The acknowledgement by Gaijin that there IS an issue is at least a start, but why on earth can I only report 5 times in 6 hours? You are ridiculously downplaying the issue if you genuinely think I will only meet 5 bots for every 6 hours of play time…
2 Likes
Well I tried out the Reporting System now to see what happens this was my first Naval Match after the update to the Reporting System
War Thunder — Realistic Military Vehicles Online Combat Game for PC, Xbox and PlayStation. Play for Free Replays
1 Like
report through the Website War Thunder — Realistic Military Vehicles Online Combat Game for PC, Xbox and PlayStation. Play for Free Replays
Fully agreed, for once.
In naval there have been script bots for a year now, and these days you’re lucky to have 5~6 human players in the whole match across both teams, with the rest being bots.
I’d say them publicly acknowledging it and letting us talk openly about it is in itself a huge improvement and a good start, compared to the total ignorance and denial before.
I appreciate they say in this week’s article they have been “studying this botting for months.” But so have players. And a lot of things you and others said wouldn’t work, yup, didn’t actually work, as it turns out…because they were dumb ideas.
So look, Gaijin guys: I was the first guy to write an article on the WT forum about bots arriving in force in naval back in October 2021, detailing how they work and warning you about the threat they would cause (long ago threadlocked of course). So I’m gonna use whatever privilege nearly two years of studying the phenomenon myself affords, and take two minutes of your reading time to state what should be done, maybe save everyone a little time here.
-
Bring the hammer down. Nuke -shoti- from orbit right now. Send a message. Delete the squadron and ALL associated accounts, regardless of whether a couple are bots or not. Any humans there are benefiting from the squadron research. They are part of a criminal enterprise (albeit a small-time one) trying to defraud Gaijin and the player base and now they’re openly laughing at the snail to boot. Be sure to tell us when and why when you do it. Don’t wait for Orson’s monthly ban post. They’ve made themselves the biggest target by playing Chicken with you here. Easiest way to send a real message.
-
Flag every account with more than a mathematically impossible number of games in a 30 day period. Every single one. Don’t tell us or the botters what the exact number is, but it’s going to be around 3,000 games in a month to work. Air RB games should count for half-points because they don’t have spawn lock. All other games count the same.
All accounts like this should be visibly flagged, appeals the same as any account suspension. Put more staff into your complaints department to handle appeals if you can. On next month’s account ban review board, devote it to bots again, but just review and delete the 200 flagged accounts with the highest games per month. Make that the whole list of 200 this next month, and a part of all future lists going forward. No matter who they are. I can guarantee the first replay you decide to review on any of those 200 will show botting, so it should be easy to document. Make it clear it’s not just player complaints you are acting on going forward. Player complaints, while useful, at most should only ever be used to alert you to new trends in botting; account flagging should not depend on them when the pattern of ToS violations is already clearly defined, as is the case here. Once you have the “impossible” number set in your mind, you can do this procedurally, without human review, going forward indefinitely.
Flagged accounts can still play, but you impose potentially permanent limits on them that would inhibit account resale, such as:
–not being allowed to create or change their squadron;
–not being allowed to accumulate squadron research;
–not being allowed to change player name;
–not being allowed to change currency region for Gaijin sales purposes;
–maybe even not being allowed to make purchases with SL in game (including tech tree vehicles and lootboxes);
–and sure, captchas on login if you want, whatever
You’ll get people who say their account was stolen and used for botting, so you will have to have some kind of appeal process. And that’s fine. Just handle appeals from the “suspected bot account” status the same as regular ban appeals. Otherwise it stays permanent, making the account much harder to resell.
What will happen if you do this is the botters will go back to what they were doing in 2022 and focussing more on selling bot scripts to regular players, as opposed to running their own account farms. Regular players who use those bot scripts too much will get caught in the net above; others botting at a lower level will still have to be progressively hunted down through EAC improvements and cease-and-desist letters against websites, etc. selling the scripts and reselling accounts. But the botting plague will diminish and you’ll have sent the clearest possible message that player ToS need to be respected.
You really need to do this before the fall crafting event in October, so you don’t have much time here. The April event was an absolute gong show with just the naval and air RB bots we had then. This one coming will be worse, with bots in all modes. If you do anything like this, we’ll know you’re serious about saving the game.
18 Likes
They just increased it to 10 per 6h, according to the dataminers. They’re saying use in-game reporting now, server replay reporting should just be the backup (as it always should have been).
4 Likes
Problem is not script bots that are Gaijin made to fill up empty player slots.
Biggest problem is players (hard to call them that) using 3rd party software to farm XP and open tech tree.
i havn’t noticed much those kind of bots in naval (not talking about Gaijin AI with names like Stephan, Robert etc)
im talking about Tanks arcade/realistic with all those 2S38 standing on respawn, pretending to be AA or those dumb-bots, rushing at capture point, ignoring hits and using smoke grenades a lot.
last time i end up with 15/1 KD ratio, because i manage to sneak to enemy resp and just shot up all those bots, so yea…
P.S. pretty sure my comment will flagged “against community standards” bullshit again
3 Likes
We’re talking about the same thing…
Script bots = “players” using 3rd party scripts, which have totally taken over naval for months now, and is only recently spilling over to other modes.
Gaijin (official) bots = ones with simple names used by Gaijin to fill up naval queues.
4 Likes
Superb post. If only Gaijin had enough will and manpower to actually make that happen… @Smin1080p @Stona_WT @OrsonES Please pass this on to the devs at least.
5 Likes
Where there’s a will, there’s a way. At the end of the day, the only way to truly beat botting is to make it unprofitable. The flagged accounts is a good idea, but maybe they can use the old “you fly it too much your rewards drop” they got rid of back in the day. Maybe tune it so it flags the 250 accounts with the most battles after a week, and drop the RP and SL multiplier by 0.1x every match. After that, just check for similar behavior as before then ban.
You’ve been probably the most reasonable person in this topic, and nobody can deny you aren’t passionate about the issue. Keep your head up King
Edit 2 - corrected misunderstanding
5 Likes
And now we have the next iteration of “Kerchbots” getting ready to farm the summer event, and then sold off. They’re Woodbots now:
5 Likes
That was against the people who were asking for region locking against a certain country(the effects of which would be questionable), not Bruce.
2 Likes
Yeah, I realized when I looked at it a second time, corrected it.
2 Likes
Suspect they’re focussing on the US tree more now because it’s a more valuable tree long-term for its resale value than Russia (bigger battleships coming). When all you had as a starter boat was Litchfield it was impossible to make it work, even the Wood isn’t great. So they start with the Wood as their free boat and then get out of it into Fletcher then up to Porter as soon as possible, since they need to get to rank III DD’s by next week. The choice of Fletcher probably indicates their aimpoint. So yeah, they’ll be more Porterbots, I expect. At 897 SL (unmodified) needed to break even on a death, they’re a lot less efficient than any premiums, but the most efficient of the US tech tree rank IIIs.
3 Likes
Wouldn’t Gearing be a better choice for them?
Possibly, my point is they won’t stay on Wood or Fletcher for long. Argument for Porter would be 8 guns over 6 if you have to stay on primary, 897 SL per death break-even point vs 954 for Gearing (but 5.0 instead of 4.7).
We saw this in the April crafting event, the Kerchbots were just the larval stage of the Tashbots, once they hit Tashkent they mostly parked there (although some moved on to K. Kavkaz and a few on to Chapayev too; but they seem to seriously play only one boat per rank as they ladder up).
If it’s true the event naval vehicle’s gonna be Quint’s Indianapolis, I’d see those going pretty cheap on market if the botfarms are already lining up on it. (This month’s event shouldn’t be as bot-ridden as the October event could end up being though, since you normally have to earn score in-mode for prizes, unlike the April and October crafting events.)
1 Like
Above all, just use the same heavy handedness in the game, as you do on the forums
3 Likes
And here’s another one to the pile, BOCN Bank of China is another squadron like SHOTI that’s just full of bots…
EDIT - Need to add not EVERY player in this squadron is a bot, but by checking a whole number of these profiles, a large percentage of the squadron are bots.
6 Likes
