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Yet Another Bot Complain Thread (With a Solution)

minkypink·11/20/2019, 1:19:59 AM·8 votes·4,191 views

Because the morons wonderful and patient mods over at /r/leagueoflegends deemed this against their rules.

I used to only see bots in ARAM, TT, or SR games about 1 in maybe 50 games. These days I see them in what feels like every other game. They ruin the game because all they do is run down the lane and auto minions while randomly using abilities. Because of this, they can usually go undetected by typical bot-spotting techniques, since the system might think they're just really bad players and not just bots. All bots have the following characteristics:

  1. They all take Ghost then Heal. No other order of the summoners, and always those two since they are the default on new accounts.

  2. They all have summoner names that include a regular English/American name in conjunction with a random sum of letters. Ex: "tOnCcSean"

  3. They sit in fountain until about minute 2 or 3 and then they run down a lane and begin auto attacking minions and randomly using abilities. They will also buy standard items.

  4. They always have one of the 5 starter icons (Ahri, Yi, etc.)

  5. Their entire match history is a series of the same exact summoners with mixed results on champions. Most games they are 0 and some number. Some random games they will have a few random kills, maybe through random abilities if they happen to get Karthus.

Here are a few screenshots of these summoners to prove that they follow this general pattern.

https://i.imgur.com/YT6rukP.png

https://i.imgur.com/vFrW5Vl.png

Riot should at the very least ask players who fall into this category to type a phrase into a box, much like they do for AFK notices. It could be something as simple as, "I am not a bot." It wouldn't be hard to implement, because all they really need to do is look for profiles where the player only takes Ghost/Heal, has a weird name, and has a summoner icon from one of the intro sets.

I'm begging you, I can't take it anymore. I just want to play some ARAM :'(.

Also reporting does nothing on these accounts. Don't waste your breath.

9 Comments

Rabblerouser11/20/2019, 1:28:39 AM2 votes

/r/leagueoflegends is nothing but esports nowadays anyway. That and they're abusing their power in championmains as well. Who cares about 'em. :P

I can see problems with logistics on any account with names like that run ghost/heal, though. People could just be beginners and playing poorly. It almost demands manual review.

There should be something internal within Riot, such is flagging EVERY report that includes the "cheating" checkbox to be manually reviewed BY AN ACTUAL PERSON AT RIOT. Not run over by an imperfect bot. An automated system would probably be light on punishment anyway and let a LOT of bots through.

A few other things to help people feel like things are actually changing: Make these manual reviews give something akin to the Instant Feedback reports (which I'm under the assumption you only get these for automatic bans, not manual review bans). ALSO EDIT THE "CHEATING" TICKBOX TO INCLUDE SOMETHING ABOUT BOTTERS IN THE DESCRIPTION. That way people don't just report for "intentionally feeding". But also tick the cheating box so Riot knows what sort of report it is.

Rabblerouser11/20/2019, 1:37:50 AM2 votes

Who the hell is going through these and downvoting people actually wanting to offer genuine solutions?

Rabblerouser11/20/2019, 1:44:26 AM2 votes

What gets me is why bots are moving to ARAM. I'm no programmer but I'd imagine TFT would be easier to bot and wouldn't affect an entire team as you're playing on your own.

Pierce The Veal11/20/2019, 1:44:52 AM2 votes

You’ve done great work. When such trends are so obvious and have been for such a long time (at least a year+ in TT), it SHOULD be easy to take care of them. Unfortunately, a small indie company doesn’t want to put in the effort of flagging accounts that meet several bot criteria. As you said, all they need is something that pops up if people meet several criterion that makes them type a random phrase (if it wasn’t random it could be further automated). Prevent them from entering a game until they enter said phrase. Boom. If they don’t enter the phrase within X period of time, suspend the account.

Ice Weasel X11/20/2019, 2:16:33 AM1 votes

As someone who frequently plays a Coop vs. AI game to guarantee FWotD timer resets, I've seen a lot of these.

{quoted}

 1. They all take Ghost then Heal. No other order of the summoners, and always those two since they are the default on new accounts.

Not always, just usually since they're the starting spells. It also depends on the bot variant. Many of them are using the same scripts, and the popular ones change over time. For a long while, Smite bots were common on SR so they could just hide in the jungle and be less noticeable avoiding champ interaction.

{quoted}

 2. They all have summoner names that include a regular English/American name in conjunction with a random sum of letters. Ex: "tOnCcSean"

Again, most of them do this, but not all. I've seen some adhering to the typical bot waypoints with more credible account names. They may be existing accounts which were stolen and added to the bot pool to sell off, or lazy people with access to the bot apps. I've even seen people take over halfway through a botted game after being called out on it. A bot following auto waypoints and ignoring pings/comments for 10 minutes suddenly stopped moving after someone mentioned reporting bots, then started interacting with the team and actually playing, including chatting.

{quoted}

 3. They sit in fountain until about minute 2 or 3 and then they run down a lane and begin auto attacking minions and randomly using abilities. They will also buy standard items.

The funny thing about this is that some of them appear to be fully time-based botscripts rather than reactive. Just the other day I saw 3 bots queued together crash at load (one thing the bigger account sales groups will do is multibox several bots per computer on VMs to maximize numbers, which can cause connectivity problems and super slow loading). When reconnected, they went through the standard waypoints. Move to a turret and stand there until allied minions pass, then follow them to lane (it's about an even split between fountain delayed bots and turret standing bots). Except this was 5 minutes after the game had started, and they were functioning as if the game had just started. So they stopped at a turret and didn't move until the specified time from their entry to the game.

{quoted}

Riot should at the very least ask players who fall into this category to type a phrase into a box, much like they do for AFK notices. It could be something as simple as, "I am not a bot." It wouldn't be hard to implement, because all they really need to do is look for profiles where the player only takes Ghost/Heal, has a weird name, and has a summoner icon from one of the intro sets.

It's not that simple. That would interfere with legit newbies fairly frequently. The name thing is more problematic than you realize. RegEx parsing is a mess that many successful programmers love bitching about because of the nightmares it can cause.

{quoted}

Also reporting does nothing on these accounts. Don't waste your breath.

You're wrong here. Riot does ban them, just not immediately. https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/de/c/player-behavior-moderation/cG73k0eG-banned-for-mmr-boosting-just-now-and-dont-know-why

They don't want to give bot users immediate feedback on their discovery so that they don't help the bot writers figure out what is getting them caught. Banning them later also has a side effect of upsetting the account buyers, hopefully discouraging them from further purchases.