Riot I DEMAND an answer

FarRockBF·2/1/2015, 5:02:21 PM·32 votes·2,091 views

How does a BILLION dollar company not deal with IP farming bots for over a year?

And they are getting ridiculous. I just played a normal 3s match. All 5 other people were bots. Yup, 2 names stuck together and ghost + heal. Running into enemy turrets etc.

But they are getting smarter:

They now use abilities and target people. They use to just AA.
They actually chat. Random COMMON words. Like last game the Vicktor randomly chatted "lol" and "holy shit" and "...". I asked multiple times to confirm that they were not bots but of course no answer... and of course they kept running into enemy turrets.

Please tell me you are doing something about this. I keep reporting them and keep seeing the same ones over and over.

27 Comments

FarRockBF2/1/2015, 5:52:44 PM19 votes

But it doesn't feel like they aren't really doing anything about it? I mean come on..., there is no "Report as IP Bot" option...

That's insane given their numbers.

Matthias91192/1/2015, 5:08:43 PM9 votes

How does a BILLION dollar company not deal with IP farming bots for over a year?

You answered your own question:

[the bots] are getting smarter

Riot figures out what they're doing, the botters make a more advanced bot that Riot can't detect, then Riot tries to figure out what they changed and it keeps going. It is very difficult to reliably detect and get rid of client-side scripting/botting. It will likely never go away completely.

Literally every game I've played that involves "grinding" in some way eventually attracts botters, because people will pay to avoid the grind and botters will undercut what a F2P game charges to avoid it. League is the most-played game in the world right now and attracts a lot of attention from people looking to exploit its success.

Jubbinaut2/1/2015, 7:56:14 PM5 votes

While they are banning and removing these accounts as they find them, they're primarily focused on removing the incentive to bot.

For example, the upcoming (seriously, are they ever actually coming?) changes to the RAF system were intended specifically to remove significant incentive to botters. Permabanning accounts post-sale is intended to disincentivize buying the accounts (which should hit those who bot accounts to sell right where it hurts - the pocketbook).

And adding an "IP Bot" report option would do nothing more than make it a bigger issue as more people would become aware of it. There's exactly zero benefit to that, overall.

Trylobyte2/1/2015, 11:36:43 PM3 votes

Bots will always exist in free to play games.

Dealing with bots in a free-to-play game is literally impossible if you employ the simplistic 'Just ban the bots' approach. In fact, it actually makes the problem worse. If you start mass-banning bot accounts, those people who are making and selling those bot accounts still have their customers and they still have a quota they need to meet, so they will simply make a lot more bots to ensure they still meet their quota despite harsher ban actions. Remember, because the game is free to play there is no limit to the number of accounts they can conjure up at any given time. It's not an easy problem to deal with - Bots evolve along with the measures taken against them if there's an incentive for the botters to keep making them and selling accounts. Botters may not have as much money as the company, but they generally have more people, more time, and a much, much narrower focus in what they do.

The best way to manage the bot problem (because it's never going to go away entirely) is to hit their customers, which is, by all accounts, what Riot is doing. Lower the incentive to buy bot-farmed accounts, lower the number of bots farming accounts. It's the best that can be done realistically.

Raptamei2/1/2015, 7:01:49 PM2 votes

Riot should bring back IP gains in custom games. At least they'd bot in customs instead of ruining TT.

Silents4292/1/2015, 9:43:29 PM2 votes

The fact you are demanding anything makes me glad to know that no one at Riot will comment.

They are removing reasons to have bots, because trying to remove bots is really fucking hard to do. I mean unless you have a specific way outside of just reporting?

D0nC2/3/2015, 3:23:44 AM1 votes

In all fairness I have rarely seen a bot outside of domination, scripts have come by the boatloads, though.

If they know bots have gotten smarter, why can't they simply add a fucking report system for Bots instead of 10 different forms of "he hurt my feelings" options?

Once an account has been labeled a bot user, freaken hire people to stalk those players and apply the law of the land accordingly.

OP is correct in asking where the hell is all the money going.

SlarkeSSC2/1/2015, 8:49:29 PM1 votes

From what I've seen, bots aren't all that easy to deal with. I figure if a company as big as blizzard still has problems with bots, Rito will too. Although I will say there should be a report a bot option.

2 much sauuuce2/1/2015, 10:41:09 PM1 votes

Bots are so fun. Especially in ARAM's. You can tell they are bots cuz they can't do their skills properly. I once saw a Varus bot charge his Q multiple times, and never ONCE fired it off the entire match. Was hilarious.

Urdnot Entar2/2/2015, 3:59:36 AM1 votes

How does a BILLION dollar company not deal with most of the game-breaking bugs that have been ruining games for years? How does a BILLION dollar company not deal with afk's/leavers/dc's for the most part? How does a BILLION dollar company not deal with having such a terrible ranked system for so long? How does a BILLION dollar company not deal with matchmaking issues for so long? How does a BILLION dollar company not deal with ...

...

FarRockBF2/2/2015, 1:25:13 PM1 votes

Honestly I don't give a crap about botters in custom or Coop games. But in normal on TT. It ruins the main gamemode I play :(.

And loads of people stopped playing TT specifically because of bots.

Yash Gautam2/2/2015, 8:34:50 PM1 votes

This happened to me a while ago. I thought they got rid of this with the refer a friend thing.