Buying A Bot To Level-Up Your Account Actually Works! (How Bots Are Ruining ARAM and AI games)

From a perfectly personal standpoint I feel like bots need to be acted upon more strictly. One of the issues is though that it isn't terribly hard to get a bot to act enough like a new player that having an automatic system in place risks hitting new players.

Most bots aren't that in depth, but that is because Riot seems to tend to go on botting waves, specifically trying to hunt down the actual companies and completely remove them from the face of the earth in one big sweep. If you remember a while back they managed to take down the largest botting service at the time and wiped out far more bots than they would have if they tackled them on an individual basis IMO.

Not having anything to do with Riot's end of that though I can't really say (and even if I did know I couldn't say) exactly how they are dealing with it.

From a programming standpoint though I know it can be pretty easy to identify how an automated program is detecting the differences between your bot and actual players. From there it tends to be pretty easy to adapt the rest of your bots and suddenly all you have done is weed out a couple and cause the rest to be even harder to spot.

So short end solutions are actually quite easy, as you mentioned though it is the long term solution that really matters.

One option would be upping the security to enter the game, but ultimately that only kills off small time botters and makes the actual companies just hire a couple workers to manually register accounts.

Their was the idea of having accounts be hooked to phone numbers but I agree with Riot's stance that it would not make up for the issues it causes to new players.

Ultimately there is no real long term solution as eventually bots will be good enough to pass off as actual players, although at that point there is no longer an issue until they get better than actual players.

So realistically I think focusing on the companies and causing enough pain to them to discourage other botter companies from even focusing on league is the most efficient strategy, even if it does look like nothing is happening for long periods of time.

Of course as someone who works on games I have a lot of sympathy with the "grand scheme of things" view. As a player it is still painful, but that doesn't mean that throwing a ban at even bot that appears is actually more efficient, especially since botting services are often also tied in with boosting services so they can both be wiped out at once.

Now as for the boards and naming and shaming bots:

Frankly I think 99% of the people who use the boards would be responsible with it. The remaining 1% is a margin we can deal with. The issue is how many people wouldn't know about the rule in the first place?

While I can't say exactly how many report relating to name and shame we get a day I can definitely say that it is quite a number. A good chunk of those people simply don't know about the Name and Shaming rule in the first place.

Maybe a monthish ago new rules were added to player recruitment and pinned at the top of the page saying exactly how often people can bump/repost. Player recruitment has only just started to take a drop in reposts/bumps, and that is due to way more policing on that board than any other board the roaming wardens cover.

So while I think 99% of player would be responsible about it, a good 25% wouldn't know about the rule in the first place and would either:

A) Report it (Now we actually have to go and check on it)

B) Mess with the comment section (usually when someone posts an incorrect correction someone else responds and gets so many upvotes it stunts the rest of the post and dominates the discussion which is something we want to avoid.)

C) They would see other people posting names and no one blinking an eye so they would think naming and shaming actual players is Ok, causing another rise in reports, and meaning that as Wardens we do suddenly need to go through and check most posts. This is only complicated because most people don't provide much evidence, and since most bots are pre lv 30 there is no ranked match history to check so as Wardens we have no way to tell for sure and hit a rough spot when it comes to deciding what to do with posts like that.

The biggest thing is that we might be willing to do all that if it actually contributed anything. However it doesn't. Knowing the names of some accounts you will probably never meet doesn't add to the discussion, it doesn't help Riot identify them, it does nothing good at best and causes a hate fest in the comment section at worst. Listing the names of 3 bot accounts doesn't raise any more awareness than just saying "3 different bot accounts".

Sorry about how long winded this got, to put it simply we see every report that people post on the boards. There are usually 2 Roaming Wardens online at a time at best, only 4 of us in total. We have to go through every single report on the half dozen boards we monitor, read through the post/comment, often read through the main post if it is a comment, then either dismiss it if it is wrong, delete the comment, lock the thread, or in severe cases summon up our dark overlords to rain wrath and punishment upon those who crossed the line and decided to keep going.

If you have ever had a post removed for whatever reason, even as simple as being in the wrong section, you will notice that you got a short paragraph in response. If it was relatively recently you might notice it is a bit longer and contains links to the proper board, terms of service, universal rule, and a copy of your post depending on the situation.

So any time we delete/lock a post/comment we have to explain why and give all the necessary links. We have to copy the person's post and drop it in on deletes too, fixing any of those stupid ' to ' errors, and then go back to look at our beautiful queue.

So if it is an incorrect report it takes all of 30 seconds to deal with. However sometimes we can spend upwards of 10-15 minutes on a single report. Now tack on the time of actually checking whether or not a player is a bot. Then sometimes we aren't sure so we ask some other Wardens for advice and time gets added on. Finally half an hour after starting on this theoretical report we decide the guy needs "wrath and punishment from our dark overlords" and have to yell at them until they wake up and Rito Plz uses smite.

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