Bots! Bots Everywhere!

[BehindEnemyLine]

We see up to 4-5 players in with random names (when you don't write anything) and INSTA leave the game at the same time. Any faction, this bots just leave the game immediately.

I thought: Well, I met 3 bots in one, 3 in other, 1 in the next, 2,2... And I report them every single game and so most people. Still they appear the next game. I go do some other things, expecting the bot que to get off; 5 bots in the same game! Like .

So I just reported them for "Gamethrowing" and wrote "BOT", hopefully that does something. It's unplayable right now. Mind me, this is not a public que or ranked practice this is a "high elo" que, so I can just imagine hacked lower rankeds or even public games.

There should be an automatic ban system after you leave X games. With more focus if you leave d1 (not even n1), lets say 2 leaves d1 in a row you get 1 day ban. Like this is already a problem with some random evil leavers but Bots are just ridiculous. Unplayable with 4-5 bots, you win or lose depending on the RNG of roles.

Fix it please! This is gamebreaking.

[kyuss420]

Leaving isnt considered gamethrowing anymore, unless they state their intention to leave. Sorry, but your reports are all being innoed/ignored. Sounds more like someone using alts as lobby fillers to me, but even that is hard to prove, unless its the same 3 accounts every time....

But the Mods have said that the devs have said they have plans to implement a ''Leaver Buster'' system, after unity has been rolled out to all platforms....

[GrumpyGoomba]

Ooh this leaver buster thing sounds interesting. Know where I can read up more about it?

[gbPeyton]

We see up to 4-5 players in with random names (when you don't write anything) and INSTA leave the game at the same time. Any faction, this bots just leave the game immediately.

I thought: Well, I met 3 bots in one, 3 in other, 1 in the next, 2,2... And I report them every single game and so most people. Still they appear the next game. I go do some other things, expecting the bot que to get off; 5 bots in the same game! Like .

So I just reported them for "Gamethrowing" and wrote "BOT", hopefully that does something. It's unplayable right now. Mind me, this is not a public que or ranked practice this is a "high elo" que, so I can just imagine hacked lower rankeds or even public games.

There should be an automatic ban system after you leave X games. With more focus if you leave d1 (not even n1), lets say 2 leaves d1 in a row you get 1 day ban. Like this is already a problem with some random evil leavers but Bots are just ridiculous. Unplayable with 4-5 bots, you win or lose depending on the RNG of roles.

Fix it please! This is gamebreaking.

These "bots" are hacked accounts from the database breach. The current method that is being employed to combat these bots, is setting the ELO of the hacked account to 0 so that these bots intrude low level ELO games instead.

In my opinion, these accounts should be frozen until the original owner contacts the mods. I imagine the accounts are not frozen so that traffic numbers look better than they actually are.

[Jerme]

We usually ban the accounts on sight, have the owner change their password and unban it afterwards. I am not sure if the devs will do another passwordforce reset or the active accounts that have yet to change their passwords. I believe the botted accounts leave their elo down to 0, instead of them being manually reduced.

[BehindEnemyLine]

I checked and didn't see any bots in All Any- Classic or Ranked Practice so it definitely seems like a Ranked only thing. Don't know lower match ranking but I would assume they have the same issue (as % more hacked accounts could be there).

Using phpBB for login and such...considering that the hackers posted about it and showed the weakness of this type of system, I dont think anyone would feel like "ohh they are reinforced security, hacking won't happen now". (Less about Cryptocurrency safety...)
I am not sure if the hacked accounts are related to THAT breach tho, the hackers showed their intentions and what they tried to do, and the bots in this one are small in comparison to the hacked accounts so I guess it's non related.

Bots seemed to diminish. Not having leavebuster at this time is a joke and leaving not considered gamethrowing is something only a broken system would do. Game balance , bots, trolls, leavers, hackers, data breachs (emails and passwords), mobile matching with PC, ... like no wonder why people go to play Throne of Lies or other stuff, this is just disgusting how little they care for the player base and how they go for greedy updates instead of fixing what the consumers agree on.

The excuse of being an Indie studio is lame, many of this issues are not hard to solve:
Balance; tweak the rolelist , change some roles (community already posted many ideas).

Security: Change this way of logging in

“We are making plans to replace PHPBB with a more secure forum such as Vanilla, and moving to a more secure hashing algorithm”.

Still waiting.
“It appears that the Town of Salem’s database was hashing passwords with the PHPBB3 algorithm, which is relatively weak and presents little barrier to cracking. It should be assumed that all passwords are exposed and all users who have reused passwords should change them across all services ASAP to limit their vulnerability to the credential-stuffing attacks that will likely occur in the future.”.

Leavers: Simple to code, leavebuster system. It's not really hard, adapting and rewriting to a different platform IS.

There you go, you fixed the main game issues. YW

[Jerme]

There was an alpha/beta version of the leavebuster introduced already, but due to some issues it got taken down for a while for later redesign.
The current accountcompromises are related to the breach happening at the end of December 2018, so everyone who did not change their password after this event till now, should do it right away.
At first the game is updated so it can survive the death of Flash before any further action can be taken.
Keep in mind that the "easy" solutions you offer are not really that easy to be done, as tweakin a rolelist would require data to be gathered to determin in which way the rolelist can be tweaked to preserve, or create a better balance. Same with the role changes, ideas/concepts are one thing, but coding those can be quite time comsuming.

[GeniusWind]

OP. those "BOT" accounts are actually hacked accounts.

A solution would be to set a timeout for players who leave games while they're alive.

[Jerme]

I believe there is one.
Anyway this should be fixed now, as all accounts created before 2019 that have not changed their passwords have to change it now.

[GeeJubejube]

In my opinion, these accounts should be frozen until the original owner contacts the mods.

This is incident response 101. You’d think that after a major, publicized breach, that BMG would take steps to prevent further abuse of their resources....

[helianthium]

Can confirm, I am one of the dummies who never changed their password after the breach and I was just forced to change it to log in. Hopefully this decreases the number of bots!

[Jerme]

In my opinion, these accounts should be frozen until the original owner contacts the mods.

This is incident response 101. You’d think that after a major, publicized breach, that BMG would take steps to prevent further abuse of their resources....

That is what has been done with the force reset of the password.

[GeeJubejube]

I’m saying that this should have been done in the first place, last year.

[Jerme]

I’m saying that this should have been done in the first place, last year.

It was announced and every user was sent an email addressing the situation, givem the ability to change their password. There was a forced reset for all accounts that were deemed inactive, but it was considered that the active users have checked the news (which were also displayed on the gomepage of the game afaik), so that they had the ability to inform themselves and change their password.