When I played DB-7 not so long ago in literally every battle there were 2 or 3 German Wellingtons (premiums) with completely random usernames (like wisx8574) on the enemy team - they all were just going straight towards a base, bombing it and then flying in the straight line. No maneouvers at all. Sitting ducks even for my DB-7. In every battle.
I noticed such behavior in early jets as well.
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Thank you!
I was taking a long break from the game because of the massive increase in bots in GRB and ARB games. I did report a bunch but it never felt like it was going anywhere. This update and the article in the website is an amazing news!
I really like the idea of having CAPICHA in-game if it means no more bots.
Thank you for the update!
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On another issue, I’m glad the article addresses the problem with false positives, but as we’ve seen, a couple of people are already insistent they’ve been swept up unfairly. Over-aggressive enforcement often has a false positive problem, especially when it’s based on something subjective as player reporting as the only mechanism being used.
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Player-reporting makes sense for other kinds of cheating. Not so much for bots. It’s baffling to me that just stopping the accounts that have played 72 hours continuously, 10 games an hour for a solid month, 24/7, in some cases for months at a time, is not something that can be done, simply because no player has reported them based on their poor in-game play convincingly enough. Because players are wrong. (And players sometimes even lie.).
Right now the player at the top of the official RB Gaijin leaderboard on the web has played 7,900 games in the last 30 days. One air game every 5.5 minutes, continuous. And yet they get to continue, apparently. Only the one guy with 100 bots to his name in naval gets banned, the rest of that squadron of bots is fine. But the ground mode… it’s been aggressively targeted, possibly even over-aggressively, it seems.
Yes, today was a positive step; but this seems very much a half-measure so far… hoping for something less subjective and more equitable and broad-based than we saw today, as welcome as it was. First step is acknowledging you have a problem anyway.
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Great news. Am very glad to hear that over 200 bots have been banned in one week. I will continue to report bot account however with a limit of only 5 per 6 hours we can only do so much. I typically am able to find and report 5 bots in much less than an hour. Would be nice if I could help more with a higher limit of reports.
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that’s the simple solution, I agree. Account with a kdr as bad as 0.01 should immediately be flagged. No human would enjoy playing a game with that kind of stat.
This is really noble to try, but that’s unsolvable
People are tired of the grind, so they use bots to go at a reasonable pace
Any try to counter bots will lead to bots finding their way though
Captchas for example, it’s 1 USD to defeat a thousand of those using human farms
IP Bans, my ISP gives me a new IP when I reboot the box
Hardware bans, they will use VM
2FA or human auth. is automatable via fake phone numbers
ID cards are fakeable, and players wouldn’t trust Gaijin handling those
Votekick would be abused and rather useless, since people could have false positives
And for the love of god, don’t even think about Élő ranking for matchmaking, this is a Pandora’s box you better not have to open, this will lead to a serious backlash harder than the previous one
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Well we have seen again and again time based
Rewards don’t work we have sim/RB games that can last Almost a hour Sometimes over that
And then there other games were people just end in furballs and the game is over in a few minutes
Yes please thanks for finally officially recognizing the issue, I am all for nuclear options like a captcha for all players.
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I can name almost every naval bot from having seen (and reported) them in hundreds of naval matches. They aren’t “hard to detect” as is being claimed. There are a number of factors that, when combined, guarantee the account is a bot.
- Account is very new
- Ships played are all premiums
- K/D ratio is absurdly low for number of matches played
- Number of days/hours played is very high
- Match behavior is consistent in every single game
- Region and/or name with Chinese symbols
If the account has 3 or more of these red flags, it’s a bot. There is no human playing that has a combination of 3 or more of these that isn’t a bot. Period.
Not sure what is so controversial as to get this post flagged. I guess the bot players aren’t happy.
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Exactly, these bots have awful stats, usually only about 1 kill in every 3 games.
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my wife plays on my pc downstairs and when we play this game together the only plane she fly’s is the ju288 in air rb with me and nothing else would that be considerd a bot account because of the weard stats that the account has only played the ju288? or are you guys going to look at more than just the player service record or actualy look at the replays
I’m very glad to see that you are concerned about bots in War Thunder. For a long time, we in the community have been reporting this absurd behavior, which goes against the rules. I’ve been playing for almost 10 years, and this situation has been bothering me a lot in recent months, especially in naval battles, where I noticed that the majority of players are bots. Countless reports have been submitted via the replay system on the website, but I’ve never seen any difference, either because there are so many reports that the moderators can’t analyze them all or because for every banned account, two more pop up.
I view the implementation of a Captcha system in matches favorably, and I know that, despite being annoying, it is a price that I, and I believe a significant portion of the community, would be willing to accept.
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Thank you so much for the post (Bots in War Thunder); you are now more vocal after what seems like a year or more of no response to countless forum posts. I understand it can be hard to talk about cheaters; after all, non of us wants the game to get a bad reputation. However, if left unchecked, it gets even worse.
The CAPTCHA (good idea) should immediately be given out to all those accounts with thousands of battles in the same vehicle with very bad stats.
With the recent economic updates, there is really little reason to cheat or buy an account that has been created using bots to get a big amount of SL and a tech tree fully researched, but some people just can’t help themself and needs to be banned.
I welcome this positive news and see it as a good step forward. You want us to help identify and keep the servers clean, then continue to communicate and give us the tools to help with the work.
Thank you
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Thank you for addressing this problem. I am really enjoying this new openness from Gaijin. Good work!
Unless she is literally setting her plane to fly straight, then go AFK to do something else then return to press spacebar, you should not worry. But if she is often afking while playing, she should stop that.
Gaijin is looking at other things before an account is banned, not just stats.
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oh than she should be fine
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Finally, acknowledgement! Thank you! But there’s A LOT more than you think.
Do not make the mistake to focus only on “low efficiency” combatants or those with passive behavior.
There are bots who do the exact opposite. TOO high efficiency and non-stop action. They will be ALWAYS on the movie and ALWAYS on target, making impossible shots etc.
These might not “let the whole team down”, but it’s still unfair play.
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Botters are only one side of this huge 3rd party software issue.
I found and reported so many blatant wallhack users in the last couple months via replay (at least 12) that I don’t even feel like playing top tier GRB anymore. Their names never seem to show up in the monthly spreadsheet either, but I dare any GM to review my reports and tell me that I don’t have a >90% precision rate when it comes to detecting these cheaters.
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4 incorrectly flagged posts out of 60 posts…
Not a lot of flagging.
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I did see quite a few naval botters in the last ban list. Of course it’s not enough, but botters have been banned before.
I’ll have to check with this list again, but I expect quite a few botters to be in there this time as well.