So I personally never believed that a company like NCsoft or any company who runs an mmo game, could not 100% detect bots. Im not IT or a game developer but as a gamer i imagine the bot must in some way make changes or connect to certain parts of the game code or whatever.
I do understand that even if they could detect bots 100%, they wouldnt be able to ban them all as it would cut their income by an insane amount as well as get rid of 80% of the community lol
My question is for people who know more about this stuff, are bots 100% detectable? regardless if they can or should be banned im just asking about being able to detect a full 100% of botters.
My answer isn't the technical version you want... but it's pretty Damon clear what toons are bots if you ask me.. they have random names like agdhdkgjshsbnd, and there are hundreds of them.. so my answer would be having active gms that actually log into the game and monitor stuff.. watch the chats roam around the world a bit.. and they could find them no problem..
Im not IT or a game developer but as a gamerIn other words you admit that you are clueless at the beginning of your post. That's good because only when you acknowledge your own ignorance can you find the truth.
Having said that just because you flew on an airplane doesn't mean you can build one from scratch.
i imagine the bot must in some way make changes or connect to certain parts of the game code or whatever.Well done bots don't. NCsoft has tried to trip up bots in the past (and it worked for short periods) by changing the login protocol and such. Alas bot makers have strong financial motivations to get around those changes. I imagine the people running +20 bots named asjiodj1 don't lay over the actual in game client and are relatively easy to detect (you know excluding the names). Last I knew they were faking game guard's responses and were running some kind of bare bones emulation of the client.
My question is for people who know more about this stuff, are bots 100% detectable?Some are and some aren't. The mass botters should be fairly easy to detect. While the individual running a bot carefully would be very difficult to detect.
Look at world of warcraft for example. Blizzard has dumped hundreds of millions into their anti-bot/cheat system called warden and people are still botting and cheating en mass. My favorite were the bots that were running around UNDER the map taking all the resource nodes (mining/plants/etc). The only clue from a legit player's perspective would be the magical disappearance of ore nodes.
My question is for people who know more about this stuff, are bots 100% detectable? regardless if they can or should be banned im just asking about being able to detect a full 100% of botters.
You know, the most promising technique is neural networks + delayed bans. However, the problem with it is that it was killed back in 200x. Serious botters (the ones that intend to sell everything they earn in game and the characters themselves en masse) have humanized everything about the game input: mouse movement (starting by using ln-based indirect movement with divergent average speed), click timings that diverge over a larger period instead of converging to a preset interval, using all possible game features to indicate serious solo play (turning off the chat, using invisible mode to friend list, whatever the game has configurable), so that effectively the only way they could be detected is if a GM tried to start a conversation with them, as they would effectively get a DC quite soon thereafter. All the characters were rotatable, so X hours botting with one, Y with other, etc. Nothing that would be flagged as "avg 22.9 hours / 24 hours in combat mode" (famous HF & GoD botters, as shown by the Museum system), instead average playtime: 0-4 hours / day.
However, in games where the stance on botting was much more lenient (*cough*L2*cough*), other forms of botting were used. Considering L2 updates like twice a year (instead of each week in Korea, while other MMOs can pull even 2 updates per week), client alteration/emulation was often used, along with botting logic devised by a 2 year old (a 4 year old could devise server side logic to detect them all). Now clearly, the widespreadness of these bot platforms did attract more serious people, so technically, as long as the platform itself allowed, they could devise something more serious (including using xieve to avoid names that signal that a character is almost undoubtedly a bot).
As far as client alteration is concerned, that is easily combatable. No, not by heuristics, but just by updating the anticheat part of the client immediately after publicly available tools are updated to bypass it. Yes, this means NC HQ or NCw or the anticheat module provider itself will have to buy those tools, but hello hello, that's what ActiBlizzard does; that's what JaGeX does, that's what people who care that there would be no dumb botters on their servers do.
TL;DR
No, there is no way to get rid of botters, but you can get rid of stupid ones.