Fair Play July 2023

Modern AI programs can solve CAPTCHAs though. A captcha could be used as part of a layered system, but it won’t singlehandedly stop the botting.

Why Calls to Region-Lock China for Apex Legends Won’t Solve the Problem (vgr.com)

The use of capchas will work, they are not unsolvable of course but u must solve them in a given time and in battle you will not know when and how they appear. And you can’t use any farms to solve them because they will appear inside the game not on a public server. All resources you want to use for this must have access to the running game session, that is easy to counter.

For this reasons the chaptchas could be very easy e.g. 4 RNG digits

Yet it worked for EVE Online and PUBG…

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Was that even suggested, or is it what you fear, that your stats would be that bad that you’ll end up in thier matches or something?

Not the fact that they’ll merely be off and hidden to grind amongst thier own?

Quick add from myself after reading the news. I don’t think captcha will solve the problem, there are easily available projects on github that achieve near 100% correctness in solving them (while humans have something between 80-95%), if anything captchas will just annoy people

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if captcha doesnt help, then whats the next option? region lock? or what?

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Well said. In other news, -Shoti- hit #15 on the squadron overall rankings this morning. Day 75 of 24/7 play by the all-bot squadron.

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No idea, hardware bans? If you’re banned for botting you need a new pc to play, checking if a game is running in virtual machine? I’ve seen a photo where some guy from China runs 38 instances of war thunder on 1 pc, I’m not sure if a game can be launched more than 1 time without some kind of virtualization (you can run 1 game on dev server and 1 on main server for sure at the same time). There are some people who use linux but virtualize windows AND play games only on that windows, war thunder have linux version but it still might be a discomfort for those 0.001% of players

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Its possible to create user friendly captcha that will take you 2 seconds to pass yet will stop bots.

I want a list of the cheaters bruh. Ever since I found one I’ve ran into more and more I know for 100% fact the guy that crossed mapped me on sveresk was cheating he was coming out of northeast spawn I was on the hill south of a through trees and all hit me restarted the game in ULQ and still couldn’t see me the shizz was bonkers

Absolutely. It’s madness.

Activision recently introduced ‘hallucinations’ or fake targets for suspected cheaters as part of their “Ricochet Anti-Cheat” system and successfully banned 14,000 accounts this weekend. It works by producing fake targets that only suspected cheaters see.

Fake bombing points in Air RB for suspected botting accounts would be a nice addition. Then again, I would hope that your analytics/stats are in a place where they can determine if a player dies to AF AA a dozen times a session without doing anything but bombing a base, well, probably not a human.

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Especially when those players switch their view in the match only for bombing a base, solely rely on ai gunners and try to bomb bases without any bombs left. At least the few view switches should give you a nice indicator for “suspicious” players…

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A very good thing to see bots getting what they are entitled to a big arse sledgehammer out the door.

Aside from that hopefully it doesn’t come down to using a captcha every or so match since that’s def gonna get very annoying very quickly.

My understanding is that every Captcha can be defeated as long as it has Accessibility Mode by switching to that mode and then having speech recognition understand numbers Captcha reads out loud to you via mic and enter them for you.

The all-bot squadron has cracked the top 10 through continuing to play despite their human leader’s account ban, moving into 8th place tonight. Should be #1 in another couple days.

As opposed to some, I’d say the one ban of the commander at least proves they’re not actually secretly in with Gaijin. So that just leaves them saying “Bring It, Snail, We’re Doing It Anyway” as the only remaining alternative here, really.

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Are you telling me it’s hard to detect someone who plays 24 days (576 hours) on a new account in 1 month with a single ship and 6,800 kills? ANY algorithm could detect that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Warthunder/comments/15fe6xq/half_our_team_got_wiped_by_this_single_guy/

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I have had three of my posts restored by in the mods so far in this thread alone (and gj for that, btw, ty mods), because none of them broke any rules. Once the mod rules you’re not breaking a rule, your post is there for good, but if you leave it hidden it disappears after 30 days. Always take the opportunity to re-edit your posts and make your case, and resist the shadowbanners.

Yeah, instead of captchas, which can be defeated, or increasing the amount of player reports they receive, they should just manually review any account with more than a certain number of games in the last 30 days that would be impossible without bot assistance or other account sharing.

Let’s say you’re a human ODL base bomber in Air RB who manages 12 games an hour average because you never play more than the first few minutes. Hard but not impossible, at least in Air RB, because there’s no crewlock when you die there (different modes like AB or naval could have lower game-per-hour review-triggering thresholds).

Let’s say you can sustain that for 16 hours a day, because you exist on minimal sleep and have nothing at all else to do with your life. 30x16x12 = 5760 games over 30 days. Throw in a buffer even on top of that, to make it 6000. So if you had more than 6000 games in the last month, you clearly didn’t do it alone, and your account should be auto-flagged for review, and probable suspension. If the review from replays on a flagged account shows any period where you “played” 72h+ continuous in that fashion, without any break between games at all, which most bots do now, well humans do need to sleep, so you could convert the suspension to a ban without any risk of a false positive. You’re a cheater and you’re wrecking the game for the other players.

Well, would you look at that…

(You could say the bots could dodge this sort of rule in future by just playing fewer games per account per hour, to more closely emulate humans, with three bot accounts playing 8h a day replacing one bot “playing” for 24h straight. Well… yes. But that would be good. They’d be making less SL, so they’d have to use ever more sophisticated and potentially catchable hacks like aimbotting to stay SL-positive (or pay for premium now, I suppose…) or accept the reduced profit margin per account, making the whole thing less lucrative.)

(EDIT: It’s just really really hard to take WT/Gaijin seriously on their two-day old anti-botting stance while they have a leaderboard on the company’s main website listing their best bot players in order of performance. I don’t know any other game that so openly and effusively congratulates their worst hackers that way. Sorry to say.)

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It is good that unclean players are banned.

  1. In the update from 02.08.2023, a new option to report bots was introduced.Greath!!!
    The WT community is very large with players of all ages, some very talented and some not so good… How will you prevent abuse of the new option? from those who are frustrated that they are taken out of the game quickly because those with skills can do this easily.
    I personally met a player who actually couldn’t play well because of a handicap (missing few fingers) and had breaks until he managed to make the combinations on the keyboard.His status was pathetic, he made 1 kill and died 10 times to succeed. In some matches he only captures points and those with difficulty… Many times I played squad with him to help him DM… in conclusion he liked the game and it created a feeling of well-being. Was it boot player ? NOO because we were talking on discord…

  2. Sharing account - Yes, I do it sometimes because the game doesn’t have the option of a parked account (some go on vacation for days in a row and don’t have laptops). And I lose my progress for days by continuously logging in. Will you enter this option - park acount (breake game, vacation etc)?
    3. Game time.
    Some of us play only WT and WT only. I have hundreds of hours, days, nights lost, to grind, to research tanks, etc., to do the tasks at events x 3 (tank, planes, ships). Am I a boot too?

  3. The right to reply
    In the situation described in point 1. Skilled players and frustrated players who will abuse the option and wake up with blocked accounts have the right to reply?
    I have been playing since 2018, I have invested time and money and I can wake up because some people feel inferior and powerless in front of me…
    How will you prevent this?
    Best regards, _m1hai,

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