Why couldn't this work to prevent bg botters?

[opposing critter]

Dumb idea of the day

[Deleted]

Fuck captchas, why would you even suggest to implement them? They're the devil in any game or any internet thing. You can barely even fucking read them most of the time.

[Demolocklol]

Dumb idea of the day

And what is your idea genius?

[WillFeral]

So many complain about botters and I very well agree that a captcha would work wonders against honor buddy heroes but I don't know what more sad, the botters too lazy to play the game or the ones crying that typing a few letters to enter the bg... I guess that would take away their time from taking selfies...

[Kaleredar]

I see people suggest this all the time, but can't name a successful game that even uses this.

Almost everyone forgets that if a computer can make a Captcha they can also solve one.

If someone can write programs to solve Captchas, their time is wasted making bots for WoW.

There are many more nefarious causes that would have use of their programming services.



At any rate... they should instate Captchas for players that have been flagged or previously banned for botting.

[Ballrug]

I see people suggest this all the time, but can't name a successful game that even uses this.

Almost everyone forgets that if a computer can make a Captcha they can also solve one.

Solving CAPTCHAs is nontrivial for computers. There also needs to be a concrete economic incentive for creating a new CAPTCHA solving module.

It would put an end to battleground bots if it was actually implemented. I've never been clear why Blizzard hasn't implemented some active protection against bots in BGs. However, the lack of action has kept me from playing in BGs for going on 2-3 years now (I'm at 300,000 HKs from the days before bots took over BGs).

[Mormolyce]

Bots have something like a 90-95% success rate at solving captchas these days.

/thread

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Solving CAPTCHAs is nontrivial for computers. There also needs to be a concrete economic incentive for creating a new CAPTCHA solving module.

It would put an end to battleground bots if it was actually implemented. I've never been clear why Blizzard hasn't implemented some active protection against bots in BGs. However, the lack of action has kept me from playing in BGs for going on 2-3 years now (I'm at 300,000 HKs from the days before bots took over BGs).

What do you mean new?

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=b...N8ru8wfLs4KYBw

Huge list of articles.

Random link:

The Death By CAPTCHA API is one of three CAPTCHA beating APIs posted to our index in just the last week. After taking a look at them I can say that they are just as seedy and sketchy as you would imagine. Even so, I don't see these services going away anytime soon. The existence of super cheap CAPTCHA beating systems begs the question, how effective is the visual CAPTCHA today?

...

There are at least 15 different CAPTCHA APIs in our index. Why not hook up a CAPTCHA creation service to one of the decoding services and have a little fun?

http://www.programmableweb.com/news/...has/2012/10/17

San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup Vicarious has announced that it has developed software algorithms which can solve CAPTCHAs up to 90 percent of the time. Though CAPTCHAs are any automated test which differentiates between humans and computers, they often take the form of strings of partly distorted letters and numbers which many websites use to check that a visitor is human, the idea being that a computer cannot read the disguised text while a human (hopefully) can. It's this type of CAPTCHA that Vicarious's algorithms are designed to beat, and the high success rate renders the current standard of text-based CAPTCHAs ineffective, the company claims.

The main purpose of a CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, is to prevent automated software bots accessing web services where they might get up to all sorts of nuisance, such as signing up for spam accounts, or adding or editing information in a directory or wiki.

Vicarious isn't the first to develop CAPTCHA-beating algorithms, but the company claims that its system, which uses its Recursive Cortical Network technology, can beat current text-based CAPTCHAS up to 90 percent of the time, including those developed or used by Captcha.com, Google, Yahoo and Paypal, defeating their very purpose in the process.

To put the success rate into perspective, Vicarious cites a 2011 paper out of Stanford, which deemed a CAPTCHA system "broken when the attacker is able to reach a precision of at least 1 percent."

http://www.gizmag.com/captcha-beating-ai/29559/

Along with heaps of blog posts from people asking how bots are bypassing their captchas.

Instituting a captcha would have the same effect that other bot breakers have every time Blizzard deploys them. They fix the leading bot types for a few weeks while the makers re-tune their bots, then wham they're back. Meanwhile legit players have to put up with captchas, which are like visual AIDS.

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Fuck captchas, why would you even suggest to implement them? They're the devil in any game or any internet thing. You can barely even fucking read them most of the time.

It's funny actually, wouldn't at all surprise me if AI solve rates on captchas are significantly higher than human ones. I reckon I get like 80% if I'm lucky... is that a one or a letter L? Fucking things...

[ImpalerEU]

I used to complain nonstop about bots as well, but years later I really can't blame them and can easily understand their choice of botting. Bgs have been here for so long, they just got old, even to a former Bg addict like myself.

[Draahl]

There are programs that are better at reading captcha's then humans. So no, doesnt work.

[Ballrug]

Bots have something like a 90-95% success rate at solving captchas these days.

/thread

It's simply not the case that the garden variety CAPTCHA-breaker or the type of tool that would be available to XyzBuddy has that kind of success. But gee you sure want everyone to think you're informed. Yay you.

There are programs that are better at reading captcha's then humans.

Not that are generally available to bots, and not with the kind of success rate that they would need to defeat a halfway intelligent implementation by Blizzard.

[Hottage]

Most CAPTCHAs these days are more accurately solved by OCR libraries (which a bot developer could easily implement in their bot) than by humans.

CAPTCHAs in the traditional sense are extremely intrusive and will only work against the most low-hanging of fruit.

Botting is a serious issue which causes a lot of problems for legitimate gamers in the casual PvP environment, but this is not the solution for it. Until Blizzard are able to add some seriously clever heuristic scanning technology, the most sophisticated of bots (which are obviously also the most widely used) are going to remain an issue.

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It's simply not the case that the garden variety CAPTCHA-breaker or the type of tool that would be available to XyzBuddy has that kind of success. But gee you sure want everyone to think you're informed. Yay you.


Not that are generally available to bots, and not with the kind of success rate that they would need to defeat a halfway intelligent implementation by Blizzard.

There are 3rd party OCR libraries which you can plug into your own code to do this for you. Here is one example, which is freeware, which I found in less than 10 seconds: http://code.google.com/p/captcha-breaking-library/

[Kaleredar]

I used to complain nonstop about bots as well, but years later I really can't blame them and can easily understand their choice of botting. Bgs have been here for so long, they just got old, even to a former Bg addict like myself.

If you don't want to work towards content, sorry, you don't deserve rewards.

There's no "excusable reason" for botting.

[Mormolyce]

It's simply not the case that the garden variety CAPTCHA-breaker or the type of tool that would be available to XyzBuddy has that kind of success. But gee you sure want everyone to think you're informed. Yay you.

Yes yes, I oversimplified that part. Regardless of solve rate, the point remains, captchas won't stop bots.

[sophos1]

What if there was a captcha everytime your queue popped up? Although, it would not prevent the botters that actually monitor their bots but it would to those that do not. Seems simple but something that could work...

uh fuck that

[Mormolyce]

Botting is a serious issue which causes a lot of problems for legitimate gamers in the casual PvP environment, but this is not the solution for it. Until Blizzard are able to add some seriously clever heuristic scanning technology, the most sophisticated of bots (which are obviously also the most widely used) are going to remain an issue.

I kind of doubt any heuristics could ever be effective, since bots play better than a lot of players.

[tehdef]

Do you know what helps against bots? Speaking out about players that do it, shaming your friends, and quit being so apathetic about everything that happens around you in the game.

See a botter? Report his ass. See someone with a bad name? Report them. See someone shaming another player for RP or harassing them? Report them. See someone using super foul language? Report them.

You have to be the change you want to see. Don't support botters, don't allow people who ruin the game to go unchecked by blizzards reprimands.

For botters you can also email hacks@Blizzard.com

[Tech Priest Bojangles]

And what is your idea genius?

Heartrate Monitor to detect a pulse, Retinal Scan, Submitted Copy of Birth Certificate, Connected to Facebook, and Credit Check all required to queue for one BG.

[Illiterate]

Yeah lets punish the players.
They tried this in what is now Runescape Classic with swags.
IT. WAS. A. TERRIBAD. IDEA!
Seriously.

Not to mention the bots still got around it, so it only pissed off real players. Something like STS at the tail end of RSC had a 100% success rate with them.

[pucca]

If the computer can't read it then how does it know that you entered the correct information?

He doesn't. Those captchas Gerbert mentioned always contain 2 words, one that is known and one that is not/partly known.
Enter the correct word for the (easily readable) known word and anything else for the other one.

@Topic: I automated captcha-solving years ago when browser games were a thing, this won't help against botting. If I can do it, everyone is able to do it. If Blizzard would decide to use captchas ingame I'd just make a tool to solve them, because they piss me off.