Guild Wars 2

A instant captcha* the time someone are reported for botting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

- The game knows when you are active or not, the game even log you off if you stay innactive, so the captcha will NOT affect afk players.
-If you are active and you are really there, you will complete the captcha. I’m not saying it need to appear in the middle of your screen while you playing, so maybe in a corner of the screen.

Use -> images <- with letters and numbers for the Captchas or random questions, because if the system just say something like “repeat: ABc.12T” they can program a bot to copy everything after “:”
If they do not complete the captcha they will be logged off and their “place in Arena Net’s verification botting list” will become priority.

Maybe even some bots have someone watching the screen to complete the captcha but not all the time, because is just impossible someone watching over their bots doing the same thing in the same map across the same path for 24hrs.

Somes are not just bots, they are cracker programs (I’ll not say hack because hackers deserve respect). They use programs that affect the game, like +speed, teleporting, etc
About this, Arena Net need more security and/or like other games, they need a GM online to come see what’s going on when a player call for this issue ONLY. Then instant BAN for them.

They are ruining events, the economy…

I’m not saying all the mess with bots will be cleaned but maybe help.
Well its open for more suggestions give yours

How quickly would a player need to complete the captcha? What if someone is afk? What if someone is too busy in combat to complete a captcha? It’s good in theory, but it would cause problems for real players.

And how do you suppose we determine when the captcha should pop up? Most bots don’t just sit place all night, they run or even teleport to mobs and nodes as they appear.

Illharess and bwillb
The company need to think about all the -if- when a Idea may be viable.
Or do you guys think they come here, get a suggestion and do the exactly way someone’s said?
I’m giving a suggestion but of course I cant give a manual with every possible -if-, the -if- is ArenaNet’s Job to implement in their way.
We can help with one or another -if-, but in a part we just dont have all the knowledge to. So I cant give you all a correct answer, just a opinion/suggestion if you really want.
I just started a point…
When you ask me:
“How quickly would a player need to complete the captcha?”
If I tell you 1 minute or 1 hour, even if you think its ok or not, I do not work in the game to gather all the information needed to estimate something like that. But do not means they cant (Anet); and do not means they cant take our suggestions to start with.
So please, all of you, dont see my last post as a “complete flawless suggestion” that should cover every corner. Just saying…

Why dont you guys try to answer your own questions with your knowledge about the game, flawless or not, and then give it back as a suggestions for the "if"s we do not have in the main suggestion? It’s a great help.

For example: “What if someone is afk?”
As I said in the first post and I’ll repeat: – “The game knows when you are active or not, the game even log you off if you stay inactive, so the captcha will not affect afk players.”
So let’s try: What kind of bot would stay inactive and for what? Do you know a way to let your character doing something while you are afk for a long time? Can you stay for example, running plus attacking while afk? With the answer we can exclude some variables and so on.
In this case, in my view captcha should appears only for characters who was reported and was in movement + attacking/collecting materials.

Just to add:
What about the idea I gave to contact a GM (When I say GM, read this like “anyone who can do something about”) in game ONLY to confirm a cracker program user? Will affect other players? A guy teleporting from mob to mob isnt hard to confirm and for sure afk or not you just cant teleport so will not affect real players.
Some of the ones I saw last night still in the same place, doing the same path killing the same things ruinning the same events.

Unfortunately, CAPTCHA will probably only annoy the players and not the botters. A program can be written to read almost any CAPTCHA and even easier, they’d probably farm out the entering of it to a Chinese sweat-shop. It’s what they do for spamming websites and such.

Thought behind the idea is good, but to be honest it would really annoy players. Having that kind of system would feel like a punishment to those who are doing nothing wrong.

Of course I want botters caught too, but I don’t want to have to prove possibly many times a day that I’m not one.

If I didn’t read it wrong, you only get captcha’d someone reports you for botting. If you’re behaving like a human, there’s a general awareness of how bots operate, and some measures are put in place for people frivolously reporting legit players (like reducing the “weight” of or taking away their ability to report), this sounds like a fairly good plan to me!

FYI, robots (OCR software) are better at solving most CAPTCHAs than humans. I kid you not.

Unless Arena Net was willing to change its CAPTCHA “type” on an almost daily basis, it would be trivial to code a bot to solve them.

What the game needs is:

a) GMs that will actually check bot reports and ban them ASAP. If they stay in the game long enough to make a profit, banning them just means the farmers will buy a new account and come back within minutes.

b) Code to automatically detect bots (but this won’t solve anything without (a), because it can make mistakes, so it always needs human confirmation).

c) A way for players to sell gems to each other directly (ex., through the trading post), like Mike O’Brien said we’d have before launch. This is what Eve did, and it turned every player into a competitor for the gold sellers, which meant that their margins went down and 90% of them left the game to go sell gold somewhere more profitable (ex., WoW, and now GW2).

Do those things (especially (a) and (c)) and the bot problem will become negligible.

While this would help alleviate the botting problem, it wouldn’t solve the problem of the mass wealth already accumulated by the botters which has already ruined the economy.

If ANet was to open up a fresh server after fixing the botting problem, sooo many people would flock to it just for the economy reset alone.

ANet’s approach to fix botting bot lowering the reward rate for events concurrently done over time doesn’t really solve the botting problem. And hurts us real players more than it harms the bots.

If you implement CAPTCHA, they’ll just make use of human CAPTCHA solvers in the 3rd world.

$2 per 1000 CAPTCHA’s solved at >80% accuracy.

You’ll just make them stop for a few seconds every so often and annoy the living hell out of legitimate players getting trolled.

Account.9832:

FYI, robots (OCR software) are better at solving most CAPTCHAs than humans. I kid you not.

Unless Arena Net was willing to change its CAPTCHA “type” on an almost daily basis, it would be trivial to code a bot to solve them.

What the game needs is:

a) GMs that will actually check bot reports and ban them ASAP. If they stay in the game long enough to make a profit, banning them just means the farmers will buy a new account and come back within minutes.

b) Code to automatically detect bots (but this won’t solve anything without (a), because it can make mistakes, so it always needs human confirmation).

c) A way for players to sell gems to each other directly (ex., through the trading post), like Mike O’Brien said we’d have before launch. This is what Eve did, and it turned every player into a competitor for the gold sellers, which meant that their margins went down and 90% of them left the game to go sell gold somewhere more profitable (ex., WoW, and now GW2).

Do those things (especially (a) and (c)) and the bot problem will become negligible.

I am all in favor of C. Gold 4 Gem prices on the TP are ludicrous, and the 10s tax (approx 25%) is complete guano.

Account.9832:

FYI, robots (OCR software) are better at solving most CAPTCHAs than humans. I kid you not.

Unless Arena Net was willing to change its CAPTCHA “type” on an almost daily basis, it would be trivial to code a bot to solve them.

actually no. ocr is great and everything but captchas can still be made impossible to read for ocr software, where humans have little to no problem discerning the letters.
take re-captcha for example. those are images (scans) of words an ocr software couldn’t parse. After it’s already unreadable by the software, it gets distorted even more and then it’s being displayed to humans.
the images themselves come from digitization efforts from the new york times and google, both of with assumedly use an effective ocr software.

Katz.5143:

I hope you aren’t talking about those impossible to read things they have to screen people out from posting, etc. Half the time I can’t decifer those things.

exactly. and you only need to decipher one half correctly, as they anticipated there would be illegible words anyway. one word is always one which has been typed in the same manner by multiple people (if lots of people can read it with the same result, so should you). that you need to write correctly. the other one is one which hasn’t been used often and is added to improve the system (if enough people can read it and type the same word, it will be added to the former list, if its different every time, it gets added to the ’can’t parse’ stack and is discarded from future captchas.
additionally if you really can’t read both parts, you can just hit the refresh button next to the captcha to get a new one.
the system works quite well and is self-healing (there is of course additional stuff preventing spammers from abusing the system and marking readable words as illegible)

or well you could annoy the hell out of other legit ppl, spamming reports on them, ust to make them have to solve them

Oranisagu.3706:

actually no. ocr is great and everything but captchas can still be made impossible to read for ocr software

You’re living in 2008. There are several companies selling commercial CAPTCHA solvers with 1st try success rates higher than humans. Even stuff like Phoca CAPTCHA, which groups small numbers and letters to make the shape of a larger number or letter is solved with a success rate of >75%.

The only tests that still resist reasonably well are image association ones like Kitten Auth or AreYouAHuman, that don’t rely on numbers / letters at all, but it would probably just be a matter of time to have software written specifically to solve those, if there was enough incentive.

Oranisagu.3706:

exactly. and you only need to decipher one half correctly, as they anticipated there would be illegible words anyway.

Er… no. Assuming you’re talking about reCAPTCHA (developed by Google), one word is the test (a deliberately deformed sequence of letters, typically very hard to read and with no real meaning), the other is a scan from a book.

You always need to enter the test “word” correctly. By entering the other word (which is optional but generally much easier), you are helping them create digital versions of scanned books.

Visit the reCAPTCHA site for more details.

1. open your webbrowser
2. go to “google.com”
3. enter the following into the searchbox: captcha (solve OR bypass)
4. look sad because you realize that captchas wouldn’t help at all if the person running the bot is willing to pay a few $

All the bot would have to do is take a snapshot of the CAPTCHA, send it to one of the services and he gets back the solved captcha within a few seconds.

So basically all you would achive with a CAPTCHA is to annoy normal players while professional bots could adept to the new situation rather easily.

I played a f2p some time ago that added a CAPTCHA to prevent botting. They removed the function less than 4 weeks after adding it as a LOT of their players complained.

Account.9832:

Visit the reCAPTCHA site for more details.

that’s exactly what I would recommend to you ;-) the first part (which usually is readable but not OCR-able was once on the right side as being unreadable. it only moves to the left when a sufficient amount of people read it as the same word) – that’s at least what the recaptcha site states.

and don’t misunderstand me – I’m absolutely against the idea of ingame captchas (because outsourced human solvers are cheap), I just argued the validity of captchas in general due to the fact that they can’t be bypassed accurately without the help of humans.

the usage of captchas is not for things like in-game verifications, as these would occur seldom and thus you can just hire someone to parse them. captchas are great for spamming prevention on mailer-forms etc, because to generate a large enough amount for the spam to be profitable, the increased cost of having to pay a human to solve them, makes the whole thing unprofitable.

generally speaking: captchas only work for stuff where the net gain of bypassing one single captcha outweighs the cost of having it translated by a human.

you can’t ask every player to enter a captcha every 5 seconds, and if you only ask for one every 30 minutes or so, the botters just pay to have them translated. it simply won’t work.

what would work instead, is a gm walking up to the assumed botter (after reports), chaining them, and talk to them. if they reply (and don’t have a cleverbot attached ;-) let them go. if they keep spamming skills without target while being bound, permaban them. takes more gm-time (say 5 minutes per bot-group), but will probably lead to way less false-positives and doesn’t impact regular players. humans are fast at recognizing patterns and require very little training to do so (we are amazing computers in some ways). to teach the system to spot botters would be quite a feat and take lots of hours of development – hours imho better spent fixing bugs at this stage of the game lifecycle.