I believe we’re going to do Beefed up Sherrifs + Review Period ASAP, with GMI offering to help on the onboarding quest later. Also harvester sig prop, and limit concurrent rentals and… I’m sure there’s more, it’s early.
To chime in here as someone who has been watching bots pretty heavily for the past few days, I don’t think the review period is enough. Sure, it will slow them down, but it’s still a never ending battle. We need some sort of exclusivity. I’m not sure how many bots you all think there are playing at any one time, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out the number is 80%+.
People saying “we need more complex gameplay that is harder to bot”, I agree. Until then, I don’t think the review period will suffice. We don’t know how long it will be until we get more complex game modes, until then, we need to have exclusivity. Most alphas do in Web2, and I think it’s even more important in Web3.
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Well, what we can do immediately, is put boots on the ground, nd in a week we can have the Review period, nd that will have to do until there is time to complete something more robust. Even iuf you only get half of them with the direct approach, it’s something. If you don’t fight back, they just get richer and better armed, nd more addicted to our money.
Fighting bots is like fighting weeds… you cant truly win, but if you don’t push back continuously, they become the majority.
After some thinking I’ve come to the same conclusion, we might implement a review period and what not, and it may not change much in the end. TBH, considering dev bandwidth needed, market conditions and how reliable the temporary fix could be, I believe the best option right now is to halt the spillover. Owners and scholars (and probably some bots too, lol) can still channel till more features are released.
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I agree. Nearly every player I see is an obvious bot (they get stuck on altars and move in a consistent bot-like way no matter how long I follow them)–who exactly are we serving by giving money to them? Not investors, not scholars, not gamers, not pixelcraft. Completely nutzo, imo. It would be way better for everyone involved to halt for now and relaunch in a way that makes any kind of sense for what we’re trying to achieve. Not only are we just bleeding $ in a bear market to the worst botdaddies, it looks horrible to anyone coming in who genuinely wants to get involved.
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I’m not sure from which planet you frens are. But I’m from Earth, where botters have already started preparing for the “Review Period” implementation. They will bypass this solution faster than you will implement it.
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I’m going to start a new thread specifically about doing whitelist only rentals.
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Yes, taking responsibility for our behaviour is the way to succeed. You can’t just bot your rentals and expect to not get bots as customers. The portion of our community that is playing this as bot-to-earn(using rental bots and not interacting with the customer) is the reason our main customers are bots too.
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IMO Temporarily Disable Spillover like I can imagine the weekly meeting would have made more sense if I wanted to do a full wow raid. Not knowing which item will drop is exciting, and weekly savings can be spread across player-directed areas. maybe even more encouraging if it can be integrated. It will encourage the owners of the vacant land to at least build an altar. We may be ghosts, but we are not in the grave! This is our universe!
Sorry if I missed it, but has anyone (Dan/PC) shared any data around the bot problem?
How many accounts have been flagged/banned as bots total. What percentage of total players is that?
What percentage of banned accounts were on whitelists?
How many daily rentals are executed from those on whitelists and those not on whitelists?
What is the average amount of alchemica collected by renter per period? Do we see a bifurcation/ is it obvious that a certain subset of players are collecting way more then the average player when period adjusted?
What is current total alchemica emissions per day/ trend over time?
What percentage of daily emissions have been collected by flagged bots?
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The voice of sanity! So far all I’ve seen/heard are anectodal comments like
-20%-50% are maybe probably bots
-wouldn’t surprise me if 80+% are bots
-bots are everywhere because they bump into altars and walk funny
Feels we’re becoming a mob, out with torches and pitchforks, fueled by fear, speculation and groupthink with no hard evidence.
How hard is it to log keystrokes to check for perfect or formulaic movement? Is this something we do now? Is it easy for bots to fool these measures?
My only experience here is with a racing game called trackmania that records keystrokes and makes it easy to identify non human input. If that forces botters to behave like humans in game then a significant amount of our worries are reduced (apart from the social aspect) as there is no advantage over a human player in terms of extraction (except bots controlling many addresses which still need to be controlled in other ways, and for which good ideas have been proposed)
The paranoia around the secrecy behind the info is a tricky one but I feel like I’m voting in the dark here.
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Our main dev says he’s been working on bots full time for the last month, and that it’s a battle that’s impossible to win.
You’re right we shouldn’t just rely on anecdotes or pull out the pitchforks, but I challenge you to spend ~15 minutes in the gotchiverse following people around until you are sure whether they are a real player or a bot. I don’t know if it’s 50% or 80% or more, but at least half of gotchis I run into are 100% obvious bots who never respond to emotes, change how they walk, or are able to approach alchemica in a human way (most commonly they sort of awkwardly spiral in once they get close, if that makes sense).
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Definitely how I’d envisioned the spillover! All the discussions pointed toward that too, there were talks of how the walls would delay gotchis trying to get your spillover, etc. When did it become this wide and on what basis, is it because we are too early and the level of aaltars is still very low on most parcels? It’s really one of the few parameters on which we have control over right now and I agree that at the moment we are dilapidating alchemica for no gain to the global ecosystem so we should adjust those
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CoderDan has been clear that he has spent heaps of time combatting bots - and that is a shame as I suspect his talents would be best used on other things.
I’m curious as to what his efforts have achieved though - is he saying 20%-50% of ppl attempting to get into the gotchiverse are bots and he’s stopped most of them? Or that our best efforts still mean 20%-50% of players in there are bots? If it’s just effort intensive but working we need PC to hire someone to keep doing it full time (or a bot task force to hire someone)
I’ve spent plenty of time in the gotchiverse collecting alchemica and I just obviously can’t tell who’s a bot. I feel like I have fair races for alchemica with other gotchis and I almost never see obvious, weird, non human movements despite looking for them. I don’t often emote ppl. For me the terrible lag can easily cause ppl to move weirdly and I’m bumping into aaltars all the time cos I’m looking at my phone instead of where I’m going lol (decorations will not help me lol)
I’m definitely not asserting that bots are not a big problem - I just don’t have solid info either way (also, appreciate your reported experience)
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I dunno, fren, but truly I have a hard time finding human players. My habit is to follow the first gotchi that arrives on screen each time I channel and see if I can tell. One thing that’s made it even more obvious for me is to follow a gotchi until it finds a piece of alchemica, then beat it to it (usually easy because it can’t efficiently walk that last few inches honing in), rinse and repeat–if I succeed or even attempt this 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x in a row with zero reaction from the gotchi (no change in walking behavior to get away from me, no “frustrated” movement at my poaching, no stopping, no emotes), I can’t believe it’s a human.
This is also just a good strategy to collect alchemica. Look especially for ~equally-segmented diagonal movement that looks like it “knows where it’s going” way off screen.
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What bothers me is the idea of creating a bot taask force that operates on ambiguous indicators like “spirals into alchemica”
I’d love to see stats on the bot problem, but hearing that bots are a significant problem for devs is enough for me.
Still, I’d appreciate having more technical/accurate ways to identify bots, at least for a task force.
I have read everything that you are here and understand that you are getting written utter nonsense.
you say that there are problems with bots, but in fact there are none.
Let’s say that the game is 100% real people. when channeling a drop, the alha and all living people collect it and sell it. the average player has no need for alchemy.
I have played before and professionally that I will sit 12 hours a day and get 15$ for it. Now if I sit 12 hours a day, I will get a maximum of $ 2-3 (if I’m lucky)
and now let’s say that you enter a pass, 300 people will play at most 300 people in the game. currently there are no applications of mechanics for alchemy. all farmers should rejoice at the transition to the alchemy course, because now they can buy it cheaply, then the hamsters will come and buy it at high prices. what is the point of all this controversy?
I don’t see any problems. I know one thing, if you introduce restrictions in any way, the game will die.
look at the world’s MMORPGs as an example of WOW. did they impose restrictions on russian players due to the regular ones and how did it turn out for them?
you are doing the same for yourself.
all your thoughts are idiotic and do not carry any logic. that 2000 bots play, that 2000 people they will all sell alchemy because of uselessness. you are whining here that the course is sagging and looking for a solution, in fact you are going around and around and do not understand the obvious.
bans don’t help, nothing helps, gotches develop very slowly. there will be new mechanics - everything will be fine with the game. restrict people - centralize the whole game.
aren’t we in a decentralized game?
you want no bots, you want to limit everything, who will you do better? yourself in the future? may be. but people who play now will lose interest in the game. in the future with “passes” and all that crap you’re trying to come up with here, people won’t be interested in miraculously getting it. there will be a maximum of 500 people online in gochi with all your passes.
Have you ever seen what% of people own land? I saw an account that has over 100 lands, and the average account has 50 lands. we know by math that 600 people own all the gochi assets. that is, these 600 people decide who will play and who will not (in case of omissions)
disabling alchemy spawn will cause those who own lands and gochiks to play, and this is 600 people.
question for you Dan, do you want this? so that 600 people play the project that you are doing with all their hearts?
I said everything, good luck to everyone
p.s. Gochi owners bend prices, a day costs 3 ghst. Think about it
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Yeah, all alchemica is dedicated to channeling i.e. spillover 0 or it’s range reduced to 20 gotchis kek Good bonus boost for laand owners to save some up for upcoming upgrades 
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We need waaaalls lol
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Extended version of what’s i’ve been saying exactly. No matter who’s selling alch, me or botters. It’s not a matter of gameplay but tokenomics issue. Like a prayer Supply/Demand = Price.