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Server-Side LCP Detection (2) Solution

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ZipZap

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I posted this in the previous thread discussion regarding the article posted by Floops83. If you've not read this article, take the time to read it, and realize this technology has been in implementation since 2009 or prior and imo is the evil behind 99% of the ban activity.
Server-Side Bot Detection in Massive Multiplayer Online Games

The summary of the article is that its not nodes per hour or auctions posted that's getting farmers banned. Its sophisticated waypoint detection/analysis. Entire discussion in this thread.
Here

The solution, which i also posted in that thread, is copied below. I feel this is important enough to warrant a new thread for discussion of solutions, and important enough to warrant developer input as well.

The "FIX"...

Option 1/Existing Profiles - Gatherbuddy needs to be redesigned to pick a random waypoint out of the waypoints, then fly directly there. Once there, pick another random waypoint, and fly there. This will result in a less efficient pathing, but you will not trip the LCP (Longest Common Prefix) detection which this article describes. What you'll effectively have is a bot that will stay within the circle or what ever shape your profiles x/y coordinate dictate.

Option 2/No Profiles - Gatherbuddy needs to simply ask what zone you want to farm in, and use the mesh to keep you within that zone while 'bouncing' in random directions from its edges. This way you never form a detectable path, since your not moving along a waypoint, and you'll never trip the LCP detection since they have no reliable 'path' do develop from your coords, and your not traveling along known coords.

No common waypoints to record, no way for this system as it exists to establish a common path, no actual path which to compare against established 'public path' waypoints, means no way to trip the LCP detection.


Not looking for flamers, looking for constructive feedback.
 
I think devs already know that and i hope they work on it. Very nice options!
 
Option 2/No Profiles - Gatherbuddy needs to simply ask what zone you want to farm in, and use the mesh to keep you within that zone while 'bouncing' in random directions from its edges. This way you never form a detectable path, since your not moving along a waypoint, and you'll never trip the LCP detection since they have no reliable 'path' do develop from your coords, and your not traveling along known coords.
Click to expand...

I like this option. Nobody having to make paths anymore sounds nice, just add in a personal 'blacklist' that could be adjusted to a certain area as desired. saves people time, helps noobs get started, and may address the issue. If this is indeed how Blizz is catching people.

I can tell you though, that back when I worked with them, they used stats like NPH, Hours played, Chat per time played, Auctions Posted, and looked at where the gold was going.

Most of the info was gathered automatically, a script was ran to hit those that fell in the red zones, and those that appealed were looked at closer to determine guilt. That was how it was a few years ago anyhow.
 
Option 2 is good but Option 1 won't come cos they don't like increased inefficiency over randomization.
 
Considering Option 1:

WHat do you think the "randomize hotspots" function in your gb2 options does?
 
Questing works fine. leveling my third 85 right now strictly with kicks.

If you absolutely have to GB2 right now, the best way to test the waters that I can think of would be to make a multi-route profile with those addons linked earlier. Routes from curse, and the routebuddy plugin work together, thats how I make my own routes.

Time how long it takes to hit half or 3/4's of the route, then make your guy farm that twice every 24 hours.

Do that for a few months and see how it works, if no ban increase the farm time with just one account. continue till you get banned, keeping track of the thresholds.

From there you should be able to determine how risky it is to farm your particular route for x amount of hours, and you can make a call from there on what you want to do.

Thanks
 
ZipZap said:
Option 1/Existing Profiles - Gatherbuddy needs to be redesigned to pick a random waypoint out of the waypoints, then fly directly there. Once there, pick another random waypoint, and fly there. This will result in a less efficient pathing, but you will not trip the LCP (Longest Common Prefix) detection which this article describes. What you'll effectively have is a bot that will stay within the circle or what ever shape your profiles x/y coordinate dictate.

Option 2/No Profiles - Gatherbuddy needs to simply ask what zone you want to farm in, and use the mesh to keep you within that zone while 'bouncing' in random directions from its edges. This way you never form a detectable path, since your not moving along a waypoint, and you'll never trip the LCP detection since they have no reliable 'path' do develop from your coords, and your not traveling along known coords.
Click to expand...

Option 3: Skip the next random(x) waypoints. This should work much better than option 1, you will still have a raw circle and it shouldn't trigger LCP.
 
I think Blizzard implemented their own adaptation of this method into World of Warcraft, to reduce your risk of ban start using private profiles and make new ones every week or so. I got one bot banned because I used a public profile but my other 5 bots that used private profiles are still good to go.

Most of the ban reports in this forum shows that most people are getting hit with a ban when using public profiles, more noticeably kickz questing profiles.
 
I got a simple question, if let's say I make a profile with tons of hotspots in the same zone, lets say I wanna farm GIO and I make tons of hotspots in townlong steppes. After that if I make bot to randomize hotspots will it do the trick?
 
If Blizzard is using waypoints to detect bots then why weren't toons on Kickz profiles the first to get banned since his profiles use waypoints and his questing profiles are used more frequently than any other Honorbound profiles?
 
lotrodude said:
If Blizzard is using waypoints to detect bots then why weren't toons on Kickz profiles the first to get banned since his profiles use waypoints and his questing profiles are used more frequently than any other Honorbound profiles?
Click to expand...

It could be because the single questing character might only travel that same path once or twice. I would think it would be much harder to compare waypoints across characters/realms than tracking just one character
 
633csi said:
It could be because the single questing character might only travel that same path once or twice. I would think it would be much harder to compare waypoints across characters/realms than tracking just one character
Click to expand...

Understand, the path/waypoints that they're measuring your LCP against have to come from somewhere. I propose that for lvl90's they are character specific. I.E. your historical coordinates are tracked and mapped, generating a path, from which to measure future coords against in order to develop your LCP.

For anything less than lvl90 the path is developed simply by either internally testing/running/leveling common profiles like Kicks and developing a path from multiple in-house tests of these profiles, or by simply recording coords for everyone leveling, and overlaying then all to find the 'common paths'. Yes, single questing characters only travel the same path once or twice, but they could easily develop the path for LCP detection by leveling in house and recording/tracking it, or by analyzing several thousand unique character coords for lvl specific toons.


lotrodude said:
If Blizzard is using waypoints to detect bots then why weren't toons on Kickz profiles the first to get banned since his profiles use waypoints and his questing profiles are used more frequently than any other Honorbound profiles?
Click to expand...

Seems pretty obvious to me, but maybe i'm just speculating here...

1) Ban the shit outa the farmers, then they rebuy WoW ($$Cha Chingy$$)
2) Ban the shit outa the farmers lvling toons to rebuild their farming fleet, then they rebuy ($$Cha Chingy$$)
 
Last edited:
ZipZap said:
Understand, the path/waypoints that they're measuring your LCP against have to come from somewhere. I propose that for lvl90's they are character specific. I.E. your historical coordinates are tracked and mapped, generating a path, from which to measure future coords against in order to develop your LCP.

For anything less than lvl90 the path is developed simply by either internally testing/running/leveling common profiles like Kicks and developing a path from multiple in-house tests of these profiles, or by simply recording coords for everyone leveling, and overlaying then all to find the 'common paths'. Yes, single questing characters only travel the same path once or twice, but they could easily develop the path for LCP detection by leveling in house and recording/tracking it, or by analyzing several thousand unique character coords for lvl specific toons.




Seems pretty obvious to me, but maybe i'm just speculating here...

1) Ban the shit outa the farmers, then they rebuy WoW ($$Cha Chingy$$)
2) Ban the shit outa the farmers lvling toons to rebuild their farming fleet, then they rebuy ($$Cha Chingy$$)
Click to expand...


If they are creating common paths from kicks profiles I'm pretty sure we would see more than the ~10 questing ban posts a month, considering those paths haven't changed in......? They are EASILY the most common waypoints used by HB botters.
 
633csi said:
If they are creating common paths from kicks profiles I'm pretty sure we would see more than the ~10 questing ban posts a month, considering those paths haven't changed in......? They are EASILY the most common waypoints used by HB botters.
Click to expand...

Pretty sure the forum has more than 10 questing ban posts per month. Regardless, leveling might be the most common waypoints between different characters, but there not the most repeated. You'll spend what, 7-8 days leveling, while your farming character may have what...50+days farming 2-3 zones? The repetition of farmers is much more easily and reliably detectable.

And beyond LCP detection is blizzards banning policy, which none of us are privy to. Who's to say what level of tolerance they actually have in that policy.

Point being, LCP detection has been here for at minimum 4 years (2009 article). You cannot argue the legitimacy of that technology to detect bot vs humans. HonorBuddy should at least offer true 'Randomization' of Waypoints for farmers..and not just taking a coord and going +5yrs. I mean taking the waypoints in the profile and picking 1 at random. This will avoid almost all chances to raise a flag using LCP detection.

HOWEVER, they could still use the same technology to find the your most common coords, and the resulting map would look like a dotted line, with the actual waypoint locations eventually establishing the botters 'map'. Instead of Longest Common Prefix, they'd use something else like the #Visits to the most frequent waypoints.

Which is why i say the concept of using the nav mesh to just keep you in the zone and randomly bouncing from the edges when your 25-75yds from the edge is a better idea. Truely random, no profile or waypoints involved. Just personal blacklisted areas. Then the technology of tracking our coords would be come irrelevant from a standpoint of detection.
 
It sounds like a really good reason for this ban issue atm.!
Either it has something to do with NPH or the route, why we are getting banned.

The accounts I've got banned (a total of 7/14) have all been running GB2 with public profiles. All but one was 600/600 herb/mining, the one who had not 600/600 yet, was leveling in MoP and was around 560/560. This account was banned at the same time as the 3 others. All of the 4 banned accounts ran at the same time with the last 7 bots that still runs today (toon leveling). All under the same name and similar email addresses (@ wow1 - wow2 @ -, etc.) but this one acc were, WITHOUT PROBLEMS, unbanned at first inquiry. The other 3 have 5-6 mail correspondences.

What I can conclude is, that it must have something to do with the route, maby also NPH, and I therefore believe that we should see a new GB where it can be using random waypoints if requestes in the settings, from the developers asap!


So this is a call for developers - Get Started on a new GB :)


- Sorry for bad English.
 
The route your character is traveling is the same all the time. Going from one quest to another, blizzard have an very advanced logging (backlog) which the server generates all the time. It could very well register which and where you moved and then from the log they can generate a map where your character has traveled from point to point.

They can generate these maps and compare them to other users, now if you're using a public profile let's say a highly public one (leveling).. They can then see which character has gotten from point a) to point b) at the exact same way, now however since many "normal" players likes to press auto walk or _might_ go the same route as the public profile did, they need more proof. So they generate more points C to D and E to F and all those are the exact same way or similar how odd. Banhammer *poof*

Now if the HB would let's say generate different and randomize the paths it can take to it's current objective this would be a different case. Let's say your public profile has it like this (EXAMPLE)

a) Hey get this quest over to this map z,x,y
b) Then do the quest over here z,x,y

Of course, you may say "how randomized" ?

Instead of going -------------->
We can go ----/---/--/->

What is the / ? :: It indicates we can go Right or Left at a random period of time, this could also eliminate some stuck issues (stuck in a tree or stuck in a fence) during questing. It will look more of a player and not a bot..

But this is not the only issue bot questing has. It's the amount of time it uses to dismount,mount and move towards the objective. A normal player will mount and dismount almost perfectly all the time, for instance a quest mob.

A) We are mounting! Hey we see the mob
B) 1-2 seconds later.. Dismount and target mob then wait 1-2 seconds before actually going into combat.

We also have a scenario where it's very slow on getting the required quests from the NPC itself. This is caused by mostly the profile XML itself rather than HB.
 
Could we get any developer from Bossland to look at this, and get a beta build of "GB3" up and running? :)
 
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