How do you prevent cheaters?

[john.]

We have a game where User can perform different tasks, giving them money and such.

People are cheating. And we know about it. But we don't know about how we should prevent it.

People are using Macros to perform these requests (simulating), the better ones have started to implement different intervals to perform these different tasks, which eliminates our suspiciousness at the logging files.

Some Captcha randomly is currently what we are thinking about trying... I would like your ideas on though. How do you make it a pain for the cheaters?

[Guest]

Captcha is probably your best bet, or build a system that monitors users and flags them for moderation, the more often a user is on, then the more often a captcha :)

[Zettieee]

Just add a simple number + number. If they fail, freeze the account for a set time or untill you review what they did.

[Guest]

Just add a simple number + number. If they fail, freeze the account for a set time or untill you review what they did.

Simple number + number is a 10 second fix for the scriptors, scrape the page find the div split by a space add both numbers.

[Dave]

I'd write some form of logic to determine whether someone could be cheating. Here's a couple of things I'd check for

- You'd presume that bots would run on a loop, so check the chain of pages

- A bot is going to randomise it's actions but not by much more then 10 seconds. No one is going to bot slowly?

- The tasks that are being botted are going to be of benefit to the user. Build up a list of pages which have benefits and examine this with point 1

- Monitor how long a user is logged in for. However good your game is I highly doubt they're going to play it for 20 hours a day

- Depending on how the bots been created check which browser they're using. If they've written a server bot it'll be some form of script rather then IE/Chrome/Firefix

If you get this logic right, then I'd run through a procedure of showing a captcha. If the captcha isn't completed within say 2 minutes then you can mark this account as a cheater needed to be reviewed.

[SRB]

To add to Dave's as I have a friend who wrote a bot for them, so can relate to this;

Check what they are doing also with some stats.

For example;

Current brave;

Crime ID;

A bot can be set to run XX crime only after having XX brave, which means they'd do no lower crimes, but let the bot read the screen and determine when to do the crime with XX brave.

[Script47]

Since when did people start using bots in text based games?

[Guest]

Since when did people start using bots in text based games?

Since forever ^_^

[Script47]

Since forever ^_^

o.O

This is genuine news to me! :D

[Guest]

o.O

This is genuine news to me! :D

For my old game: http://pastebin.com/1t9KZ2Zs

[john.]

To add to Dave's as I have a friend who wrote a bot for them, so can relate to this;

Check what they are doing also with some stats.

For example;

Current brave;

Crime ID;

A bot can be set to run XX crime only after having XX brave, which means they'd do no lower crimes, but let the bot read the screen and determine when to do the crime with XX brave.

We don't have any attributes related to making a certain task easier, expect a general attribute making every y task easier. And the bots already making these tasks randomly, not sure If it's in some pattern as of yet though.

 

Since when did people start using bots in text based games?

Barely had the game started before we had 2-3 players admitted they botted. :P

 

Logging and tracking what Users does is on our ToDo, and from there we hope to be able to implement an automatic system that can help us.

[Dave]

For my old game: http://pastebin.com/1t9KZ2Zs

I have so many old scripts like this lying about. Good fun to write!