Bots

[_Gunnar]

Far as I know, the main bot programmers from haven haven't started playing Salem "seriously" and as of yet haven't really tried to churn out the bots. I've been assured by a couple it's easily possible though.

Ontop of hay and compost, you could probably bot fishing with some success (except it's worthless so why bother).

im sure people who like to are botting, wouldnt be hard.
i remember (i think?) the goons found quite a lot of evidence for russian botting straight after beta started.

[Dallane]

compost bot:

dig dirt, drop dirt, inventory full of worms, put all the worms in bin, eat a food, repeat


Somebody make me this bot please. Thanks.

stax check our channel

[harflimon]

Alright well let's for arguments sake say that it's probable that someone either has or will create a bot like that. What does everyone suggest they do to stop something like that? I mean they can write it into a set of rules for the game, but it's not like some words are going to stop someone determined enough to do it. How do you think they are going to police this type of activity? I guess a first step would be to stop the use of custom clients, but that would destroy a lot in the process and I'm not sure if it would even completely eradicate this issue.

I used to play a game called Asheron's Call which had basically the same problem. At first bots weren't really outlawed because in the devs naivete they thought a sophisticated enough bot program couldn't be made that would survive (not that that's the case here, I'm sure they know about it). Eventually they caught on that it was working, most of the playerbase got pissed off and started quitting, and so they outlawed the bots. Problem was that there wasn't any good method of stopping the bots. They had already allowed third-party plugins into that game that did a massive variety of things, if they tried to stop all that it would have been an even bigger outrage than stopping bots. Eventually they relied on players reporting bots and then a Mod would message the reported person in game and if they didn't respond and answer some questions then they'd get banned. Not a very effective method, especially when bots got smart enough to log-out when people got to within a couple radar of them and then log back in after a certain amount of time. It basically started coming down to people blind reporting each other because everyone was doing it and you just had to guess when someone was logged on that they were macroing. Of course this led to a lot of wasted time for mods and I think they eventually started handing out bans to some of the people who were sending in tons of reports that were just crying wolf.

The same principles apply here, with the added problem that this game does not have the resources to hire Mods as staff to actually police this type of thing. I'm sure to this day bots rule AC even though they are technically banned. So how are we going to stop them here?

[_Gunnar]

get j&l to implement logout timer, kill forage bots ourselves

[harflimon]

Logout timer > Bots programmed to log themselves back in. Unless you feel like they should add a captcha to the login screen...

Kill forage bots ourselves > Bots log-out when unkinned players detected on screen.

Any obstacles you throw up are just that, obstacles.

[Ornery]

Think he means a timer from when you Log Out until your character actually disappears from the game, similar to what haven has now. This would allow people to aggro and kill bots before they could :lo.

[Kaol]

Its hard to ban bots in a free to play game, even if you ban one whats to stop another being made?

[Ass_Kraken]

I saw this thread the other day and thought it was just an attempt at sarcasm, or to see who would take the bait and actually say "good idea" and be exposed as the scum they are. Bingo! Got a few bites on the bait.

lol this guy here, this guy.

[Kaol]

Personally i wouldn't use bots because

a) The developers don't want people to use them.

b) Spending my time writing code so a machine can play the game for me is abit daft.

[harflimon]

Think he means a timer from when you Log Out until your character actually disappears from the game, similar to what haven has now. This would allow people to aggro and kill bots before they could :lo.

Guess that would work, but it would also stop noobs from using that tactic if they run into anyone out in the wild. Guess that would make the game more realistic/hardcore, and they could always just drop their inventory and port to Boston. Course a bot could implement the same tactic of dropping everything and porting to Boston, and much faster as well.