Fair Play July 2023

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.

Bot reporting is supposed to be done in the server replay system right now, where there is a “restricted modifications” category. But maybe with the planned improvements, they’ll allow bot reporting within the game itself, too. That would be nice.

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Personally, this is a great idea.

But im aware this will encourage Aim Botting in lots of Bot. That would be nightmare to face.

Currently bot reporting is supposed to be done via the server replay system, not the in-game report system. The server replay reports don’t have any limits.

That being said, in-game bot reporting is really needed, alongside a removal of report limits specifically for the botting category.

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The newer aimbotting bots actually have pretty decent k/d though. And many old accounts also use bots. So 2 of those factors aren’t a good indication of botting.

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Almost none in fact, and if you looked at their replays (if you still could, which is rare) they were generally also botting in other modes as well. The simple fact is that almost all the effort until this week that was put into player reporting has been a complete waste of human effort.

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Overall, it’s nice that you’re finally talking to us openly about this. Acknowledging the issue is the first step to solving it. The current reporting and banning processes are totally inadequate to deal with the many thousands of bot accounts. When 1000+ accounts are being banned each month(at least until the epidemic dies down), then I’d consider the system to be adequate.

Currently it is near impossible to have a fun match in naval RB between BR 4.7 and 6.3 due to the insane amount of bots. They take up more than 80 percent of both teams, and always leave after one death. This can make matches totally one-sided if there were more bots on that side to begin with, or the bots on one side die quicker than the other. They never capture objectives, making it hard to gain a ticket advantage, and even harder to turn a losing match around to a win. More recently, the bots also seem to be using highly sophisticated aimbot scripts, resulting in them being insanely accurate and being able to see through land masses and smoke screens. This is why it’s impossible to fight the bots(especially when multiple bots are focusing you) with weaker ships, and difficult to fight them with similar ships. You just get “mowed down” so to say. Only the best battleships and battlecruisers have any chance of withstanding such a barrage and “farm” the bots. But since the lower BRs are unplayable, it’s also very difficult to grind to those capital ships in the first place.

There are many good suggestions and ideas from the community(which I agree with), both here in this topic and elsewhere, so please listen to them carefully. Really hope that we can come up with measures to more effectively counter the botting issue, and that you’ll continue to be transparent and communicate with the players about this and any other issues in the game. (But don’t get into too much technical detail as that will make it easier for the botters to work around the countermeasures)

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I counted 18 from the June ban list, so it’s really quite subjective as to whether that is “almost none” or not.

Before this post from Gaijin, I’d say you are right. But the continued reports must have played some part in the decision to make this post, and has resulted in some botters getting banned, AND has resulted in some anti-botting measures being taken already(however ineffective or questionable they may be). So I wouldn’t say it was a complete waste. It was mostly a waste of course, but not completely.

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TL;DR “All your reporting of bots was completely pointless until now, sorry a third your teams are robots we’ll try better next time hope you like CAPTCHA teehee”

215 Bots…In a Month… That’s a single ban almost every 4 hours…

If their lifespan is 6 minutes in a ARB match, a single bot is playing 40 matches in that time it takes them to ban a single account

Announcing that you took a month to ban the amount of accounts you should be banning in a day to keep your head above water isn’t a good look

Edit - Flagged, minor edit to attempt to conform to Community Guidelines better

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It’s not a bad look at all, it’s an extremely good look.
Even then they probably got a few false positives among those 215, which I hope are resolved.
It shows that they’ve came to some ideas that they’ll be able to action in the future.
Banning without future prevention can lead to unforeseen consequences.

Also there was nothing special that happened with the game in October of 2022.

I am at least a little confused because I thought War Thunder was itself using bots to flesh out low participation games. I can’t count how many times I have been playing air arcade and a dozen SBD or SB2C or A-26B or F-84G planes (depending on BR of the game) just show up from each side of the battlefield (one section friendly and the other hostile). I have also seen from the results of several naval arcade battles that a number of the ships I have sunk are listed by name with Bot after their name (USS Northampton (Bot)). Are these identified player bots or created by the game itself. I am all in favor of canceling out illegal bots but I feel it appropriate to clear up if there are actually legit game-created bots and how do we as players differentiate these bots in order to report them.

The -shoti- guy today is a case in point. He wasn’t banned for naval botting, or running 100 naval bots in a squadron. He got banned, if you look at his replays, because he has also been dabbling in ground RB AA botting recently. Has singlehandedly damaged Naval RB more than arguably anyone ever, for over two months… nothing had been done against him or any of his minions despite no doubt hundreds of collective reports, they’re now the #18 squadron in the entire game in terms of activity, anyone can see their progress on the first page of the squadron search in game now, they should be the #1 WT squadron or close to it in about 3 days. But, a couple games shooting planes with a 90105 from a ground RB spawn with his own account… he himself got caught and banned. Oops.

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Naval bots have only a single first name. They do not have a squadron and do not collect score on the scorecard.

In air AB/RB, the official bots have no name at all, normally, unless you’re still playing the newbie battles.

From what I’ve seen, that guy’s been botting in all 3 modes since the beginning. His stats with the Ju 288 are also very sus as well.

It maybe true that naval botting alone hasn’t resulted in any bans yet. We’ll see what happens next I guess.

No, it’s not a good look. I’ve been playing for over a decade at this point, the botting epidemic would just be bad if it’s brand new, but we’ve seen them kill naval for years now while they’ve been content with the same 150-200 banned accounts every month. They were complacent with the botting destruction of Naval. It’s only now when literally 1/3 of the teams are bots in other game modes they ATTEMPT to try and fix the game.

They don’t deserve praise for literally doing the bare minimum

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If they let -shoti- continue it’s climb to make #1 on the squadron list by Thursday-ish, I think we’ll have a pretty good sense how serious they were about this.

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