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- Low drop chance from champions and elites, very low drop chance from normal monsters.
- 1 token = 1 AH trading slot. Cancelling an auction refunds your token.
- Purchasing an item requires 1 trading token.
When a trading token drops from a monster you have a limited time to activate it. Say 1 hour. This is done by going to town and talking to the Spirit of Deckard Cain, who is not quite ready to leave this world yet after all. He presents you with a riddle, a lore question, anything that requires actual human attention to answer. This to prevent automated completion of course - this system would only do more harm than good if boters had trading tokens dropping left and right all night long. There would be hundreds of different questions to be answered and quite frankly that'd be all picked up quite fast of course - UNLESS (and here's the kicker) they are presented with a CAPTCHA on occasion and the wording is changed around a bit now and then (so as to counter easy to build data gathering).
Players don't like to be disturbed while playing and that's one very good reason why Blizzard would be hesitant to introduce such a thing. I've seen blue posts on the topic of CAPTCHA to combat boting and it seems they're not totally against the idea but they'd need a good system for it. After all this is a game that one is supposed to be enjoying and you don't want Big Brother interrupting you all the time to ask if you're legit, so to say.
So let's say you're in town to have a drink with Charsi (Where did she go btw?) or something. Or to ID items for vendoring of course. How about just adding another chore to that - you go visit Cain and 4 out of 5 times you're not being harassed to see if you're the real deal. But 1 out of 5 times he presents you with a nice CAPTCHA, Diablo style and always changing of course. Yes I know there are bots who can recognize CAPTCHA but it's limited how far they can stretch it and keep up with new presentations.
So the goal would be that the bots would miss the CAPTCHA while at the same time it's all weaved into the game in a nice way. Let's say though that a real player misses it constantly - that would be the danger of it. To counter that, there'd have to be a secondary fail-safe system in place which would for sure be a 100% human-only-solvable thing. One thing that comes to mind is that if Blizz employees submitted a random question about something daily to their supervisor, they'd spend 5 minutes of their time deciding on the 'question of the day', which would be the question for the fail-safe function for the players who just can't get the CAPTCHAs right. Unpredictable and effective. Certain underground sites would probably be quick to share this info with others so there'd probably have to be more than 1 'question of the day' but anyway this would be a last resort before having to call Blizzard to fix things and if Blizzard could narrow it down to 1% of the players having to resort to this then it'd probably be worth it.
Now look, you might be thinking "But rly dude, I'd just like to game on and not be disturbed, I don't need such real world interruptions." - No, you don't and you deserve better but this is 2013. Back in 1995 things were different. Now you have scammers, spammers, boters, lamers and trolls all over the place and THEY are ruining the gaming experience for everyone else.
I would write up a whole lot more but I'll leave it at this for now. This is already a long wall of text. It's not perfect and it'd likely not go through like this. But if I can write all this down in less than half an hour from the moment I thought about it, then surely Blizzard, a multi-billion dollar company, can figure something out. The battle against boters, cheaters and other lamers have been going on for a long time with little to no success and I just can't help but think there are other ways to confront this. The gaming industry is playing a catch-up game and they need to do something different. Thanks.
Edited by rebjorn, 26 January 2013 - 05:59 PM.
