Crafting: Complication Macros

[Kandra]

[quote="falloutdc"]Nobody grinds craftorders for 8 hours straight whos not a bot[/quote]
No sane human would do that, but I did.

[Kilsin]

[quote="Kandra"][quote="falloutdc"]Nobody grinds craftorders for 8 hours straight whos not a bot[/quote]
No sane human would do that, but I did.[/quote]

/raises hand slowly

[Jakkal]

I ... I too did that.

[Apaelias]

[quote="falloutdc"]
To slowdown craft botting, a fatique system similiar to the hated archeage labor could be introduced serverside. Nobody grinds craftorders for 8 hours straight whos not a bot[/quote]

I don't even craft but that would cause me to never touch this game again. And possibly blow up anything associated with it.

[Faux]

That was one of the things I disliked most about ArcheAge, the labor system. While it seems like a decent idea on the surface, in practice I don't like systems that prevent me from doing what I want after a certain amount of time. It was easy to blow through 5k labor, and then you either have to buy labor pots from the cash shop, or go do something else. If I was enjoying crafting armor, I don't want to be forced to either log out, run trade packs, or go grind Hasla.

That game ended up just being way too cash shop focused for me.

How about we implement their RNG style crafting? *ducks*

[shargash]

I don't think a fatigue system would work. I had 7 50+ crafters. It took me a long time to get them there, but then I didn't bot. Someone botting crafters to max level would certainly have more than one crafter (6, at least), probably on more than one account, so the botter would just change crafting bots as fatigue set in.

I would think it would be better to make it harder for a non-human to figure out what was going on with the recipe. VG helpfully put messages in the chat log for pretty much every crafting event: end of each step, end of recipe, arrival of each complication, end of each complication, etc. That made it trivially easy to figure out what to do next. Of course, even without the chat log, there was text in the tool tips, so it may require a client change to really affect that.

All of this was aggravated (made possible?) by the fact that crafting got easier and easier the higher level you got. It was a rare recipe that left my T5 crafters with less than 900-1000 points at the end (with max quality). That leaves a lot of room to make mistakes, or even to ignore complications entirely. A normal recipe for me would have only 1-2 complications. If you didn't care about A quality, it was that much easier.

I guess the ultimate would be something like captcha. You could have a captcha complication, or you could have the work order giver require you to type something in rather than just responding mechanically; if you responded incorrectly a small number of times, the work order giver would lock you out for a while, like diplo NPCs after a loss.

I do not much like this idea, btw, because of immersion. I'm just throwing around ideas. I would be surprised if craft botting was an issue in VGEmu. But if it is, I think there are things that can be done.

[Jakkal]

Not being a coder myself, I don't know if this is possible, but maybe something could be made that tracks movements or something. Let's face it, there's only one place where botters can craft continuously for XP: Tawar Galen. This was the only outpost that didn't run out of work orders, because it's the only outpost for all of Kojan. Now if we made a couple of other outposts (Tanvu and Martok perhaps), and split up TG's work orders, they'd run out.

But, assuming that isn't set up, is there any way for the game to detect if someone is doing the exact same movements over and over, and the exact same macros, with the exact same timing set up? If players keep a lookout for bots and report them, the GMs could directly watch their activity and see if they're botting.

Another thought:
On my IRC network, we don't allow people to idle. Before we kick people for being over an hour idle, we PM them to see if they're there, they're just not talking on IRC. Maybe every hour or so, something sends a tell to the crafter, and they have to respond within 10 minutes or they'll be booted.

[John Adams]

I genuinely appreciate the open discussion about botting. As others have said, it's likely not going to be a problem on the emulator due to the other glaring fact, there is no real-world money to be made here by selling anything. I think our initial implementation of Crafting will probably be less chat noise as suggested, the dot commands for complication macros, and creating more places for work orders. I think with the zero-cash and a few speed bumps, we can spare our economy from the gold botters.

Thank you all for the ideas. Keep them coming.