As many of you may know, we’ve been plagued by some bots over the past few weeks.
I’ve spent today hunting a bunch down, and have just gone through with a banwave. Another 25-30 have bitten the dust. We’re getting better at spotting them, and we’ll continue to add code to automate this into future versions so that spotting them becomes even easier!
If you see someone in your guild with a “(banned)” tag next to their name… they were botting, and they’ve just been banned.
When a player in a guild is banned, we deduct any trophies they’ve earned from the guild.
The problem we have had prior to today was what to do with GOLD contributed by the player who is botting… it’s really not fair that other players benefited from it, but it’s extremely difficult for us to follow the money trail and reverse the damage done.
But we now have a new policy!
If a player is banned for botting, and is in a guild (or has contributed gold to a guild) rather than trying to reverse the damage done, we’re simply adding it onto the next set of guild tasks - split evenly amongst them, based on the theory that the guild players can make up the gold that was given by the botter before getting rewards again. In most cases it’s a small amount, but there were a couple of cases this week where there has been a significant amount added to the tasks.
Botting would be any means of hacking to automatically gain wins, resources, etc. by exploiting internal game data. Botting would also be the use of hacking or external programs to loop a specific task such as completing the treasure map minigame, PvP, and other similar gameplay.
Loving the stern-but-fair stuff. Down with botters! Time to check the leaderboards for conspicuous gaps…
OK I actually just thought of an issue. If other guilds are anything like mine, there will only be two types of tasks being focused on. So the Key and Gem tasks will be dealt with, but whatever the other one is will just be sitting there as per usual, only with a giant extra cost on it, and it will never be done. (And the guild will only deal with 2/3 of their ‘debt’.)
It mostly happens on PC, since it’s easiest to do there.
Pretty difficult on iOS, because of the way the devices are set up.
Android is an interesting one… can be done, but you need to be clever… but Android emulators on PC are a potential issue.
One guy had three accounts Intrim! Twice! All Botting! Please don’t let this how players see Intrim. We are still a good guild!
I have been gaming for 25years. I do understand there will always be hackers and cheaters and everything else regardless of what the devs do. Well done on your part on removing these people from the game.
I second Nono’s comment… as far as we can tell every player in Intrim, apart from the aforementioned clown, is playing hard and fair, often working their butts off to get some really great rewards for each other every week.
