Source: http://forum.worldoftanks.asia/index.php?/topic/41670-botting-progression/
Thanks to everyone who sent me the link to this (cca 20 people, nice to know so many people from the ASIA server read FTR :) )
Hello everyone,
Yesterday, Tanitha posted quite a long post about what is being done with the bots on ASIA server (by the way, notice how Tanitha is starting to be the source of some very interesting info lately?). Either way, the post is linked above, I am going to summarize here and comment on it. The original text is in italics. The post starts with the classic “hi” and all that, gonna skip that.
World of Tanks is also unique in its player base, with WOT attracting a lot of middle age historians and military fans, a lot often attracted to WOT as their first online MMO. As such a large section of our player base are new to online gaming, and not familiar with the common issues brought to MMO’s in the way of bot’s. Bots are one of the plagues of online games, like other issues such as crime, unemployment etc, the botting issue is never “fixed” it is more a matter of constantly fighting the issue and keeping them at an acceptable level / percentage.
The last sentence is true, sadly, bots will never be eradicated from the game, not completely, there will always be some new software emulating player behavior.
Bots?
The word bot is misused a lot, as there is plenty of types. It can range from players manually AFK playing, by starting a game and then multi tasking / watching TV. We understand “stuff happens” like the phone rings, door knocks, the internet disconnects, etc, so players do go AFK occasionally and such is normal, however “Repetitive and excessive passive play” is against the rules and players who excessively go AFK are permanently game banned with no warnings for first offense. Dumb macro’s which can restart games, shoot the ground a bit etc. all the way up to professional sophisticated bots.
I think that Tanitha is missing the issue here, noone is really complaining about someone going AFK for a phone call (hell, I did that on more than one occasion, it happens – you gotta run off, someone calls you etc. – that’s no problem and noone is complaining about that. What is actually a problem are players that have 400 or so games per day – with 7 average minutes per battle, that’s theoretically impossible, which means the battles of such players last much shorter. These should be targetted.
Ban the bots.
It is done, however, its not a solution. When a botter’s bot is banned, they can simply start again.. Banning bots thus barely reduces bots. Although we do ban ~50-100 a week which helps get the numbers down..
This is also theoretically not entirely correct I think, although I am sure that Tanitha wouldn’t post that statement without having some internal stats to back it up. Or would he? Nah, let’s say he’s serious. Either way, what is written above is perfectly true… for games with economy, such as World of Warcraft. In World of Warcraft there was at one point a complete PLAGUE of bots, but these did not belong to real players trying to progress. They belonged to “Chinese goldfarmers” – typically Asian company employees (!), who “farmed” resources or gold and then they sold them for real money. You can imagine how completely devastating this is for the ingame economy and for the fun of play (it had other extremely nasty side effects, such as the companies that ran this business had TONS of ingame money, they literally bought out the entire auction house on the server and inflated the prices. Recently, I had a sort of deja-vu of this in Elder Scrolls Online, where bots were literally farming quest monsters, they camped their spawn and when the monster (a boss of sorts) spawned, he was dead within 2 seconds. Good luck getting that quest finished! Luckily, the producers of ESO responded by banning shitloads of bots and this issue was managed.
In World of Tanks, there is no economy, so there are no “Chinese gold farmers”, thus, bots are used for grinding, eg. progress by players, who actually CARE about their progress and won’t likely start another bot account when all their progress was already deleted by a ban (that is however a pure speculation on my part, seems logical though, doesn’t it). The problem is, botting punishment is account wipe, which however doesn’t reset premium account and gold and premium tanks, so even if you lose your progress, you get to keep the paid stuff. It would be wise to change this policy, so the botters FEEL it by losing something they paid for. If you are concerned about the legal side – I don’t think you should be: nothing you see on the screen belongs to you according to the conditions you signed, the tanks are essentially just “rented” to you, you are buying a service – it’s more like when you misbehave on a rollercoaster, endangering other passengers, you’ll be kicked out regardless of whether you paid the ticket or not.
Plus, check this out – the first punishment for botting is a wipe, second is a ban. When you have a look at Stormshadow’s bot list, you will see that most bots, caught by Wargaming were actually eventually banned, which means that it is very likely a wiped account will turn a recidivist and will start botting again (clearly, this is not working). At first glance, this does seem to contradict the second part this reply (the one about botters not being motivated to start botting again), but only seemingly – take the recent Superpershing event, where players could get a Super Pershing by (simply put) playing a lot. A bot comes in handy here – in fact, it is confirmed that some players did get their SP by using a bot, so the gain outweighed the risks. And those that were caught did not get their Super Pershing removed, since it’s a premium tank.
Ban more bots then.
More bots are getting banned, as we continue to work with existing systems, and add additional systems. We have always sanctioned from the Bot Detection System, additionally recently we started banning players additionally for excessive games played (linked with other analytical information). Unfortunately due to errors in the “games played/day” statistics, banning of players with excessive games was ceased until backup verification systems were put in place. This has now been done, and investigation on high number of game players is now continuing again. In addition we are currently looking at switching on a third system aimed specifically at smart bots.
Well, that’s new. What errors? Would actually explain why the daily battles statistics was removed from the Hall of Fame. However, on third party sites, it seems to be working. Anyway, as for the “bot detection system”, I personally am not convinced it exists. Check out the botlist by Stormshadow. Each bot in the list comes along with a replay and each replay was manually checked for the signs of a bot by Stormshadow, who has been catching bots and cheaters for years. And yet, only like half of those botters are banned/wiped? Does that sound right to you?
Prevent the bots then.
Its something that is dreamed of, more so than something that is realistic. As one would know from previous gaming experience, any anti bot programming is soon circumvented by the bot programmers. Its usually a situation of.. every update bots functionality is killed, 4 hours later the protection is bypassed and the bots continue. Following such paths that lead to no results is not a good option, better more long term solutions need installing to limit the bots. Unfortunately i shouldn’t mentioned other games as examples. But players with gaming experience know the situation themselves.
I must admit, the only game I know handles the bots is World of Warcraft. Their solution was to install (with your permission – no permission = no game) a memory scanner of some sorts or some tool that scanned running processes. It was quite complicated and I don’t know how exactly it worked, but it worked (I remember that at one point it was very trigger happy and banned people who were innocent, after that they tuned it).
Should have started years ago then.
As above, there isn’t a button to press to eliminate bots, its an ongoing issue that will always be there and requiring increased development and work. Many alterations have been made in the past, however at the moment the bots situation could be improved, so extra effort is being placed to reduce the bots. The most recent being the alteration to 0 exp for passive participation during football mode, the bypassing of the games played/day which was unreliable, etc.
Why was the battles/day unreliable? Not sure I understand it. Either the battles count correctly, or they don’t. I mean, noone reported any issue with “battles played” within the client as far as I could tell, so I assume they are correct, right? If the battles count correctly within the client, how can that number be unreliable?
Introduce 0 exp into random battles as well
Its currently in development, however its not as easy as it was to install into the football mode. The base system of the football mode issued no exp with the exp being issued by a mission, that mission paying exp was easy to alter. With normal random battles, it requires full development alterations. Development for passive play (non active play), suicide and other fair play topics is currently under development. With the aim of such games to generate 0 exp and credits. The aim of this development is to see it being completed within in a couple of months, provided testing and development goes as scheduled.
Good, but how will that system prevent a bot from driving around, bumping into things, getting off a shot or two and then getting killed? Because only the most primitive macros and “bots” are simply AFK clickers.
Long term.
The long term solution (upon further development and testing) is likely to be a captcha mode implemented. The beauty of this system is it cant be circumvented, and “sufficient proof” is not required like other actions “permanent game bans” require. Players who are even suspected of unfair play / excessive and repetitive passive play, or botting,, can be inconvenienced with a captcha mode preventing the botting from continuing.
I wonder why is it so difficult to implement straight away. I mean, every damn website site has captcha. But I guess there is a programming issue in there somewhere, so I won’t comment on this one.
Additional Long term. PVE aspects are also coming in the longer term.
Interesting. I am not entirely sure this is the right direction for WoT (I really hope they won’t try to introduce “AI players” to random battles). But, okay. Could be useful in historical battles. Either way, Tanitha offers a sort of daily bot ban chart (keep in mind that this is only for ASIA server). Whether you trust it or not, that’s up to you.
IF they will do, what they say, then definitely it will get better. Hopefully, it won’t take 5 more years, as every other stuff is ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0VSLVBPNlU
thats a link to bot video
his nick :
DARKBULLET
plz show this to wg so they ban him and his downloads
thanks.
Silentstalker add info, or link to post about bots, and how to report them to Stormshadow (a small effort to fight with bots).
correct me if im wrong, but the 0 xp system is already working on EU server. Ive seen it countless times, that the tank that stood on the spawn point the whole game got destroyed in the end of the game and received 0 xp. So.. how it exactly works? :D
It is not. The afk at base probably was on the loosing side + did not get any of the XP generating events as-
- First spot
- Damage on spot / assisted damage
- Damage
It is possible to get zero xp when loosing even if you where active if you have an utterly terrible game.
nah, it was on a winning side. Definitely, seen it like a 100 times. The tank was destroyed even from full hp, it just exploded. Just try to look at the game messages in the end of the battle, sometimes you see it “Ally (xxx) has crashed”. And he got 0 xp, which is otherwise impossible, even if you do literally nothing and win, you got like 200 base xp or so.
no, is not.
to get 0 xp you must leave the game with the tank alive, if not you always will get some xp from entering the battle and team efficiency bonus.
I actually think this is somewhat working since a few weeks now: In the last second of the game, you se a “ally XYZ is lost in battle” befoe you get back to the garage, resukting in the player getting nothing for that round.
This happens for soccer games as well as random battles, but less often (because its in test mode?).
First I thought this happens to suicidal artys, but after haveing seen this like 20 times now: It always happens to players I previously reported as afk/bots, so I’m pretty sure its some sort of afk-detection.
Those blowing up tanks are always as a result of quitting to garage before you actually die.
And that could be as a rule to get 0XP for the game either.
If you wann know you can get a 0 xp. I did on normal play. I didnt shot to any target (fast die), and no spot or detrack. Move to faward and no cap and i did 0 xp on 1 win on ferdi xD
First thing they should do is introduce a 0 xp 0 credits for anyone who has moved 0.00km in the battle. Nothing could be easier to implement and that will at least eliminate some percentage of bots/afkers.
Next they need to get more hardcore with the banning and account wipes. Why should anyone keep premium tanks if they are banned for botting? They shouldn’t. They broke the EULA and should lose EVERYTHING. Make it so that if people get caught there is a real penalty and not just a delay of 2 weeks while they bot themselves to tier 10 again.
The memory scanner/third party software scanner you talk about could also work. Something that scans for stuff in the background and flags/reports your account if it finds illegal mods or bot programs would be great.
I also like the idea of the Captcha test. When you connect to a game you get 30+ seconds to wait for the battle to start, so why not flash up a simple captcha for people to type in while they wait. If you don’t type it in then you get disconnected/reported/0 xp.
Bottom line, anything would be better than what they are doing now which is f**k all.
EULA = toilet paper against law btw
Only small amount of those AFK. Even simple and old bots move 0,10 km and make one shot, just to show they are moving and shooting.
Nope. This 30 seconds is set to allow all players to connect to the server. When you have shitty ISP, you will load to the battle in the last seconds of counting or even after start of the battle.
I imagine the captcha would be required before the tank enters the queue, so the 30 second countdown wouldn’t start until captcha accepted your entry.
Frankly, I hate captcha. Some of it is so bad, I end up taking 2 – 3 tries before I can get it to work. If they use it for every battle, I won’t play anymore.
well if they put up something like this:
player A is just very noob and falls in the water all the time dropping off bridges.
Player B is a bot suiciding in the water/dropping from bridges etc.
those 2 are both suck
why dont they give players that play like this for lets say 5 or 10 battles in a row a captcha?
and when you play more then X battles in X time you get a captcha to.
this way you only get the bots and the rushers that only join rush die leave start other battle and maybe somethimes other ppl but if it is once in every 10 battles i would not really care.
>First thing they should do is introduce a 0 xp 0 credits for anyone who has moved 0.00km in the battle. Nothing could be easier to implement and that will at least eliminate some percentage of bots/afkers.
There is a problem with that idea. Some artillery have fully rotating turrets, so an active human player could go into the SPG view the moment the battle starts and click on tanks for the duration of the battle without moving their tank an inch.
Silentstalker, just a comment about the canvas of your article. When you massively quote an official post like this way to react on each sentence is it possible to quote the whole post as one block then explain sentence by setence (you re-quote it) your point of view ? This way is easier to understand the WG post as a whole and understood the logic of the WG post.
On top of that thank you for this post and your explainations.
Just read the italic text first :)
“Why was the battles/day unreliable? Not sure I understand it. Either the battles count correctly, or they don’t. I mean, noone reported any issue with “battles played” within the client as far as I could tell, so I assume they are correct, right? If the battles count correctly within the client, how can that number be unreliable?”
Mostly because it counts as a secondary proof only – you can have a bored person who plays all day long (or has shared account with two brothers and they play all day) and bots can have some trigger which can let him play only every 15, 30 minutes or so. Can’t ban based only on those numbers, that’s IMO what counts as “unreliable”.
“I wonder why is it so difficult to implement straight away. I mean, every damn website site has captcha.”
Has to be programmed, and must avoid to appear on normal accounts, or there will be whining non-stop.
I agree. There are people who farm free XP by jumping into light tanks and dying within the first minute of play. Annoying as it may be, they aren’t botting, and it may not be considered passive play. These people can rake up hundreds of battles per day. Bot on the other hand can probably be programmed to limit the number of battles per day.
Captcha is most websites are provided by a third party developer, and while a crude catcha program can be made in less than an hour, a good one requires considerable time and money to make from scratch.
I would also like to add that botting is not just for games with in-game economies. Account-selling is also a profitable business. Gold farmers can max out an account and sell it for a substantial amount.
They already have one working on their forum site. The only issue would be to make it work within the game client.
The whole forum part is 3rd party solution, captcha included.
All WG did is extra code to work with WG.net user data.
EULA is a useless text when faced legaly
What it says has 0 value to the law SS
It’s a written contract you agree to. Of course it has value to the law, same as for example a contract with a bank, and WG can afford quite a few lawyers who can prove it to the court.
Unless you say that when you agree to the bank contract it has no legal consequences to you, of course.
The fact that sometimes you can sue about unreasonable parts of the contract doesn’t mean that the contract itself is always invalid and you don’t have to follow it.
Clicking accept =\= I signed myself for it
Ask any legal entity how much weight EULA.has. enough to stop trolling but will last 10 seconfs in court
Good luck arguing like that in court.
SS, please, check these stuff…
This wont hold in EU court.
This is the reason why WarGaming will NEVER whipe premium stuff too. They simply cant do it.
Jeez, I thought that the gaming community would know this shit by now…
If the contents of EULA are in conflict with law, you can throw it out. Outside of that it’s valid agreeement.
(If law bestows on either party certain rights or obligations, EULA trying to overrule that is invalid. Its parts still can be taken into account when assessing disputes though.)
Exactly.
Taking away the stupid premium tanks will be against the law. EULA <<<<<<<< EU Law.
There.
That depends how the “purchase of premium tank” is described in EULA. I kinda doubt you actualy own any vritual goods in WoT, it’s probably defined as provided service that can be terminated on certain grounds, at least I’d specify it as such. And that’s prefectly fine.
Even Sony and MS cant fuck over people in EULAs.
WG cant either.
There is a REASON why a company that believes half their players are morons (and they are right) does not nuke the accounts completely.
They cant and they wont. It will end badly for WG. Simple as that.
Yes, that is exactly why pressing the buy button on amazon, ebay and wherever does not result in a VALID contract and has CONSEQUENCES, right? Because clicking buttons cannot result in valid agreements, right?
Oh, legal contrats like that can totaly be formed by a click of a button, especially if it’s common practice in matters at hand.
Funny thing about going to court. It costs a lot of money and time. Most often, it isn’t worth it to fight for in a small number of game items offered in WoT. Now, if some bot user purchased every premium tank, or otherwise purchased a couple thousand dollars or so, maybe they’d make an effort, but I doubt there’d be many who would do that.
If you just wipe their account and they start over again it would be easier to spot a botter due to the lack of matches in normal tanks. EX: an acount with a löwe with 6k battles and no other tanks presented, and low stats would clearly indicate a bot account and if you get your account wiped a couple of times, then one should consider if botting is worth the trouble..??
Banning them isnt the solution because then they start over with a new account and you then have to indentify them again wich takes time.
quote: “The long term solution (upon further development and testing) is likely to be a captcha mode implemented. The beauty of this system is it cant be circumvented, and “sufficient proof” is not required like other actions “permanent game bans” require.”
Tanitha is delusional to think captcha is sufficient or even reliable
I agree, circumventing 1 regular captcha costs a fraction of a cent if properly automated.
It should be something WoT-related, like “on this image of a tank, click on the part which shoots”.
Sure, capcha can be beaten.
But if they make it appear in the garage (and block you) when someone reports you it would be at least one more hurdle for bots to pass.
>> and keeping them at an acceptable level / percentage.
There isn’t an “acceptable” level. You can say “as low as possible”, but it is still not “acceptable”…
>>The word bot is misused a lot,
Let me guess… Probably because there is single report reason in WoT for idle and bot both…?
TLDR: they hire wrong people for the job. Stormshadow should be the one in charge and they should approach him on normal ground and hire him instead of relaying on some dumb HR department to find good employees…
wow, they made a long post about bots and they didnt talked about the cause of the bots.
there are bots ingame because they reward xp for doing nothing, the team efficiency bonus will give you 300-400 xp on wins even if you do nothing, also you will win 42-45% of the games without playing.
but since the average wot player is so bad they should reduce the mm spread before removing these bonuses, since most players fails hard agaist +2.
without any of these bonuses most afk bots and the worse ones would cease to exist(the best ones usually hit enemies and they are more useful than the average player) and the overall quality of the playerbase would improve since they should do something to get xp.
the sad part is since that isnt profitable for wg its unlikely to happen.
If Wargaming really wants to solve this problem they should fix the reason people use bots. I would suggest reducing the excessive grind and finding a different monetization strategy since (looks like to me at least) they rely on the grind to make players spend gold on free xp. Valve seems to be making a lot of money with Dota and TF2 without forcing the players to pay.
true – different camo, more inscription on various places of tanks, some “extra visible equipment” (commander positioned at top of turret)
i would pay for my e-75 being completely black, or is-4 in red/yellow colors :-)
sorry – bullshit.
for captcha you can rent India(n) service.
It is working for big companies, PR agencies etc.
You rent Indian guy, and for 1hour/1$ he will be rewriting captcha for bot program.
basically on line, with approx 15-20s delay.
(yep, its possible :-) )
and yes – true, it would eliminate noob – very basic bots.
And YES – if I will have to enter captcha 3++ times per day, i will say good bye to this game :-/
Yea, sure, all the 12 year old Russian kiddies will rent indians for CAPTCHAs :D
And it would be required to input them only for those players with too many games in too short time period not for all the average 10 games per day players.
But, what I am afraid, is that nowadays there are quite a few “smart” solutions to break the CAPTCHA and someone will most likely implement one of them into WOT bots as well.
ehem – about Indian guy i did mean, that if you pay for bot, you pay for a service.
Which means if “company” which is creating bots wish to keep paying customers, they might implement this kind of service as well.
They are being paid for it, anyway …
“And YES – if I will have to enter captcha 3++ times per day, i will say good bye to this game :-/”
I agree. I already don’t like having to do it for the website. I wouldn’t mind one time a session for the game, but once every hour or so, no thank you.
Memory scanner doesn’t prevent bots in WoW. You just rename the process/exe and you are save. I have seen many mining/fishing bots in a game a year ago when I was playing it. Over the years Blizz just made gold farming less profitable.
On the other hand the batlle/day statistics is very good bot detection system. Shame on WG they can’t keep reliable statistics.
As it comes up several times in the text.
The number of battles played per day – as it was shown on the website was buggy. When the community first checked the new information, everybody was upset about the excessive number of games – some people seemed to have played some reached from 700 to 900 matches per day. Finally somebody took a pocket calculator and proved that this is actually impossible. 24h*60min=1440min/700=2,05 min/battle. (for 900 it is 1,6 minutes). If you subtract the obligatory 30 seconds loading screen and a very optimistic 10 seconds for the queue you end up with those people spending a maximum time of one minute in every battle, which is not possible even for the most talented suicide rusher. A bot can impossibly so quickly out of a battle again.
Investigationturned out to find that the battles per day are measured by some sort of counter – and this counter did in many cases (not sure what caused it) not reset properly, so the new day would not start with 0 games but with all the games you played on the day before. in some cases it must have accumulated over several days.
So it was pretty safe to say that the people with these 700 games may indeed have been botters or suiciders, but the method of identifying them over this method alone was not reliable enough and probably even juristically arguable.
Plus – as it still seemed pretty obvious for those large amounts of games – what with the people who did or 200 games a day. Youtuber Circonflexes lately did a 36-hour-streaming-WoT-marathon – and its entirely possible he managed to get a huge amount of games together. As could have done any bot in teh same time, constantly playing. So to distinguish between bots and crazy guys like Circon it needs more than the number of games played. (In Circons case, the stats are certainly a good guess.)
What really amazes me though, is that Wargaming obviously (as Tanitha indirectly admits) never managed to simply fix that counter for number of games played per day. I wonder if that is so tricky to do (bad data from server?) or if it is just “low priority”.
By the way:
They are working on a longterm solution against bots and they are working on a longterm solution to introduce AI opponents.
Why do they not just count one and one together and legalize the bots and sell them as a feature. :)
All you need is to identify them and put them via matchmaking into the the matches that are supposed to have AI in them. :)
Plus a failsafe serverside botscript, that takes over if the player ever wants to play himself again.
wau – this is actually very good idea…
bot = lower income, but still OK (run your game through day, when you at job)
if not, they could just implement feature of “lock your account” for X hours,
earn XYZ silvers.
(like vampire wars, and all that FB crap games :-)
main idea is good/acceptable.
“24h*60min=1440min/700=2,05 min/battle. (for 900 it is 1,6 minutes). If you subtract the obligatory 30 seconds loading screen and a very optimistic 10 seconds for the queue you end up with those people spending a maximum time of one minute in every battle, which is not possible even for the most talented suicide rusher. A bot can impossibly so quickly out of a battle again.”
While this is true for a bot in the traditional sense, this is very easily achievable for load and leave afk leach. Hit battle, press R three times, wait (or don’t) for counter to reach zero, go back to garage. Later, rinse, repeat.
CAPTCHAs are not a silver bullet. They have been circumvented in the past and are by no means a solution.
The memory scanner solution is also not super-viable because the scanner itself just needs to be disabled/compromised and that’s that.
The fact of the matter is, you can’t control what software users run on their computer and because software is capable of a huge variety of activities there is a lot of scope for abuse.
An alternate method of dealing with bots would be to strike the core of the problem. Bots take advantage of the fact that they can run far more battles in a given space of time than any human. It thus makes sense to simply reduce the silver and XP income a player plays more than a certain number of battles played in a given space of time and in order to make botting non-viable.
For based on the fact that the average battle lasts 8 minutes and based on personal experience it’s safe to say that in an hour the average player can play roughly 10 battles. It’s probably also safe to say that most humans don’t play for more than 3 or 4 hours at a time. Even then, they take mini-breaks in that time and as a result a human probably won’t play more than 40 battles in a 4 hour period. It’s thus probably safe to assume that someone that manages 60 or even 80 battles in 4 hours may well be a bot and, as a result, should get their XP and silver earnings cumulatively reduced for every battle past, let’s say, 40 in 4 hours.
Furthermore, we can keep and eye on the players exceeding 60 battles in 4 hours. If they keep playing for another 4 hours then there’s a stronger chance they’re a bot and so on.
At the end of the day, WG needs to make it such that botting is an undesirable for the users. The bot makers produce bots because there is demand. Take away that demand by altering the game parameters such that botting doesn’t pay and you can maybe make a strong impact on the usage of bots. After all, no botter is going to want to pay a monthyl subscription to their bot provider if the bot doesn’t produce any real results.
something like diminishing returns, or blue/red XP bar in WOW.
good idea as well;
Great job, Circon, QB and other marathon streamers will be banned.
Being AFK due to pizza delivery, due to need to walk their pig etc. are common excuse of botters, that’s why Tanitha writes about it.
SS, you’ve targetted number of battles per day but this is wrong approach. With any malfunction of counter of battles you’ll get false detections and bans. You’ll get false detections on all nolifers playing insane amount of games daily.
More important: using raw number of battles per day or even per hour is poor method of bot detection. If botter will use his brain, he can set 2-3 minutes interval between battles and can order bot to wait till the end of one battle before start another.
Detection of bots is much easier when we compare several small data:
• % of wins — of course there are several poor players but 40-42% of wins is strong sign of bot account;
• % of hits — bots are shooting through the walls and will significantly lower number of hits, especially on middle and high tier vehicles;
• dmg per battle — most bots are unable to fight properly so if an account with few thousand of battles on different tiers and type of vehicles has average dmg near 200, this is bot;
• XP per battle — even noobs have games of life, some luck etc. and can get some XP, bots are unable to think and gain additional opportunity XP;
• Kill/Death Ratio — bots are unable to make much kills but die very often so they will have very poor ratio;
• Damage Caused/Received — as above, this ratio will be very poor too.
Combine all those data and you’ll find bots.
Most of the battle performance stuff (if not all) that you mentioned is constantly getting improved by better bots, though. In fact some of them already have better %of hits, dmg and XP per battle than some bad players – because they always aim precisely, that’s their biggest (and pretty much only) advantage.
Do you have hard data? Nope. This is myth born after famous “28 bots” and “MS-1 bot” videos.
Bot programmed by experienced player will be better than humans on low tiers, where players have just several dozens of battles and have no idea what to do. But it’s very hard to make bot better than average human player on high tiers and repeating this battle after battle.
Bots can’t think so in long term, like 10k of battles, will have worse stats than average human player. Stats will be improving but bot never make high XP game, never make really high dmg in battle, never get some special medals etc.
yep – i think basically any bot is 150% better then my father :-)
Nah, go try aimbot its horrible. ANd im glad.
Over a good amount of time you can tell bots. In fact lately though as you said I have seen greens with bots.
But if you took. Games played as the first flag and once that was tripped do a further look into. W/R+player complaints.
Most player complaints seem to do nothing. I have seen one bot who I have complained against 3 times and all 3 games had 15+ guys complain with and still nothing.
Also TBH I hate bots because they are so bad. If they made a Bot who was a true Yellow/Green I wouldnt mind so much TBH
SHAT DAWN THE GAEM…no moar bots..prublem sulved fgts
SS theres an error with the ban thing and the bot list. Most of them are players that got banned, before the wipe(WG first bans/disables acc. If player agrees to wipe, acc will be wiped and reopened).
PS: About captchas: The problem is, u need to do it serverside and in a way, u cant get around them by simply modifying a few files in ur res_mods folder.
What you mean? You could modify it to break it, but not to circumvent it.
If it goes to res_mods you simply put images in there labled 1 – 1000. Now the Server asks what is the answer to image 900 + img 454. Img 900 is now called up in a SWF file and puts img 900 with a plus sign with img 454. The server has the answer of 900s value+454 value.
If you mes with the SWF files or images you will just break the code and it wont work. And since it is a picture of say 3 + 4 + 5 and not actual code saying 3+4+5 you cant get a bot to interpret the and do the math it has to have eyes…Well I guess you could try to have a program read and scan the letters but that would be super hard and in all reality not worth it to thew avg hacker.
Also lets say a bot company made a scanner to break the Captcha, they wouldnt release it to others as they wanna make money on it. So this would eliminate 90% of the bad bots that do nothing or ram me while I shoot.
And if they leave good bots that are “green player” level, well I dont care then, I welcome better players than the normal tomatoes.
It probably helps to have a bit of context for the post, many of the things Tan mentions are aimed at specific concerns raised by the community on our bot whine thread. Its a pretty small community, and for the past few months we’ve been making a lot of noise on the bot front after an apparent spike in in game numbers (probably due to the super persh mission).
:)
Proud that our efforts lead to something beyond locked threads and ROs. It was not an easy undertaking but i’m glad the issue is beginning to get the attention it deserves.
Well, if it comes to “Their solution was to install (with your permission – no permission = no game) a memory scanner”, the answer will be “no permission = no game”. No, you are not spying inside my PC, even if that means installing WarThunder and starting again from scratch.
“This is also theoretically not entirely correct I think, although I am sure that Tanitha wouldn’t post that statement without having some internal stats to back it up. Or would he?”
The SEA server, thanks to Tanitha, is unique in its reporting of bot bans. I can’t remember when they started doing it, I think early this year, but they’ve been doing it for quite some time regardless. They don’t list names, just numbers, but I’ve always had a very high opinion of Tanitha before this, so trust the numbers are accurate. For instance, this last week’s numbers are here:
http://forum.worldoftanks.asia/index.php?/topic/41671-botting-workflow-sanctions/
So, in the last week, 45 bot users were banned, and 70 received a warning. If that is a typical week, Tanitha was being very conservative in his estimate.
SilentStalker:
Here’s an interesting fact I noticed about the bots that were banned on your list. Looking through the names of several of the banned bots these are bot accounts that spam the “buy gold from this website” scammers, not true grinding bots.
Just looking at the list from the NA server I can see names of players banned like sdkjfyfuiwqf, jhgfdgfd, jhgfgfgfd, etc etc etc. These are all gold scam accounts that you see in tier 1 matches. At the same time you see other botting-grinder accounts who haven’t been banned yet: Flex908, JSMpower, Snake_Pliskin_NY, so this statistic of wiping/banning 50-100 bots a day may be skewed in favor of WG saying that they’re doing something to combat the bot issue.
Yeah bots number one function is to grind accounts full of t10`s and sell the account to newbs who just want a MAUS.
I always thought they should have the MM show as your in a slot. Maybe not show others tiers or what tanks they are in but show a list of players names or just show it saying “Placed in battle” then while its matching for other tanks, have it say battle 50% filled etc…
During this time you enter the Captcha. Ok it fills then your in game. Now during the 30 sec countdown players already had 2 chances to enter captcha, if they dont it yanks them out of battle que and replaces another player.
It can do this up to 10 secs away from battle. And if the MM has to replace a player at the 10 sec mark the timer simply pauses another 10 secs for more players to load.
I think everyone agrees they would rather wait 10-20 seconds to have a 15 v 15 game with all players ready and accounted for than get a game with 2 bots on one team and a guy eating pizza in the other.
Simply make the MM able to substitute players in and out of games.
So a lot of people dont understand that the bot thing is a huge money scam as well.
This is a Chinese gold scam if you think of it that way. Most botters are professional account sellers, and so WG actually sdoesnt mind them, they do want to ban gold sellers as they create major problems and are usually stolen credit cards.
But a botted account thats sold actually makes WG tons of cash.
My account was stolen and heres what they do…… So they have a bunch of stolen CC`s and instead of buying HUGE $ amounts the normal way its great to do this because the money leverages itself.
Lets say they start an account and use a stolen credit card to add a Spershing a T34-3 and 2 in all 200 worth of prem stuff. This now takes 6 weeks to be reported to WG that its a bad purchase. So in the meantime they take those Prem tanks and Bot the shit out of them and these free tank drives are even better.
So after they Bot 4 weeks and now have 200 games a day at 200 xp they have 11 million XP in 4 weeks. They alternate servers of course and when roaming comes out will be to easy.
So, they now have lets say 4 T10`s and 4 Prem 8`s. They now Sell this account for 300 Dollars. It may not seem like a lot, but think 200 Dollars isnt a lot and half the people dont know its gone until after a entire quarter on there credit cards in which they lose that money to most CC fraud protect. Also they sell the account BEFORE ITS LOCKED, so then the idiot who bought it gets the account stuck for 4 tier 8 prems if it is caugth and now has to pay the stolen money because he might have sank in 200 dollars of his own being a newb baddie.
So as the CC thief this washes the money in a sense. It makes the crime take long enough A your able to make 30% more on it in just a month, where as normal stolen goods are only worth 30% of the whole price. Essentially you make 3x more dong it this way.
So if you do this to 10 bots a month that is a cool 3k. Also you can not sell them the correct Email and just reset the account and resell it. Also you can hide the reset email to another account so they will regain control.
If I was the crook I would for instance sell the account, wait for it to get banned and payed off by the idiot and then reset the account. Then I would have 4 Tier 8`s and 4 T10`s+ whatever amount he played + a clean account that owes nothing….
So this one account can net me 300 dollars 2 times AT THE LEAST