Suggestion to avoid botting houses! 3 attempts per day system!

[Themarvin]

They don't care about efficiency. They can just have a script sitting there for 12-24-more hours, more than any human can deal with, to spam the spot.

Thing is if trying to bot the house the click would be in 8 hour intervals, meaning, it can drop free at any point, making it insane hard for botting self to a house.... a sprout with the requirements and coin in hand could be getting it in between.

[Wrestlefire769]

Thing is if trying to bot the house the click would be in 8 hour intervals, meaning, it can drop free at any point, making it insane hard for botting self to a house.... a sprout with the requirements and coin in hand could be getting it in between.

What do you think the gilsellers are doing? Basically, they're botting and scripting the entire process so that, if you are a legitimate player and want a house, you cannot get it through the legitimate means and MUST either go through them or go without.

Which is obstruction in the first place. You could even have certain scripts that if anyone even so much as reacts to the fact that it is clear that every house is being camped continuously, they can counter-react as part of the script to try to throw you off.

[Jojoya]

An interesting suggestion. I wonder if SE could successfully program the system to work that way, though. Attempts to purchase would have to be tracked server side or PC users who cheat could just log out, change the code on their local client so their attempts are reset to 0 and log back in to try again. Still opens small windows where others could potentially get the plot while the cheater is resetting their attempts.

What do you think the gilsellers are doing? Basically, they're botting and scripting the entire process so that, if you are a legitimate player and want a house, you cannot get it through the legitimate means and MUST either go through them or go without.

Which is obstruction in the first place. You could even have certain scripts that if anyone even so much as reacts to the fact that it is clear that every house is being camped continuously, they can counter-react as part of the script to try to throw you off.

I think you're missing the point of his proposal.

Someone running a bot or script could sit at the placard clicking over and over and over but only the first 3 attempts in a 24 hours period would be acknowledged by the game. All their attempts after that would be useless. Someone else could walk by 10 minutes after the third attempt, or 45 minutes or 3 hours or however long, and if the purchase timer has since come off cooldown, they would be the owners and not the bot/script user that was still mindlessly clicking away.

It's still not a perfect solution to house flipping but as long as the purchaser timer remains hidden, there is no advantage to be using automation at the placard.

[tdb]

An interesting suggestion. I wonder if SE could successfully program the system to work that way, though. Attempts to purchase would have to be tracked server side or PC users who cheat could just log out, change the code on their local client so their attempts are reset to 0 and log back in to try again. Still opens small windows where others could potentially get the plot while the cheater is resetting their attempts.

Of course it would be tracked on the server side. Why would that be even remotely a problem? There's plenty of other state tracked server side already, including various kinds of timers. The leve allowance timer is actually pretty close to what's needed here; just add another timer like that but change the parameters so it charges by 1 attempt every 8 hours, up to 3 stored attempts max.

I know bashing SE is a popular pastime on the forums, but really, the developers can't possibly be that inept.

[Jojoya]

I know bashing SE is a popular pastime on the forums, but really, the developers can't possibly be that inept.

Not a matter of them being inept. There's just so much weird stuff we see in the game due to code limitations that it can be hard to tell what is or isn't possible.

If the 3 chances were on a per character basis, then I wouldn't have doubts about their ability to do it. That's the Timers menu in a nutshell.

It's when things are intended to apply account wide that I run into doubts. The game seems to struggle with how to handle issues for characters on the same account. My alts can't have a house because this character on the same account owns one. My alts can't also be tenants of the house because they're on the same account.

Other players are able to have multiple shell FCs own houses on the same world while their character is the only FC member and the game evidently can't figure that.

Some things don't make sense and it's hard to tell where design decisions leave off and code limitations begin.