom browser so even if this idea comes to fruition, there will most likely be no need to even make a feature ,but instead just to tweak the browser setting for it to refresh the backpage every 4 minutes. The bots already disable Captcha or any other anti-computer feature too.

Unique idea but literally not a single bot user would see it happening, only the legit players would suffer.

 

I think you really are misunderstanding my idea. By "game page" I mean the client. There's absolutely no reason that you should have the client open and performing tasks without any user interaction on it. That's called a bot. I'm not asking BP to destroy the game, I'm asking them to fix it. It's so flooded with people that are too lazy to kill npcs themselves that they pay money for a bot that will do that for them. Pay attention to what I'm saying. And don't try to bring up other posts of mine to prove some weird inaccurate point.

 

The original idea needed a little tweaking, but you should really read through all of the comments.

A real prompt wouldn't be susceptible to a bot breaking it because it would require a person to actively read and answer off their own knowledge.

 

The bot operates just like a real player, yes.

So this idea is completely redundant.

How could you even tell the difference between the bot and a user.

It wouldn't detect any bot users because they are clicking buttons, using keys, clicking their mouse, and doing multiple things. So the only people affected would be people who go AFK at the computer.

I think people on this forum should stop talking about bots, because the massive amounts of ignorance by the users on this forum is unreal when it comes to botting. The bots are so advanced and the many features and options they have to avoid these kinds of ideas is astounding, and you should leave the bot problem to the devs at this point. They already know who bots and who doesn't, they have scripts and they most likely have the user ID of every single person who bots, it's just that they cannot ban them for legal and game reasons.

 

Not really what redundant means, but okay. If a bot operated like a human, then why do you think recaptcha/captcha is so successful? It is possible to program a computer to detect if someone is using a bot, but that's not even my point. If, after all the requirements were not met within say 5 minutes (user interaction while playing and operating a ship), then a little box would appear and ask you a question. This could be a question where you have to click all the images with traffic lights in it, or just asking a question that only you would be able to answer. There's a reason that most games don't have massive botting problems, and the reason isn't that the game is too hard without one. The reason is that there are programs built into the games to find botters. Once they've been found, they get banned.

 

Hello EGGLOAF,

Thank you everyone for their concern on the issue. Bots and cheats must be detected by the scripts run by Support, a process which is fair for everyone.

Closing as answered/prevent flaming.