Boards›Player Behavior

Alternative Measures to Tackling Bot Accounts

Kortekai·5/7/2019, 8:17:14 PM·3 votes·5,066 views

I was talking with someone I recently Solo/Duo queued with, and it came up that the first 3-4 years of me playing League, I played Twisted Treeline exclusively. I did finally find some fun taking my Malzahar build top-lane, and from there I enjoyed a nice combination of game types. I still love the style Treeline has to it, since there's a lot more room for experimentation there. I've compared it to the difference between pro and college football: there's neat ways to pull off some crazy stuff in Treeline, just because its meta isn't as clearly established. Treeline has quirks, isn't fully balanced, and finding ways to use champions in new, counter-intuitive ways is a big part of enjoying Treeline.

I haven't played much Treeline the last few years though, because of the bots everyone is complaining about. Did a recent 1-week search on these forums, and there's a lot of people asking "Why doesn't Riot care?" Now I get that it's a banning process, and botters will keep botting, but why can't we test some sort of new system for these games? Something during the champ select process to help keep this from happening as easily? We already have the timers and things, but those really only catch people who stepped away for a bit too long. Here's a forum thread talking about some sort of captcha method:

https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/player-behavior-moderation/tTzx2b0I-player-owned-bot-accounts-ruining-games-in-lobby-captcha-is-a-suggested-solution

...and of course, an article talking about how difficult creating a good verification method has become:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/1/18205610/google-captcha-ai-robot-human-difficult-artificial-intelligence

So what else can we do, as a community, to get better quality for our time? I'm looking for constructive conversation, and hopefully some Riot insight on this. I know that Google has a two-step authentication service which sends a text verification to your phone in order to participate (and that may be going too far for League), and there's always the option of having a more standard captcha to just catch the less refined bots out there. We could even have the lock in button separated into three segments, and have a random one light up to press, or something.

12 Comments

rujitra5/7/2019, 8:31:19 PM3 votes

Many players don’t have a phone, have a broken phone, only have a landline, etc, so phone registration is not going to work.

Captchas or “random button clicks” are great, but it is trivial (read: very easy) for bot operators to bypass those. Computers are very smart.

MyAccountStolen15/7/2019, 10:52:36 PM1 votes

OR you know, make level 30 accounts available for purchase ;). Bye bye bots.

Kortekai5/8/2019, 5:16:55 PM1 votes

As difficult as it is to keep bots from entering a game, what about measures to end games prematurely without penalizing the human players? A couple of ideas:

  • Add a condition to LeaverBuster: when leaving a game, give players the prompt, "Why are you leaving this game?" Give them several most-common options, and if the player clicks "Other player(s) using 3rd-party software," allow players to report bots then and there without a post-game screen. If the report holds up, don't penalize the player for leaving a faulty game.

  • If this is a serious enough problem (which it seems to be), and we already have the spectate option, allow in-game reporting of bots. Riot personnel can spectate the game (probably up to present, instead of delayed spectating) and terminate the game then and there. This method allows Riot to both avoid punishing legitimate players while eliminating rewarding the bot accounts XP.

Of course, both of these options would incur some penalty if players abuse the system and file faulty reports consistently.

Errlang5/8/2019, 10:52:41 PM1 votes

I have now had two games within the last 15-20 played where a teammate of mine was clearly a BOT. It would run straight into enemy team, had delayed reactions as a jungler after killing camps, would blatently open run into lanes. Does not respond in chat except for "macroed" or programmed responses...even tried fake pinging random spot on the map and ran directly into 4 people solo.

These were not griefers or people not knowing how to play the game. the actions were very much bot like. I don't even want to waste my time in ranked anymore if this is the quality of the game now. I'm done.