Going to be brutally frank on a couple of things. First, I have no idea who many of the signatories are. Secondly, I don’t agree with the self-important ego-filled bullshit of the first paragraph because in the context of the “against botting” aspect of this open letter, this relatively tiny portion of the Diablo III player base (the ones who engage and dedicate their time into the competitive aspect of the game) is just that; they represent a TINY MINORITY of the overall player base.
An open letter like this should actually represent the ENTIRE Diablo III community regardless of whether they are into the leaderboard aspect or not as opposed to a few folks who actually feel this self-important to put it into the context of “we’re the ones who play this game competitively and play it the most”. Why? Because they don’t seem to have gotten the message that with regards to D3, the game designers don’t view it that way. A game that at its core is driven by layers of RNG. A leaderboard which even the designers said was meant to be used as a personal measuring stick for your own progress (and thus a means to compare your character against others), but one not really designed to be ultimately fair when it comes to what those rankings mean.
In otherwords, the ladder system in D3 is meant to be a fun and casual “competition”. It is totally unlike the kind of ladder and ranking system that exists in their other properties because those other games aren’t loot based ones with tons of RNG associated with it (I still laugh when people actually talk about high APM in D3 which is meaningless in the context of high APM in StarCraft II (as an example where there is a macro and micro game play element to it).
My point is that they aren’t the only ones who feel that Blizzard’s perceived inaction/communication on the matter “ruins the integrity of the game” as I posted awhile back about the issue.
This open letter is also being re-posted on other Diablo related sites as well as Reddit and the official Battle.net forums. I made the following post in that thread.
I’m personally not into the leaderboard aspect of this game but I agree that Blizzard needs to take a harder line stance on this issue.
I realize it also isn’t easy in this particular case because you have an actual group of people that have created an application that is dedicated to this specific game. Unlike past bots that were scripted using existing keyboard and mouse macro programs that plotted out movements based on statically defined screen regions, this particular app works at a far more sophisticated level since it extracts all of the scenes for navigating around the game world.
In the prior case, detection is actually far easier since most of those scripts are much more static/redundant in terms of actions (movement, mouse clicks, key presses) unless the bot scripter goes out of their way to change the timing of these actions. In the case of this dedicated bot app, once all of the games scenes have been extracted, the program itself is able to read regions and labels during actual game play just like a person does and is thus able to perform clicks and keyboard actions based not only for what it detects in the scene, but also work in conjunction with settings in a script. Essentially, it can adapt as needed. The apps system process and “signature” can also be obfuscated by the user.
From what I know, Blizzard tends to take a very careful approach when it comes to account actions that result in permanent account closure (the evidence during investigation by multiple people has to show fairly conclusive evidence). They can make further detailed observations at actual game play for suspected botting activity and detect redundant patterns and timings.
And that is probably one of the biggest issues right now with this particular bot application. Automated detection as well as player supplied botting reports are one thing. The issue is probably more with how much dedicated resources Blizzard wants to allocate towards investigating these reports.
My point is that internally, Blizzard needs to reassess how they’ve dealt with botting (when it comes specifically to automated game play) in D3 in the past, and decide whether or not those procedures need to be updated AND resources dedicated to dealing with more sophisticated applications like this one which does a better job at mimicking the game play of an actual person.
The lack of perceived enforcement (which as I mentioned, isn’t simple as the sophistication of a piece of software goes up) eventually leads to this being more widely accepted. The lack of perceived enforcement also makes their own Terms of Use toothless in the process. Furthermore, it ruins the entire “integrity of the game” aspect that Blizzard likes to promote for their properties.
One of the things noted in the open letter that I didn’t specifically highlight in the above post was this; “Nobody can play for 23 hours every single day.” Why? Because even though it makes sense, you cannot use that as a reason because it would require setting up demarcations and monitoring that goes beyond the sort of backend resources they’ve been willing to dedicate to this game. Furthermore, no one can dictate how long someone wants to play even though yes, it does seem logical and obvious.
Furthermore, while account sharing is against the terms of use except in cases involving a minor/guardianships, that last aspect creates an issue with actual enforcement of the above. Blizzard would have to dig into peoples personal lives from their end. The account sharing aspect is more or less a safe-guard to deal with effective account ownership (in regards to property rights when it comes to marriages/unions). And there have been cases they’ve had to address in cases where a relationship went sour, and someone claimed they were the rightful owner of a Battle.net account.
And once you start bringing more of the TOU into the picture in the above open letter, than you also need to cover all aspects beyond just botting. You’d also have to include by extension, other service uses that goes against those terms (and that would include those who use apps like Turbo HUD, those who use 21:9 ratio monitors, or any other system that isn’t built-in/supported by the game that gives players an advantage over others).
My point is that the open letter writers cannot be selective with the TOU if they want Blizzard to seriously use time logged in as a way to allow others to report players as potentially botting (even though again, it seems obvious). Blizzard already has to deal with people who go and report every single topic/poster (basically making that system less effective because a moderator has to actually waste their time dealing with those) when they don’t agree with the topic/poster. That is going to be the same fate of such a reporting system.
My other point is that as someone who has had to write policy/procedures before, I’m going to leave out ones that are going to always be open to interpretation as opposed to actually having real systems in place to deal with it.
What I mean is back in the day with Diablo II, we used to play marathon sessions (24-48 hours) with stuff like restroom breaks and what not. There are always going to be these kind of valid cases. Others have suggested calculating total hours played in a season; again, it makes sense BUT Blizzard would be going beyond their bounds by even implying to players how long they can play these online games of theirs. Sure, they can define whatever rules they want to; but it does not make for good PR.
This is also what I meant when I said that Blizzard would need to reassess how they’ve dealt with botting in D3. The game doesn’t even have game moderators actively engaged in chat because its not the kind of human resources they are willing to allocate to D3. Why would you need something like this? An activity like botting (with regards to automated game play) and actively investigating potential positives, is better dealt with in real time.
