New anti-botting measure: is it working?

[Bruce_R1 1,950]

Would be interested to hear experiences. As I read it, you have to get at least one hit yourself in a game, or your score is zeroed out. Might be worthwhile taking a close look at some Moffetts and Helenas on the scoreboards today, see if it's making an difference. An admittedly elegant solution, if it works of course. From the changelogs:
 

• A mechanism for determining the explicit activity of a player has been added to naval battles. In cases where during battle and using any weaponry under control of the player, a single hit to the enemy player is not made and therefore the account will not receive awards and achievements for the battle.

 

Question for anyone who wants to try it out: if you get ganked in spawn (or pretend to) and ODL... do you still get the score for death and damage to yourself, or no?

Those tank boats with tank guns that never hit could also be somewhat less impressive to play, if you never switch to your smaller guns at any point, possibly.

Also would be interesting to see what happens to 4.0+ queue times in RB during this event as a result...

Edited December 20, 2022 by Bruce_R1

[TheMightySardine 1,379]

Its bad. I´d rather have the bots back. They did nothing bad. Were good source of RP,and reduce que times. Now i am waiting 10 min to take out my PK as there are whooping 26 people in que. Also they seem to do something with DMs and shells. Hood hitting Eugen under turret and all that happened was slightly yellow plate,PK have same issue. Belfast went from being very sturdy ship to loosing 40% crew per salvo.

[Bruce_R1 1,950]

36 minutes ago, TheMightySardine said:

Its bad. I´d rather have the bots back. They did nothing bad. Were good source of RP,and reduce que times. Now i am waiting 10 min to take out my PK as there are whooping 26 people in que. Also they seem to do something with DMs and shells. Hood hitting Eugen under turret and all that happened was slightly yellow plate,PK have same issue. Belfast went from being very sturdy ship to loosing 40% crew per salvo.

If they hadn't there'd have been 100,000 Newport News' on the market at the end of this. It's very easily AFK-bottable in off hours without this change. I can see why they felt they had to do this now. They can always make matchmaker changes to bring back more Gaijin bots or reduce queue sizes, if that's the only effect on real players.

Edited December 20, 2022 by Bruce_R1

[TheMightySardine 1,379]

There wouldnt be. Look at Haruna,it went from 60 to 30 GJN,noone want to buy it. There are like 200 people playing naval at max. 

[Renamed67451 622]

No player bots, but real bots, and hard to kill, anyway, still killing bots

[Bruce_R1 1,950]

1 hour ago, TheMightySardine said:

There wouldnt be. Look at Haruna,it went from 60 to 30 GJN,noone want to buy it. There are like 200 people playing naval at max. 

Not with Battlepass forcing everyone to play a little. 

 

And yes, that's the point, in the summer, the first really AFK bottable event, a lot of people made Harunas going AFK, so people couldn't sell the Harunas, so the bottom fell out of the market. Botting has gotten so much worse in RB since then (I've been in several full 5.0 matches where I was the only human) it would have been devastating this time, left unchecked.

1 hour ago, KaKaParkChunghee said:

No player bots, but real bots, and hard to kill, anyway, still killing bots

Yes, but at least Gaijin bots respawn, so they increase the net amount of score available to players.

[lizardmech 764]

2 hours ago, TheMightySardine said:

Its bad. I´d rather have the bots back. They did nothing bad. Were good source of RP,and reduce que times. Now i am waiting 10 min to take out my PK as there are whooping 26 people in que. Also they seem to do something with DMs and shells. Hood hitting Eugen under turret and all that happened was slightly yellow plate,PK have same issue. Belfast went from being very sturdy ship to loosing 40% crew per salvo.

The problem is the damage was ramped up to absurd levels because the bulk of players were farming bots that can't aim. All the crew modules on larger ships were relocated outside of armor, they fixed HE spam a little recently but turned up AP damage to crews even more, a single large shell can kill hundreds of crew on some ships. Ships with large crews don't get more HP on their crew modules or anything either. It wasn't as noticeable before as you were lucky to have more than 2 human players per match, now you face 5+ who can aim properly and ships get shredded in seconds.

[LeeZhang 41]

Some people are mad about the new countermeasure. Which makes me doubt if they are some sort of stakeholder of bots. I was okay with bots until one day someone condescendingly claim bots are benefiting all naval players by providing easy-kill targets......I don't need alms, screw it.

[ExoSt4lker 20]

I would really welcome if we didnt get this feature since it was kinda good to have it you could farm the bots and sometimes you could just aim the ship and be there to correct the way of the ship and do something else in the meanwhile now you just have to sit there for the whole match.

[Solavellan_MK2 14]

1 hour ago, ExoSt4lker said:

I would really welcome if we didnt get this feature since it was kinda good to have it you could farm the bots and sometimes you could just aim the ship and be there to correct the way of the ship and do something else in the meanwhile now you just have to sit there for the whole match.

Heaven forbid people actually have to play the game now.

[Renamed67451 622]

On 20/12/2022 at 21:59, Bruce_R1 said:

Yes, but at least Gaijin bots respawn, so they increase the net amount of score available to players

Don't you know kill 3 real bots income equal one real player?

[Bruce_R1 1,950]

41 minutes ago, KaKaParkChunghee said:

Don't you know kill 3 real bots income equal one real player?

No, you're thinking air battles and AI planes. Score for sinking a Gaijin bot boat in naval is exactly the same as a player boat. The only difference is it doesn't count for task completion involving "player controlled vehicles." One-death leaving of any kind, including AFK botting, reduces the amount of score available there to be collectively extracted from that game. That is the main reason there are multipliers on event score for rank... Higher rank games in any mode have a higher ODL rate.

[Renamed67451 622]

26 minutes ago, Bruce_R1 said:

Score for sinking a Gaijin bot boat in naval is exactly the same as a player boat

just score, but income will reduce 2/3, kill a real player will get over 10k SL if you are a gold eagle vehicle, but real AI just about 4k

[Bruce_R1 1,950]

2 minutes ago, KaKaParkChunghee said:

just score, but income will reduce 2/3, kill a real player will get over 10k SL if you are a gold eagle vehicle, but real AI just about 4k

That's air, not naval.

[lizardmech 764]

About half the bot farmers are back, not sure if they have a work around or are just stupid.

[Bruce_R1 1,950]

6 minutes ago, lizardmech said:

About half the bot farmers are back, not sure if they have a work around or are just stupid.

Will be looking for them tonight. So these are regular players who bought a script for the most part... they may be getting zero score and just didn't notice yet. It's also possible the whole mechanism is bugged and broken, given the large number of non-botting people saying they got a zero score message for being accused of botting, but still got full score anyway. If that's the case, the same thing could also be happening to the AFKs. "Ooh, I got zero score?" *looks at score value and income* "Oh wait, no I didn't."

[Renamed67451 622]

On 22/12/2022 at 20:20, Bruce_R1 said:

That's air, not naval.

Same in Naval

[Gunship 505]

I'm very happy that Gaijin did something to stop the bots. It may just be a question of time before the bots finds a way overcome the fix, but until then, happy days!

 

It is also up to Gaijin to make Naval more interesting for all players and this patch apart from the voice overs did not have a lot for Naval. 

[efetenekeci 1,776]

The average battle quality increased, its not just 2 guys on each team getting 4500 mission points each and the others are... bots

 

But it affected my naval event grind worse, I was completing tasks faster with my USS Atlanta lineup, now it got harder. I started using Frigate Koln again as it no longer gets uptiered to 5.0 again and again because of the bot spam. 

 

Frigate Koln gets 2000 at least per match, and up to 4000 in some cases where people mostly use boats. 

Edited December 29, 2022 by efetenekeci

[Anzio_Supreme 21]

Gaijin's 'fix' came at the same time they released an event. Because of the event there are more people participating in naval than before. This could simply be that the current amount of human players greatly outweighs the amount of bots. But its also harder to discern who is a bot since they'll be trying new methods to circumvent this fix.

https://warthunder.com/en/tournament/replay/17911074485124833

Player: _085422928 could be a bot OR it could be what you'd expect from the average player that decided to jump into naval at 6.0. Only time will tell.

[kkang2828 1,244]

It seems to be working, at least for now. Battles are much more lively, with a lot more active players and a bit less premium ship spam. There are still a few bots(I suspect they haven't checked their rewards yet) and still many low-skill ODLs, but the overall battle experience is back to "normal" again. There are a lot more aircraft in the air from mid-match onwards as well. The que times are definitely longer than the near instantaneous state before the patch, but it still rarely exceeds 90s even during non-peak hours. This could be because of the event, so we'll have to see what happens after the event is over.

 

Uptiers are quite a lot more often and more painful now, but I'd have uptiers over the bot-fest any time.

Edited December 28, 2022 by kkang2828

[Bruce_R1 1,950]

16 hours ago, Anzio_Supreme said:

But its also harder to discern who is a bot since they'll be trying new methods to circumvent this fix.

So it'll be a while before we see a new crop again, if we do. And they are mostly gone: I went all day at 4.3 yesterday and barely saw any Moffetts. The script writers took people's money: it's not like they have any way to upgrade the bot scripts they sold already, nor do their customers have any way to demand it.

 

The next script, if it comes, will have to be quite a bit more clever. A hit with "human controls" implies aimbotting which should be detectable by anticheat. There's no advantage to turning aimbotting off in a game, in terms of anticheat detection... You're either hacking the client or you're not in that sense.

 

If we do see it, we should see the same evolutionary path as the last time: "test bots" deployed on fresh accounts at the reserve destroyer level first, so that there's no huge cost to testing new things out. It's only after they proved that worked that the script writers packaged these last scripts and sold them to established players en masse  to use with their premiums.

[lizardmech 764]

21 hours ago, Bruce_R1 said:

The next script, if it comes, will have to be quite a bit more clever. A hit with "human controls" implies aimbotting which should be detectable by anticheat. There's no advantage to turning aimbotting off in a game, in terms of anticheat detection... You're either hacking the client or you're not in that sense.

I haven't seen anything to suggest they're ever punished for it. They use to be strict but then changed when they began to focus on brining PRC players to the international servers, it became a free for all with zero concern to how much the game is ruined for everyone else. They also have AI image based recognition aimbots now as well that are invisible to game engines, they're slowly infesting air RB as they can bomb ground targets with this sort of machine vision based system.

[Steelbeast 556]

There are more a bit more playera for sure, but hart to tell if it is due event or this change. Anayhow still who will win or loose is determined purely random depending which team will get manned strongest ships. 

[Bruce_R1 1,950]

3 hours ago, lizardmech said:

I haven't seen anything to suggest they're ever punished for it. They use to be strict but then changed when they began to focus on brining PRC players to the international servers, it became a free for all with zero concern to how much the game is ruined for everyone else. They also have AI image based recognition aimbots now as well that are invisible to game engines, they're slowly infesting air RB as they can bomb ground targets with this sort of machine vision based system.

Accounts that aimbot are reported by anticheat and players and cancelled all the time. The advantage of the AFK script was it allowed established players in other modes to accumulate fully transferrable crew skill points, among other things, while they slept and the computer played their Moffetts. That requires you to use your main account. And people don't like to lose all the vehicles their main account because of some script they bought on the internet if it can be detected that way, so detectability is key. 

There will always be another botwave, yes. That's the anticheat fight, and Gaijin will win or lose that. The next one might not be in naval though, as you say. The naval AFK plague of the last year was so pernicious because all the script really had to do was launch the game and let the game's own AI take over to make the player owning a premium a profit, over and over. That was always going to be incredibly hard to detect. As was pointed out by many of us, the simplest version could be not much more than DOS-level commands. And because the mode's base audience in RB was the smallest and the risk of detection was so low, it completely swamped any reporting system.

I do think Gaijin is making a mistake in not informing the community anymore about the number of accounts it cancels, a decision they made a couple years ago now for unexplained reasons.