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Exar Kun -George
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I agree any money transfer bots should be banned. However I am fine with the war reporting bots, the recruitment bots, and the trade tracking bots that keep track of trends of average prices. The difference between money transfer bots and the others is that the others are not an essential part of a core game mechanic. One can keep track of wars declared on your alliance, or trade trends without affecting the game play of others. Recruit bots already have rules around them (no spamming, messaging people in alliances, etc.)  Money transfer bots on the other hand affect the game play of more than just the user, it also affects potential attackers who have to log in to attack a nation to try to loot the nation or alliance bank.

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Just going to quote paste my thread into this

 

25 minutes ago, ArcKnox said:

To start off with: Bots or scripts doing button presses from 3rd party sources should be verboten. Any sort of button presses that go beyond messaging should be verboten. A bot or service that catalogues player alliance bank balances and can take requests for withdrawals is fine, as long as a person with the actual ingame permissions has to be on and take the final act of pressing the withdraw button.

Also a clear rule that account sharing is illegal. This is for the protection of the players so that they can't share their password and then cry later that they were hacked. I was honestly surprised when I found that there was no such rule already on the books.

 

 

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13 minutes ago, Alex said:

1. To enforce this, it will require captchas on all withdrawals / deposits. I'm fine with that, but I'm sure in general that will be unpopular.

2. I agree - it's been a low-priority goal to create my own recruitment bot messaging system and allow alliances to pay for it through Credits as a service. It will support the game, be open to everyone (equal opportunity) and not be too OP or anything.

3. API v2 is going to be far more comprehensive and should eliminate the need for webscraping, I just haven't had time to complete it yet.

1. While unpopular I think it would be over all accepted. We could even do every 2 or 3 transactions. I’ve never saw a capcha and been actually mad over it personally 

 

2. that’s good to hear but honestly until you get time to add it, let’s just stop the practice overall. There are still ads and still the alliance pages. I don’t think it’s fair to funnel essentially all new members to 5-10 alliances especially when the others may not know someone or have the tech know how to make a recruiting script 

 

3. also happy to hear, but same as above, until it’s widely open to everyone, let’s just stop the practice

13 minutes ago, ArcKnox said:

start off with: Bots or scripts doing button presses from 3rd party sources should be verboten. Any sort of button presses that go beyond messaging should be verboten. A bot or service that catalogues player alliance bank balances and can take requests for withdrawals is fine, as long as a person with the actual ingame permissions has to be on and take the final act of pressing the withdraw button.

The issue is there is no way to enforce this 

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1 minute ago, George said:

1. While unpopular I think it would be over all accepted. We could even do every 2 or 3 transactions. I’ve never saw a capcha and been actually mad over it personally 

 

2. that’s good to hear but honestly until you get time to add it, let’s just stop the practice overall. There are still ads and still the alliance pages. I don’t think it’s fair to funnel essentially all new members to 5-10 alliances especially when the others may not know someone or have the tech know how to make a recruiting script 

 

3. also happy to hear, but same as above, until it’s widely open to everyone, let’s just stop the practice

1. I'll have to get more feedback on that from the community.

2. Enforcing this means captchas for sending messages as well (maybe not every message, though.)

3. There's no way to prevent webscraping, really. We can only ease the burden on the server by making the information accessible in a less resource-intensive way (API)

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One note to add,

 

bringing up a old Dino, in cn until you sent X amount of messages a day capcha did not show up, I think generally speaking people don’t send 10+ messages a day normally. So adding captcha at that point shouldn’t be a issue 

1 minute ago, Alex said:

There's no way to prevent webscraping, really. We can only ease the burden on the server by making the information accessible in a less resource-intensive way (API)

Wouldn’t random captchas on IPs or accounts where we know it occurs do the trick ?

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2 minutes ago, George said:

One note to add,

 

bringing up a old Dino, in cn until you sent X amount of messages a day capcha did not show up, I think generally speaking people don’t send 10+ messages a day normally. So adding captcha at that point shouldn’t be a issue 

Wouldn’t random captchas on IPs or accounts where we know it occurs do the trick ?

I agree on messaging.

As for random captchas on IPs/accounts, all accounts already get random captchas based on frequency of access as well as number of pages viewed. So that basically exists for everyone already.

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Just now, Alex said:

I agree on messaging.

As for random captchas on IPs/accounts, all accounts already get random captchas based on frequency of access as well as number of pages viewed. So that basically exists for everyone already.

Honestly I have never once gotten a capcha outside of trade screen, in my 2+ years 

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Just now, George said:

Honestly I have never once gotten a capcha outside of trade screen, in my 2+ years 

It's something like a counter that adds up, and once it hits a certain point, if you haven't completed a captcha in the past 15 minutes you're forced to complete a captcha.

Regular pages increment by like 1, whereas trade, baseball, and other likely to be botted pages (i.e. war) increase it by a lot more. So, it is far more likely to experience it on a trade or baseball page than anywhere else.

Once you complete the captcha, you're reset and cleared for a while.

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3 minutes ago, George said:

The issue is there is no way to enforce this 

There's no way to enforce the rule on multiple accounts if the person running them is competent in hiding it. That doesn't stop us from agreeing that multis are bad and against the rules.

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Just now, Alex said:

It's something like a counter that adds up, and once it hits a certain point, if you haven't completed a captcha in the past 15 minutes you're forced to complete a captcha.

Regular pages increment by like 1, whereas trade, baseball, and other likely to be botted pages (i.e. war) increase it by a lot more. So, it is far more likely to experience it on a trade or baseball page than anywhere else.

Once you complete the captcha, you're reset and cleared for a while.

Hmm interesting, good to know. What’s counter to or is that not public ? 

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I don't think the recruitment/messaging bots should be nerfed as they are widely used by a number of alliances and there are open source recruiting bots that have been made available by some alliances/individuals so altogether, it's one of the easiest bots to obtain for your alliance from my understanding. It doesn't play the game for you like other actions do, it's just messaging. If something plays the actual game for you though, that's an issue.

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Recruitment bots are literally the only reliable way of basically any alliance not drawing off a 30k+ person forum to recruit. New members rarely look at the forums or find the recruitment section, and the in-game "suggested alliances to join" or whatever it's called literally markets dead micros with 4 people and no actives as equivalent to TKR or NPO which is absurd.

An in-game replacement should be made if their existence is an issue, because it really just isn't effective to recruit any other way with anything else available.

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I agree with #1 on George's suggestions. This current situation of bots and scripts playing the game and acting in for government members in some alliances needs to be changed. If captcha codes are what we need to make that happen I then I wholeheartedly agree with the implementation of them.

The recruitment messages as a VIP feature or for the cost of a credit would definitely be a great work around. But if captchas are a fix for the banking problem then by not putting captchas on messages it could allow that feature to remain until something like that is implemented into the game.

I look forward to api v2. Stuff with the API is generally not nearly as intrusive to game play. As has been highlighted, compiling and displaying info from the api does not actually play the game for you. 

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If the bot requires both the player and the banker to be active and just makes things easier is ok

If BKnet can send to the player things from the bank without having the banker pressing the button is not ok, it's basically like a multi, you're using another account other than your own

I think we can 100% agree that no actions should be taken on players who used BKnet because was allowed by Alex, but I think he should revert his decision

I ask Alex to consider my proposal to change the banking system and basically making everyone able to take from the alliance what they need with some option for gov to limit what the player can withdraw, would make any bot like BKnet pointless and solve the problem

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3 hours ago, Prefonteen said:

Any bot that automates in-game actions (such as war declarations, bank transfers, baseball etc.) should be prohibited. Any script that accumulates and/or parses data from the game should be fine. A hard line on this is probably necessary to prevent rules being bent.

I agree with most of this but that would also ban recruitment bots, since they automate the in-game action of sending a message. Until Alex implements the "recruitment bot messaging system and allow alliances to pay for it through Credits" then I think recruitment bots should be an exception from the rule.

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Perhaps the concern about account sharing could be addressed similar to how other websites do it when the user logs on from a different IP to the last time, it sends them an email requiring them to click a link to verify that they authorise the log in. The account owner cannot simply click all incoming verification requests because their IP will differ to the other user that is attempting to access the account.

...And more CAPTCHAs on important game action pages should trip up botting of accounts, but it should also simply be outlawed. Stick to using the API for gathering information, and develop an official credit funded recruitment messaging system everyone can use without programming skills.

 

Unpopular opinion... Honestly I would even vote for no API or account botting whatsoever, because I don't think programming skills should be a determining factor to success in a game. If it's a desired enough feature I believe the players should lobby the admin to incorporate the functionality in the game itself, equally accessible to all players without requiring special skills. That's because I think the competitive line should remain squarely focused on players' decision making and not based on their computer literacy, and you must concede being able to develop a Discord bot, web scrape the site or automate your nation has its advantages and even makes those alliances more appealing to other players and alliances. Typhon itself is fortunate enough to have Tymoteusz who has developed Hydrozen for our interests, but not all alliances are so fortunate. We are forced by the status quo to develop a bot in order to remain competitive, and frankly I think it's ridiculous for the game to encourage automation and disadvantage alliances that don't have programmers. I think a better solution would have been Alex making an official P&W Discord bot and selling access with credits (also eliminates API spam).

I know that's wishful thinking, so I'd be happy just to see account botting/scripting/web scraping/'not a human clicking buttons' outlawed, and restrict everyone to just the API.

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5 hours ago, Prefonteen said:

Any bot that automates in-game actions (such as war declarations, bank transfers, baseball etc.) should be prohibited. Any script that accumulates and/or parses data from the game should be fine. A hard line on this is probably necessary to prevent rules being bent.

 

While I would rather not just copy pretty much anything Prefonteen has to say, this blurb is essentially the same thing I would have posted here. We should not be allowing bots to fight wars or handle banking, among other mechanical things.

 

4 hours ago, Akuryo said:

Recruitment bots are literally the only reliable way of basically any alliance not drawing off a 30k+ person forum to recruit. New members rarely look at the forums or find the recruitment section, and the in-game "suggested alliances to join" or whatever it's called literally markets dead micros with 4 people and no actives as equivalent to TKR or NPO which is absurd.

An in-game replacement should be made if their existence is an issue, because it really just isn't effective to recruit any other way with anything else available.

 

As for recruitment bots, eh. While I would far rather have players who are new to join established alliances that know what they are doing and have track records of player growth or at least large active communities - and thus keeping them from forming dross-tier micros that are irrelevant and lead to them giving up and leaving the game - I can't say I really like most of the concept of the automatic messaging. But advertising those things is hard otherwise, which I do concede. The forums are a hard place for new people to feel welcomed to and learn what it is they are supposed to be doing.

I would far rather a new player see a cool theme from something in real life pop culture (e.g., TKR, GotG), or find some interesting concept theme alliance (e.g., t$, Immortals), or see some type of community culture they think is fun and entertaining (e.g., BK, Arrgh), than make some worthless micro and never get involved in the game at all. That said, I don't think we should just have big mass-member alliances either, but I think most veteran players will know the rules and conventions of the game enough to where this isn't much of a problem.

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Whatever allowed for the current fiasco with Leo's account to occur should be prohibited. Something of that magnitude shouldn't have happened, and it should definitely never happen again. 

People smarter than me and with more patience than I have already chimed in sentiments I agree with.

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