Quote (Rontu @ Aug 13 2020 08:58am)

of course there are
lets be honest, the best mechanisms to detect bots are ingame
the only information we have is experience points over time

so we have some parameters (which we tested against known legit and known bot players) to run our bot detection by analysing the past experience values

Quote (laztheripper @ Aug 13 2020 03:25pm)

As you should. Testing against cases you can confirm is smart.
All I'm saying is that if you're only going on experience over time and simply setting a cap that shouldn't be human-possible, then you're also catching users who share their account with friends to level quickly, which actually happens when the race is taken seriously (mostly in the early ladder seasons however).

I'll think about some extra measures to alleviate this. Maybe some kind of a weighting that includes not only your primary check on experience over time, but also what name the character has, and if other characters at similar levels have similar names and uptimes.
Depending how granular the sampling is, which from the code you sent it might not be enough, but if it was you could look at experience over shorter timeframes knowing that bots will get more experience out of each game (perfect teleporting, no hesitation or time waste, fast aura switching and skill swapping, long range casting especially on teleport, and lastly shrine finding by other bots to nearly guarantee 50% more experience).

Quote (Rontu @ Aug 14 2020 09:14am)

Thanks a lot for your input, I really appreciate it. Lets talk about it :)

All I'm saying is that if you're only going on experience over time and simply setting a cap that shouldn't be human-possible, then you're also catching users who share their account with friends to level quickly, which actually happens when the race is taken seriously (mostly in the early ladder seasons however).
-> That's totally true, those people might get flagged as bots. Well I can say that this did not happen (to my knowledge) in europe this ladder - there was no account sharing to play close to 24/7 legit. So I guess this just hasn't popped up as a problem yet, as people seem not to play like this.

Maybe some kind of a weighting that includes not only your primary check on experience over time, but also what name the character has, and if other characters at similar levels have similar names and uptimes.
-> I understand and we also had very early thoughts about that. In my opinion there is no reliable connection between usernames and the player being bots. Checking similar charnames is problematic as guild members tend to use a prefix (DoH-Benny, DoH-Hit, DoH-Rontu) aswell as legit players like to use similar char names (RontuSorc, RontuSmite, RontuHdin). Even the combination of 6 players with same name prefix being online and leveling same time might be okay, as one could host (legit) a 6p baalrun with 1 killer and 5 leechers (which is very easy at throne).

Depending how granular the sampling is, which from the code you sent it might not be enough, but if it was you could look at experience over shorter timeframes knowing that bots will get more experience out of each game (perfect teleporting, no hesitation or time waste, fast aura switching and skill swapping, long range casting especially on teleport, and lastly shrine finding by other bots to nearly guarantee 50% more experience).
->I don't know, but talking much with DoH-Benny I get the feeling that high-quality-baalruns also tend to have similar experience output per run. Usually we also have that shrine search and all that stuff. So taking this into account might be very difficult.
Overall:

The challenge in this project is to find a good balance between "finding-max-amount-of-bots" and "making-sure-no-legit-player-gets-flagged". And there's just a fine line betwen that. The current measurements we have are very safe and also not taking too much effort. However I really like your idea of adding a parameter how long we have been into the ladder, I might include that :)

We have also thought into terms of sending players ingame questions to check if someone is really present or not - but this could be classified as spambot by blizzard or even be very annoying to the community, so this might be a bit dangerous.
Or we add some only human-solveable question on the website and players must be pm us something from their char ingame. But that's also not very intuitive...

To be honest, I think there is no way of tracking everyone. That's where the community gets important to me. Every person can go on the website and inform us (with given proof) about a non-legit player and we add manual flaggig (or unflagging). This seems to be the best thing we can do. Our guild can do that pretty reliable on europe, but not on the other realms and modes. That's where I'm dreaming we could all help together a little bit
:wub:

Quote (FreeUsername @ Aug 22 2020 11:29pm)

its pretty nice to have this man, but can you stop promoting this "we are here for the legits" while you use bots and third party software to generate and create this list?