Solutions for bots - Best ideas (?)

I ain't sending no one my info.

And if I see a bot, I report it and then PK it. Live GMs can check it out when they have the time for it.

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If they have that information, couldn't they just limit the amount of accounts under one name? And if they can't then how exactly would a picture (that could be not even of me) would prevent botting?

There's AI generated faces now that botters could use with a bit of photoshop touchup and potential botters from 3rd world countries could just go take photos of random people and use those.

And if you're suggesting sending Intrepid photos of your IDs - that's gonna be a "nah dawg" from me yet again.

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Doesn't prevent a lot of them.

Spoofing is easy. I say this as someone who has worked in the 'field' of trying to help stop it.

Until you reach PRC levels of surveillance and don't allow payment by debit card, you won't manage this.

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In the one 'game community' we had to find ways to get rid of players who were problematic (since this applies in all cases) we didn't ban the account directly, just applied hidden disadvantages to them. This way the player would report it as a bug, not knowing that we had 'caught them'.

We could then have people gather a LOT more information on them, explicitly have them create new accounts using the types of spoofing methods that one might use but the ordinary person wouldn't have easy access to, flag that they could and would do this easily, etc.

It's easier to catch people when they don't think you're after them.

Bots specifically, I personally believe can only be prevented by proper game design, but the general 'make sure you can identify them and deal with this situation' that you are mostly talking about, we deal with in this way. 'Throw a random bug into their character, wait for them to report it, gather info about them when they report it, flag them, maybe spook them by telling them "hey did you know you were also under review for this thing you supposedly did? Did that get cleared up btw?" and so on'.

Intrepid won't tell us what they will do, but since you asked, that's what we did.

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I definitely worry about bot honey traps. Top guilds have basically no reason to not run bots in their chosen node if you think about it. The bot benefits the node and therefore the guild in a lot of indirect ways. Even if IS clamps down on benefiting from the mats they will generate, baiting political enemies into attacking an 'innocent' green bot the guild knows not to attack them, but other people don't.

And you know what sucks if this scenario happens? Once people go red trying to get rid of these bots, the goon squad can roll in take what drops you gained killing the bot without fear of being tracked as bot users and your gear takes the damage and possibly gets lost setting you back time and resources. They can literally just sucker you into laundering their ill gotten mats for them. That's why I'm hoping IS manages to hire a top gun Security dev.

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This will obviously be used to harass people during combat.

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Almost zero consumer grade internet providers will give anyone a static IP. Your IP changes over time. With IPv4 exhaustion as a serious concern, huge swaths of internet providers (nearly all ISPs in many countries; many university housing departments in the US) will combine hundreds of unrelated customers onto the same IP address. Add to this that someone malicious has numerous ways of getting other IP addresses.

It's not a bad thought, it's just that it's the way we defeated ban evaders in the early 2000s. You've needed more advanced tactics since about that era. It's still useful sometimes, but it's never enough on its own.

There are a LOT of methods you can use (and I've used a decent amount of them), but banning financials (credit card number, etc) is one of the better ones. Though these days you can even get 'unlimited' CC numbers from certain privacy services. Most companies have gone to SMS verification, these days. It's unpopular for various reasons, but some big names do use it (Overwatch 2, I hear lately).