Discussion: How Can We Handle Botting Better?

So let's make this a discussion please, due to the amount of... dare I say, lack of action taken.

How can we improve the action taken against bots? I wish to hear people's opinions, ideas, and discussions over this.

I'll give a start. I think a system where if you report someone for cheating, and punishment is acted onto them, you should get an alert that your actions led to someone breaking the rules to receive punishment. Doesn't have to say who, or what level, but some form of communication that my report DOES help, would be a huge step in supporting it. How it is right now, specially when I see the same bot running around for over a year, it makes it difficult to even want to try. Incentive helps. Don't even have to reward me, just say I did something if the report was true.

Notifying you with more than a generic message of "Thank you, we'll look into it" simply wont be possible for pirvacy reasons - not even if they dont notify you against who they're taking action (because if you've only reported one person, you'll know anyways).

Its not that I dont get the frustration, but I cant really see how they could inform people about what happend to their reports without violating the privacy of those who you reported. And you might say that they dont need to protect the privacy of someone whos breaking the rules, but I suppose we all know that thats a slippery legal issue and data they just cant disclose.

So, I really dont see what else is there to do than reporting and trusting them to look into it and take appropriate steps - I know its hard to do that when you see bots running around that you reported over and over again. But would it really be easier if they messaged you to tell you that they investigated, didnt had enough evidence and dropped the case?
I just dont know... either you trust them, that they're doing their job even without giving you a full report - or you dont. But if you dont trust them, because you're still seeing bots running around, I'm not sure if that would get any better if they'd straight out told you "Yep, we didnt ban that person".

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Originally Posted by Vidu

Notifying you with more than a generic message of "Thank you, we'll look into it" simply wont be possible for pirvacy reasons - not even if they dont notify you against who they're taking action (because if you've only reported one person, you'll know anyways).

Its not that I dont get the frustration, but I cant really see how they could inform people about what happend to their reports without violating the privacy of those who you reported. And you might say that they dont need to protect the privacy of someone whos breaking the rules, but I suppose we all know that thats a slippery legal issue and data they just cant disclose.

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Other games send you some form of alert when action is taken. League of Legends outright tells you if your report actually got the person in trouble (without saying names still) and that gave players, including myself, more reason to actually report the players in there.

Sure in that case it's toxicity as well as botting in this case, and botting on a MOBA is more rare, but it's still an example of this system promoting people's wish to actually help. Before that system, plenty of players, including myself, believed unless someone was sending death threats with somehow having the target's street adress attached to it, nothing would happen.

The ball is in SE's court as far as I'm concerned. The GMs need to be given a bit more power and/or region based special task force teams need to be put in place. I think management should also have their own bots set out in various regions to see how effective their team currently is at taking action against them, how long it takes them to take action and how they can improve upon it. There should be some obvious flags in place too for accounts that are active non-stop for large chunks of time. People need to take breaks for food/sleep/restroom breaks/life in general.

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Originally Posted by Jijifli

Other games send you some form of alert when action is taken. League of Legends outright tells you if your report actually got the person in trouble (without saying names still) and that gave players, including myself, more reason to actually report the players in there.

Sure in that case it's toxicity as well as botting in this case, and botting on a MOBA is more rare, but it's still an example of this system promoting people's wish to actually help. Before that system, plenty of players, including myself, believed unless someone was sending death threats with somehow having the target's street adress attached to it, nothing would happen.

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The only thing that I could see happening is them alerting you that they've closed the case and taken appropriate steps once they've done so - with leaving open what "appropriate steps" means. And if only to alert you that you can report that person again, should you spot something fishy without spamming them with reports while they're working on their investigation.

I dont want to be rude and I know that its probably human nature, but this idea of wanting to get someone in trouble and even more so wanting to know about it, doesnt sit right with me and reminds me more of some sort of "voyeurism" and not the legit will to make the game a better place by reporting people who are breaking the rules - to do that, you dont need to know what happens.
Yes, you do need to have trust in them taking appropriate action, but there has to be a way to build that trust without violating privacy - again: If you're only reporting a handful of people or maybe even just one person, you can pretty much tell who the person was they've been taken action against, despite them not giving you the name.

I agree that they should do more to communicate about actions being taken and rules being actually enforced, but sending the reporter an alert isnt the right way to go about this in my opinion.
I think if anything we should ask for a stricter enforcment of rules, not about them telling us all about their investigation.

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Originally Posted by Dustytome

The ball is in SE's court as far as I'm concerned. The GMs need to be given a bit more power and/or region based special task force teams need to be put in place. I think management should also have their own bots set out in various regions to see how effective their team currently is at taking action against them, how long it takes them to take action and how they can improve upon it. There should be some obvious flags in place too for accounts that are active non-stop for large chunks of time. People need to take breaks for food/sleep/restroom breaks/life in general.

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This. I also think they should go after the people coding the bots outright. I don't think I've heard any instances of SE actually going after the botting communities at their sources, as opposed to WoW who actually successfully sued the people supplying some of the most widely used code. It won't /stop/ botting entirely, but working at it on two fronts might actually be a little more useful than what they're currently doing. Which basically amounts to trying to stop sand from trickling down a dune.

It's hard not to get the impression, however wrong it is, that they just don't care with their current level of response.

We can't. This is 100% on the developers

They have to make a decision: Are bot accounts that pay money worth what they're doing to the game.

So far the answer is yes. Botting is pretty bad and pretty obvious. I was in eastern thanalan a few weeks ago and saw over 15 BLM at the trainer with names like Adjklaslk Jlksdfoug. There was an A rank nearby killing them and they'd port from wherever they died to right back to the trainer. This went on until the A rank was killed about 15 minutes later.

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Originally Posted by Jijifli

How can we improve the action taken against bots?

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You're asking SE to use resources to reduce the number of subscribers for no benefit.

A quicker method of reporting would have more reports filed and would see the STF better informed.

General tips for filing a report, provided by the STF on the forums would reduce the number of reports that contain insufficient info. There is no reason for this to not be a thing already other than SE just not caring.

The ability to see retainer owners would make it easier for players to map out bot networks.

Currently, they take too long to issue action if they do and the punishment isn't even a perma. They need to either up the penalty or shorten the response time.

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Originally Posted by Jijifli

I'll give a start. I think a system where if you report someone for cheating, and punishment is acted onto them, you should get an alert that your actions led to someone breaking the rules to receive punishment.

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That would have the opposite effect. More people would see how much you can get away with and how easy it is that they would join in.

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Originally Posted by Vnolan

That would have the opposite effect. More people would see how much you can get away with and how easy it is that they would join in.

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Which would mean Square isn't taking action on people breaking the terms. Doesn't sound like a good thing for a company to do.

The current system does not work.