miscellaneous

Is it a nolifer?! Is it an alien?! Is it a raptorobot?! :o

Guess who is it?

You got it right! It's TONC!

Man being online for 38 hours? Ha? Give me a break...

Do you think the way I think? I do hope so..

42 hours and still levelling. Wondering WHO gave him ac? 😆

47 hours now.

noone cares

cheating is permitted by Ender i quess

Well, legit players do care, the ones like him dont, so suit yourself where you stand.

^^

Please report these issues to me privately. Posting them in the public forums has the exact opposite effect of what we all want (action taken on confirmed cheating) because it gives the person a heads up that their behavior is suspicious and under scrutiny (i.e. it makes them harder to catch them in "the act").

Implying there are no logs where you can see 50 hours of training without a single break. Even if he claims there were several people doing training in single session there is no way its possible to have 0 downtime. But i get it, that is not definitive proof. Also, my opinion may be subjective as he is directly in front of me in HoF and i wanna get to top 10. :)

Bullshit

^ you sold out your shit yet ?

You probably dont get it. No i didnt sell all shit lol

my offer still stands :)

I bid 1 dollar more than trki just to annoy him :)

Please report these issues to me privately. Posting them in the public forums has the exact opposite effect of what we all want (action taken on confirmed cheating) because it gives the person a heads up that their behavior is suspicious and under scrutiny (i.e. it makes them harder to catch them in "the act").

As if a normal person needs to be told that putting an AC on for >48hrs is suspicious. The fact that someone was even willing to try such a thing is a new low even for the post-captcha era. At this point it's hard to see anyone new actually getting caught cheating unless they decide to set up their AC and go on a holiday for a good week or so.

Yeah I think suspicious is an understatement, it ended up being 52+ hours i believe before the bot logged out. There are "situations" where this user could be playing legit but they are highly unlikely and in any of these cases it would make sense to log out every now and again not to raise suspicion of cheating even if they aren't.

I have always been a strong advocate of captcha, I know there is a thread somewhere about it being removed and why but I dont see how this can have a positive effect on catching cheaters, if anything I would vouch for stronger captcha like the picture selection ones that are used here and there online.

tbh the captcha will only make it harder for somebody to be caught in my eyes.

ender is not on anywhere near enough to catch somebody cheating and the captcha will limit people to 20 minutes where as with no captcha they will be using it for alot longer giving ender a chance to catch them

but lets face it if tonc was ACing he was ACing for 52 hours and ender was nowhere to be seen in them 3 days so if he catcha was back no chance ender will catch him ACing in for 20 mins lol

Yeah thats true but it's a lesser of two evils and like you said with Ender not being very active doesnt it make sense to make it as hard as possible for cheaters to carry out their dirty work instead of being able to apparently AC for 52 hours. There are surely better options than to leave the game like this. There was a reason for captcha in the first place, that reason surely hasn't vanished.

The "annoyance" to legit players argument is ridiculous I feel, I would take all the annoyance I could to be sure I'm not playing alongside cheaters. On the other hand though it is obviously vital that there is 101 percent proof of cheating before punishment, I'm not sure how Ender detects this and wouldn't want to know because it's something that should be kept secret from players for obvious reasons but if a legit player is punished that is a complete fail more so than failing to catch somebody cheat.

I don't act on suspicion - my policy has always been to act on definitive evidence. I've played games where legitimate players are banned by overzealous admins and I'm not interested in turning bots4 into the kind of game where legitimate players have to be worried if anything they do is too "suspicious". I simply refuse to have false positives for cheating.

I'm not going to get into what constitutes definitive proof, what logs I have, what can or can't be done while I'm physically present, or what other possible scenarios could result in extremely long online times because discussing this stuff only helps bad actors. I again encourage people to bmail me directly about suspicious behavior so that matters can be investigated more privately. Half the battle is getting the jump on someone while they're unaware they're being evaluated.

I understand you not wanting legit players to worry... but could you give a logical explanation how someone could play for 48 hours straight?

Also, why don't you shoot the community straight when answered the question? What little players you have left have a concern - don't be a dick about it.

Amen

heres two explanations

1 they don't have a job and just play games all day

2 they work at home and play games while working

either way don't be a jealous dick

i've done 36 hours on bots2 and thats when you would get logged out after 15min of inactivity ..... now its an hour which makes 48 hours easy peasy

... but could you give a logical explanation how someone could play for 48 hours straight?

As someone who has had several extremely long sessions in the past, even a 36 hour one once - They couldn't. Sure, It's possible to remain online for that long legitimately if you just didn't sleep and made sure to click at least once every hour to avoid being idled out (which is what I did), but to be actively training for the entire time with no breaks? Yeah...I don't think so. I was sitting at the computer, zoning out for minutes at a time towards the end of that session. It's called Micro Sleep.

Even if he claims there were several people doing training in single session there is no way its possible to have 0 downtime.

Not only that, but I've tested the multi-logging theory as well, and I've found that online time is reset when the bot is logged into on another device (at least in my experience), so that's out. The only way I could see this theory being even remotely plausable is if everyone logged on at around the same time initially, and took turns playing, ensuring that the bot never idles out - and that seems highly unlikely.

Btw, I'm not strictly referring to the player in question here. I've reported several bots that have been actively training for >40 hours in the past year alone, averaging something crazy like 3K trains per day.

It isn't the online time alone that's suspicious, it's the fact that their behavior seems to be automated, and the lack of breaks in the training. There's a big difference between simply keeping yourself from idling out, and spending the entirety of that 36 hours or whatever being active.

Sorry for the triple post, but it turns out I was massively low balling when I wrote they were only averaging 3K trains per day. 2 of them were averaging 4,700 and nearly 7,000 per day respectively: https://imgur.com/a/CXjAl2t

After all those years there are still so many haters, I was inspired by this post actually and made a return to the game, but some dickhead today decided to ruin my NaN when i was so close to level 100.

Most people would happily ruin a potential 100 NaN run if they spot one.

im one of them people that would happily ruin a nan bot or even a bot with high amount of int if i have a bot in that level range

I used to leave em' alone. Not anymore though.

I've done a Friday afternoon (after school) to Monday morning (before school) session in bots2 when I was in High School. Clocked a roughly 60 hour session.

Cocaine is a hell of a drug!

Just throwing it out there that people were pulling 50+ hours when bots4 first came on and massive competitiveness was a lot bigger back then. second, there were legit people back in bots2 that spent hours on hours way more then 60+ that didnt A/C. Its possible considering you can play the game on your phone even at work. simply just hit the damn thing everynow and again and can keep training or scoring or what ever your doing. But hey whaat do i know lol.

-rithy

Obviously not very much, although I do still love you lol

It's just not practical by any means. of course it's not proof per se but dam near close when somone is logged on for 50+ hours... yeah... no! I dont care how competitive things get, 50+ hours and happening commonly like you suggest is a definite sign of A/C

The proof "leans" toward the numbers. Show me how many people in all of bots 4 history have logged more than 50+ hours? not very much at all. so for it to be made to feel like a common occurrence when competition is thick is as silly as the many thoughts I have about you rithy, you sexy beast.

I have been ridiculously active back in the day, scoreing well over 2.4 million in one month. my longest session was 16 hours....

Yeah, sessions longer than 2 days are definitely not common by any stretch of the imagination. Hell, I'd say that anything longer than 16 isn't really all that common. I spend a lot of time checking what's happening and checking up on various bots, and rarely ever do I see anyone being on for 16+ hours. I've only seen 24+ hour sessions a few times, and several of them were from pretty obvious ACers. I'd fight them once and then they'd get stuck on trying to fight for minutes at a time, sometimes until idling out, so it was pretty clear to me that they weren't actually paying attention.

Have there been legit sessions of 50+ hours on bots 4? It's definitely not impossible, but has probably only happened a handful of times. Nos said he once did a 60 hour session on bots 2, and I believe him, but to say that " there were legit people back in bots2 that spent hours on hours way more then 60+ that didnt A/C." is ridiculous.

Way more than 60+ hours? Back when you were idled out after a mere 15 minutes? Yeah...No. There are people that have stayed awake for 3+ days before, so I'm willing to believe a 72 hour session or something insane like that may have happened at one point. Common though? Hell no. Staying awake is one thing, keeping yourself from idling out is a different story. Microsleep is a thing, and you would definitely be experiencing it after being awake anywhere near that length of time.

Well said!. couldn't have said it any better. <3

Status: offline [last seen 17 days ago] Lol

This is very unfortunate. Ender, it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify taking captcha down when you have this blatant obvious cheaters such as Tonc.

I second what Zach said. It's the most reasonable way to approach this problem. Bring back Captcha! the only people that would be bothered by this to the point of not playing anymore are those who use ac... it is as clear as day!

so as a community I say we take a vote.

I am one vote for bringing back captcha.

I second bringing back captcha. It has never been easier to cheat without being caught than in the past 2 years, even counting the bots2 days. However whether these petitions will actually make a difference or not is definitely in question.

Status: offline [last seen 17 days ago] Lol

Can we talk about Ender's avoidant behaviour for a second? Granted, we all have avoidant tendencies from time to time. Hell, the reason Rene and I founded Escapism was due to our belief in its importance in our everyday lives. However when a game creator and sole admin has got such thin skin that a mere few truthful sentences is enough to drive him to take a >2 week break from the game, I think it's high time to give it away. That's not even counting his recent authoritarian-like change to the rules whereby even a personal bmail criticising his inaction is forbidden. If you can't handle the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

http://bots4.net/forum/8/7001
http://bots4.net/forum/10/7166

Does anyone remember these posts? Not much has changed since then, some talk but little action. Ender is so deluded that he spends money through advertising trying to recruit new players, at the expense of keeping cheaters at bay, or even implementing the slightest new feature that current players might get excited about. It seems that Ender is content with keeping the status quo enough to ensure the game doesn't go offline, but any time someone calls him out on the lack of new content or negligence of basic cheater deterrence he takes his ball and goes home.

Good one Myriad! So true and so sad 😕

I'm confused/surprised by where this thread has gone. :\

My earlier posts were meant to be simple statements about my stance/policy on this topic (since I know it's important to a lot of people - myself included!). I thought I was addressing it in a straightforward and clear way - not sure why I'm being called a dick. I asked for these issues to be reported privately so that they can be investigated quietly. If it's public knowledge that the game admin is investigating you, of course you're going to stop doing whatever you were doing. I also didn't claim that extremely long sessions are normal - they are suspicious and absolutely warrant further investigation.

Regarding being offline for a couple weeks, yeah, this is my hobby side project and real life has been busy. This thread actually didn't really register on my radar, so please don't try to read further into it than that. And the "no staff bashing" rule is a long-overdue addition that should be completely uncontroversial. I'm fine with (and welcome) criticism (e.g. if you have thoughts on how $5/day could be better spent on the game, I'd love to hear it), I just don't want to be treated as a personal punching bag. 99% of you have nothing to worry about.

I'm going to lock this thread because I've made my stance/policy clear on the matter. Please bmail me if you wish to discuss further.

*click*