As I’ve wandered around the masterfully created world of Tyria, I’ve encountered that age old problem of those of us who’d rather take the easy way out of collecting materials. The insidious world of Botters, it would seem, is omnipresent.
As a technical product manager myself, I can certainly understand complex issues to overcome in a software project. Botting however, must be one of those problems that you just can’t completely solve with technology. Chalk it up to human ingenuity and the powerful forces of our own greed.
So rather than just complain about how bothers are cheating us all, and the end times are neigh should they not be caught, etc… I thought I’d offer my own half baked ideas on how to tackle the problem. Keep in mind that I have no experience in the software gaming sector, I primarily deal in the IT reseller software market. So anything I say here may be totally off base, wrong, silly, or offensive, or worse – impossible to implement. You’ve been warned.
Watching the wild botter in his/her natural environment in an interesting thing. There is a pattern of behavior, but that pattern can and will vary based on the configurations and skill of the booting tools employed. But the one underlying commonality is always some repeatable pattern. A path he/she takes through the target area, and a series of attacks to down the targeted enemies.
So what if we created a database, that could track each players movement data and key press data for the last 10 minutes. Lets say:
[Timestamp | Zone/Map | XYZ Coordinates]
Another for the key press actions of the player, something like:
[Timestamp | Keypress Value | Key Hold Duration Time]
In this data set would should be able to easily identify a few things:
1. Number of times a map coordinate has been crossed over (the same coordinate)
2. Number of times a key press timestamp matched a coordinate timestamp
3. Number of times a key press value exactly matched the key hold duration time
Based on these ‘hits’ through the database – we should be able to assign a score. A weighted metric based on repeated movement + repeated key presses. There is more that I can say on this topic, but I think you get the idea.
The players with the highest scores are bubbled up to the top of a list that a small group of A-Net employees is responsible for vetting. Once identified, the employee can instantly appear at that location and monitor the situation for a few minutes.
If the employees suspicions are warranted, he or she can issue an account warning – the results are as follows:
1. Player is immediately logged out of the game
2. Player is sent an email stating that he/she is suspected of botting and must reactivate their account by clicking a link to a terms of service excerpt (do not show the entire ToS – nobody reads these things).
3. Player can optionally justify his/her actions in the event the warning was issued in error.
4. His/her account is re-enabled until the next violation.
In this way, a small number of people can manage a very large customer base, since only players with high scores from the pathing / keystroke analytics reports will be targetted.
Cheers,
-T
