Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Gotta Captcha Them All

Aion is going to have a change in an upcoming update to help keep bots from monopolizing the game's resources. On paper, that sounds great, but they decided to implement it by putting a debuff on the player after gathering, which is removable by answering a captcha.



LOL.

While combating bots is a good thing, I think this is a very poor and laughable implementation. I'd prefer it if they did something that was in the context of the game. Age of Conan, for instance, sometimes spawned NPCs that would attack you when harvesting, like bandits or druids [angered that you were felling a sacred tree or whatever]. They posed little threat to a player that was paying attention, but a bot would be taken down eventually.

A better alternative would be to make harvesting/gathering involve a mini-game, like the ones in Free Realms.

Devs, if you really want to combat bots, just make the gameplay fun. Don't make crafting and harvesting a simple matter of clicking on a button and waiting. Make it something you have to play and react to.

3 comments:

Yeebo said...

Good lord, do they expect you to type those out every single time you harvest a resource node? That's insane...

Hunter said...

You must be kidding.

Hechicera said...

It's not every node, there is a very low percentage chance on each harvest. Presumably to make the bot's stall randomly until someone noticed. That said, it's not on the NA servers. Not even sure it's live on Korean ones.

Harvesting seems fine. The bots aren't in answer to people needing relief from the activity, they are for RMT purposes. Aion has a huge bot infestation right now, and the player base is generally unhappy that bots are harvesting nodes and killing mobs that they want to use. Interesting community backlash against anyone even remotely suspected of actually buying gold too.