I play another game called Rift, if there is any suspicion with the account they coin lock you and email you a random number to apply in game. What if blizzard did the same thing for any questionable activity? Playing 23 hours a day for 3 weeks, etc.
The botters' phone alerts them to the email, they check it and hop on their account, type in the code and continue to bot.
It's one of those problems that's a LOT harder to fix then people think, because any of the obvious fixes would be so irritating to all the other legitimate players that everyone would hate it.
The botters' phone alerts them to the email, they check it and hop on their account, type in the code and continue to bot.
It's one of those problems that's a LOT harder to fix then people think, because any of the obvious fixes would be so irritating to all the other legitimate players that everyone would hate it.
Winter is coming, are you waking up, getting out of bed in the middle of the night so you can bot in diablo3? Its too bad d3 doesnt have a parser, bot pulls half the dps for 8hours while sleeping and hits the town waypoint 10 times, obvious indicator.
There are ways blizzard could fix this but it easier for them to remain silent, exercising their elastic tos. I just run around as a chicken now in t8, no reason to even try to be competitive in a blizzard game.
Well, one "kinda" fix to it, would be if blizz actually know who's botting(example, ppl that play 22-23hrs/day for long periods of time) and wait untill there's only like 2-3 weeks left of season and then ban them, making it impossible for set ppl to comeback in that season and compete for leaderboards, and just repete this process every season, making sure none of the super botters every make the end season leaderboards.
Let's be realistic here though. Is botting the problem with being competitive on the leaderboards or is the real issue one of available time? The argument about botting seems to be that it provides no-brainer access to better gear and longer play sessions. However this idea about using a parser seems to contradict the notion that a bot is playing even remotely as efficiently as a player is. If the bot takes 8 hours to do what the player could accomplish in one, then how much of an advantage are we actually looking at?
Second, I have to challenge the idea that botting is providing an unfair advantage in terms of gear. Now, while this is purely anecdotal, I'll use the following example to illustrate the broader point that this game and pushing leaderboards isn't about gear. At the point when Alkaizer was holding rank 1 on the solo barbarian leaderboard at 75, every piece of gear he had was equal to what I was wearing, or worse. Yet there he was, 15 GR levels higher than I had gone with identical or better gear and the exact same build.
To the best of my knowledge--and I doubt anyone is going to jump forward to correct me for obvious reasons--a bot isn't going to fish high level Greater Rifts for you. Watch streams of the rank 1 players in the mid 70's right now. They spend hours doing nothing but checking the first map, and sometimes running to the second map, in a rift and evaluating mob types. You and I don't have time to do that because we're not paid to stream or we have other responsibilities that require our time. Should we expect others to limit their play time based upon our own availability? Will I be subject to the same restrictions if there's a player that can't play for more than three hours a week?
The only valid complaints I can imagine, that go beyond scapegoating and making excuses for your own lack of ability or time, is that: 1) botting can pump a bunch of paragon levels on to an account. The only problem is that I also think that's an inflated concern. I can't imagine that running a bot, regardless of for how long, will net you as much xp per hour as a 4 man group running three xp zepplins over the course of an hour or two. And 2) a bot can farm a bunch of GR keys so you don't have to. Ok, I guess? If you're pushing rank 1 on GR's, how long can it possibly take you to clear 20 or 30 nephalem rifts? I run 90 second nephs on average in T7-8 games on a speed barb. Don't have a speed barb or a WD? How is that some random botter's fault and not your own?
Botting must be suspended and all players using bots in the season should be removed from leaderboard and their season progress: mats, gear and everything else that they earned botting should be removed too.
How botters can be detected (at least most of them)?
Just look at their playing time. No player can do 22-24 hrs rift runs per day!
Why?
Because:
1) they are gaining unfair advantage farming mats from rifts, 22-23 hrs per day. Those same mats later can be used for lots of re-rolls in the cube getting bettter ancient gear for grifts compared with regular players that dont use bots and spend insane amount of time just to be able to do re-rolls in the cube
2) they are gaining unfair advantage farming keys for greater rift.
3) gaining exp from playing rifts using bots - maybe not bigger advantage, but still an advantage over regular players that dont use them!
Capping games per hour is stupid. Thanks for telling me, as a legit player I can't fish rifts. Actually for me personally it's muling items for my collection.
These ideas are only going to piss off legit players. Not everyone on the leader boards bots, you might just suck compared to them.
Basically it boils down to Bliz not giving a fuck about people botting and non of the terrible ideas people have posted will change a thing.
I would bot as well but I just don't care about pushing that many buttons to cube perfect gear, and I'm 1200 paragon behind if I even cared about leader boards.
The botters' phone alerts them to the email, they check it and hop on their account, type in the code and continue to bot.
It's one of those problems that's a LOT harder to fix then people think, because any of the obvious fixes would be so irritating to all the other legitimate players that everyone would hate it.
Winter is coming, are you waking up, getting out of bed in the middle of the night so you can bot in diablo3? Its too bad d3 doesnt have a parser, bot pulls half the dps for 8hours while sleeping and hits the town waypoint 10 times, obvious indicator.
There are ways blizzard could fix this but it easier for them to remain silent, exercising their elastic tos. I just run around as a chicken now in t8, no reason to even try to be competitive in a blizzard game.
If the email plan you're suggesting only emails once in a while, then yes a botter would absolutely just get up real quick to fix it. And, to my point before, if your email system (or anything similar) is sending out emails every two hours, then no one would play because that's a pain in the ass.
And what's your point about an obvious indicator being the bot hit the WP 10 times? I goof around all the time while talking to my buddies, and I suspect if you saw me play you'd scream BOT! This is a MUCH harder problem to fix than you're saying.
The botters' phone alerts them to the email, they check it and hop on their account, type in the code and continue to bot.
It's one of those problems that's a LOT harder to fix then people think, because any of the obvious fixes would be so irritating to all the other legitimate players that everyone would hate it.
Winter is coming, are you waking up, getting out of bed in the middle of the night so you can bot in diablo3? Its too bad d3 doesnt have a parser, bot pulls half the dps for 8hours while sleeping and hits the town waypoint 10 times, obvious indicator.
There are ways blizzard could fix this but it easier for them to remain silent, exercising their elastic tos. I just run around as a chicken now in t8, no reason to even try to be competitive in a blizzard game.
If the email plan you're suggesting only emails once in a while, then yes a botter would absolutely just get up real quick to fix it. And, to my point before, if your email system (or anything similar) is sending out emails every two hours, then no one would play because that's a pain in the ass.
Your over estimating how hard it is to open your email, hit ctrl c, then hit ctrl v in game.
Remove GR keys. Won't stop botting overall, but honestly, everyone will get BiS gear by the time they hit 800.
What advantage does botting give other than it farms the keys for you to give you near unlimited chances to fish for the right rift?
So sick and tired of the bitching. For real. Botting will never, ever reach top rankings on the leaderboard by itself. Every top rank was manually done.
So, let's give EVERYONE unlimited chances to fish then. Problem solved.
You can now QQ about how turbo gives such an advantage after you tell me why people still stand in fire in WoW despite 100 million addons that warn them about said fire before it happens MINUTES ahead of time wipe after wipe (big wigs even COUNTS DOWN to it). Thanks.
Just to add, the xp farming by most bots is 30-55 billion per hour. It is also not perfect whatsoever. People tend and DO over-exaggerate how much xp a bot can farm. Fenrix is rank 1 wiz in the US @ < 850 paragon! Clearly, he is fucking good and by the looks of it does not bot either (assuming). Shitty players who would likely never rank in a "cheat free world" will always find other reasons as to why they can't rank rather than admitting they suck.
Well, one "kinda" fix to it, would be if blizz actually know who's botting(example, ppl that play 22-23hrs/day for long periods of time) and wait untill there's only like 2-3 weeks left of season and then ban them, making it impossible for set ppl to comeback in that season and compete for leaderboards, and just repete this process every season, making sure none of the super botters every make the end season leaderboards.
This wouldn't fix a damn thing, really. If you look at sports, there's endless cases where cheaters would repeat what they did over and over again, well aware of the concequences. For people who cheat, that rush when they win something, or are best at something completely overshadows every imagineable concequence. Some have even payed with their lives for a moment of glory. They wouldn't care one bit if they were removed from LBs in the end, if they knew they could set 10 records in the process.
Also, people need to understand that catching botters isn't hard. Stopping them in a timely fashin isn't hard either. All it requires is a simple database query. If you look at other competitive videogames, most developers implement a lot of cheat-detecting mechanisms to ban/exclude cheaters. Blizzard however doesn't care. They never did and never will. They'll push the odd banwave now and then, but that's their limit.
Back when I played FPS games (Counter Strike, Team Fortress, etc), I had to install a third party app, the name of which I can't recall, to play on most servers. The purpose of the app was to detect cheats/hacks. I guess it worked similar to anti-virus. Looking for specific signatures and characteristics of cheating software.
Why can't Blizz just implement something like this internally? Build it into the game client. Make it part of the ToS/EULA. "If you want to play D3, this is how it's going to be. We're gonna scan your shit looking for cheats. Don't like it? Don't play."
P.S. PunkBuster... that's what the 3rd party app was called. FFS took me forever to remember that. granted.. it was about 15 years ago.....
I play another game called Rift, if there is any suspicion with the account they coin lock you and email you a random number to apply in game. What if blizzard did the same thing for any questionable activity? Playing 23 hours a day for 3 weeks, etc.
The botters' phone alerts them to the email, they check it and hop on their account, type in the code and continue to bot.
It's one of those problems that's a LOT harder to fix then people think, because any of the obvious fixes would be so irritating to all the other legitimate players that everyone would hate it.
There are ways blizzard could fix this but it easier for them to remain silent, exercising their elastic tos. I just run around as a chicken now in t8, no reason to even try to be competitive in a blizzard game.
Well, one "kinda" fix to it, would be if blizz actually know who's botting(example, ppl that play 22-23hrs/day for long periods of time) and wait untill there's only like 2-3 weeks left of season and then ban them, making it impossible for set ppl to comeback in that season and compete for leaderboards, and just repete this process every season, making sure none of the super botters every make the end season leaderboards.
Or just ban them when season ends and it removes them from leaderboards like they did S1.
Let's be realistic here though. Is botting the problem with being competitive on the leaderboards or is the real issue one of available time? The argument about botting seems to be that it provides no-brainer access to better gear and longer play sessions. However this idea about using a parser seems to contradict the notion that a bot is playing even remotely as efficiently as a player is. If the bot takes 8 hours to do what the player could accomplish in one, then how much of an advantage are we actually looking at?
Second, I have to challenge the idea that botting is providing an unfair advantage in terms of gear. Now, while this is purely anecdotal, I'll use the following example to illustrate the broader point that this game and pushing leaderboards isn't about gear. At the point when Alkaizer was holding rank 1 on the solo barbarian leaderboard at 75, every piece of gear he had was equal to what I was wearing, or worse. Yet there he was, 15 GR levels higher than I had gone with identical or better gear and the exact same build.
To the best of my knowledge--and I doubt anyone is going to jump forward to correct me for obvious reasons--a bot isn't going to fish high level Greater Rifts for you. Watch streams of the rank 1 players in the mid 70's right now. They spend hours doing nothing but checking the first map, and sometimes running to the second map, in a rift and evaluating mob types. You and I don't have time to do that because we're not paid to stream or we have other responsibilities that require our time. Should we expect others to limit their play time based upon our own availability? Will I be subject to the same restrictions if there's a player that can't play for more than three hours a week?
The only valid complaints I can imagine, that go beyond scapegoating and making excuses for your own lack of ability or time, is that: 1) botting can pump a bunch of paragon levels on to an account. The only problem is that I also think that's an inflated concern. I can't imagine that running a bot, regardless of for how long, will net you as much xp per hour as a 4 man group running three xp zepplins over the course of an hour or two. And 2) a bot can farm a bunch of GR keys so you don't have to. Ok, I guess? If you're pushing rank 1 on GR's, how long can it possibly take you to clear 20 or 30 nephalem rifts? I run 90 second nephs on average in T7-8 games on a speed barb. Don't have a speed barb or a WD? How is that some random botter's fault and not your own?
Botting must be suspended and all players using bots in the season should be removed from leaderboard and their season progress: mats, gear and everything else that they earned botting should be removed too.
How botters can be detected (at least most of them)?
Just look at their playing time. No player can do 22-24 hrs rift runs per day!
Why?
Because:
1) they are gaining unfair advantage farming mats from rifts, 22-23 hrs per day. Those same mats later can be used for lots of re-rolls in the cube getting bettter ancient gear for grifts compared with regular players that dont use bots and spend insane amount of time just to be able to do re-rolls in the cube
2) they are gaining unfair advantage farming keys for greater rift.
3) gaining exp from playing rifts using bots - maybe not bigger advantage, but still an advantage over regular players that dont use them!
They could :
1- Take an aggressive approach with the ban hammer, for all kinds of cheating. They've done this in D2.
2- Make GR keys cap at a low number i.e 5-10.
3- Cap amount of games created an hour. (tho it would be unpopular it would help against the fishing part of the problem)
It's not 1 Rift to 1 GR. Often 2 keys per rift.
Capping GR keys is stupid.
Capping games per hour is stupid. Thanks for telling me, as a legit player I can't fish rifts. Actually for me personally it's muling items for my collection.
These ideas are only going to piss off legit players. Not everyone on the leader boards bots, you might just suck compared to them.
Basically it boils down to Bliz not giving a fuck about people botting and non of the terrible ideas people have posted will change a thing.
I would bot as well but I just don't care about pushing that many buttons to cube perfect gear, and I'm 1200 paragon behind if I even cared about leader boards.
If the email plan you're suggesting only emails once in a while, then yes a botter would absolutely just get up real quick to fix it. And, to my point before, if your email system (or anything similar) is sending out emails every two hours, then no one would play because that's a pain in the ass.
And what's your point about an obvious indicator being the bot hit the WP 10 times? I goof around all the time while talking to my buddies, and I suspect if you saw me play you'd scream BOT! This is a MUCH harder problem to fix than you're saying.
Remove GR keys. Won't stop botting overall, but honestly, everyone will get BiS gear by the time they hit 800.
What advantage does botting give other than it farms the keys for you to give you near unlimited chances to fish for the right rift?
So sick and tired of the bitching. For real. Botting will never, ever reach top rankings on the leaderboard by itself. Every top rank was manually done.
So, let's give EVERYONE unlimited chances to fish then. Problem solved.
You can now QQ about how turbo gives such an advantage after you tell me why people still stand in fire in WoW despite 100 million addons that warn them about said fire before it happens MINUTES ahead of time wipe after wipe (big wigs even COUNTS DOWN to it). Thanks.
Just to add, the xp farming by most bots is 30-55 billion per hour. It is also not perfect whatsoever. People tend and DO over-exaggerate how much xp a bot can farm. Fenrix is rank 1 wiz in the US @ < 850 paragon! Clearly, he is fucking good and by the looks of it does not bot either (assuming). Shitty players who would likely never rank in a "cheat free world" will always find other reasons as to why they can't rank rather than admitting they suck.
This is how you fix botting.
Blizzard buys all the botting tools out there. Find a way to ban them all.
Game takes id from one of your computer components. Not telling you which. Motherboard, gpu etc. You wont know which it is.
They send out a massive banwave. Computer ID ban every cheating asshat. They need to replace said computer part to be able to play again.
A new gpu is a tad bit harder to replace than a game account.
Problem solved.
And the only people who have a problem with this solution. Are the ones botting.
The solution to reduce botting is to fix or redesign the paragon system and reward solo play more.
Nothing else would do more
Also, people need to understand that catching botters isn't hard. Stopping them in a timely fashin isn't hard either. All it requires is a simple database query. If you look at other competitive videogames, most developers implement a lot of cheat-detecting mechanisms to ban/exclude cheaters. Blizzard however doesn't care. They never did and never will. They'll push the odd banwave now and then, but that's their limit.
time-locked progression (dailies, etc) is a much better solution
Back when I played FPS games (Counter Strike, Team Fortress, etc), I had to install a third party app, the name of which I can't recall, to play on most servers. The purpose of the app was to detect cheats/hacks. I guess it worked similar to anti-virus. Looking for specific signatures and characteristics of cheating software.
Why can't Blizz just implement something like this internally? Build it into the game client. Make it part of the ToS/EULA. "If you want to play D3, this is how it's going to be. We're gonna scan your shit looking for cheats. Don't like it? Don't play."
P.S. PunkBuster... that's what the 3rd party app was called. FFS took me forever to remember that. granted.. it was about 15 years ago.....
Can't they just see the botting with the blizz anti cheat thing? How have they caught/banned botters before? or have they not?