Over recent years it has become increasingly more difficult to make sure your site is only being accessed and used by humans as opposed to automated systems or macros. Macros can be used by people in an attempt to simulate human activity.
The main downside to this, is it leaves the site open to exploitation. One site that I visit very regularly is an online game site. It's actually an "online pirate roll playing game" called Pirate Quest. The concept behind Pirate Quest is very simple, yet works very well to make the game extremely addictive. The main problem the game developers are faced with is people who are trying to trick the system.
In order to put this into perspective I will provide some examples from the game. The concept behind Pirate Quest is simple yet very effective. You are a pirate and you can sail around the Caribbean sea robbing people, buying ships, smuggling goods and much more. Every new member starts off weak and needs to train and gain experience in order to become a stronger pirate. This takes time and effort and can be a slow process. What if a user wrote a program that kept automatically refreshing the "Training" page when the user was able to train. This would mean the user would gain strength or defensive skills with very little effort. This is basically cheating and something the game developers have tried their hardest to avoid.
In all fairness Pirate Quest doesn't have a great problem with cheaters. The staff and developers are very strict regarding this type of activity and will ban any account that has been found to be cheating. The problem is industry wide and there are lots of users on RPG games who are all to happy to use automated systems to enable cheating. There are two problems that face RPG developers. Detection and prevention.
Detection is never going to be easy. To a large extent this process will be manual. Let's say for example a player's stats have rapidly shot up in a relatively short period of time. This may raise a flag about the honesty of the user on that account. The developers will then be able to look back and find out just what the user is doing. It may be that the user has been working very hard to improve his/her game abilities or the player may be cheating.
Prevention would appear to be the key in this battle. If you can make it as difficult as possible for the cheaters to run their automated systems on your site then you will greatly reduce the chances of it happening. This is one area Pirate Quest have been very active in over the past few months.
On Pirate Quest one area where automated system could be used is training. Let's imagine you set up a macro or automated system to train your player every 30 minutes. This time would be long enough for your players "strength" and "awake" to fully recover before training again. This sort of system could be left running at night. The player is asleep and the system is improving the game stats whilst he/she sleeps. This is clearly cheating and gives them an advantage over other game players who are having to do this process manually.
What can and does work is throwing something into the mix to effect the cycle that the system is following. In our simple technique we mentioned above, the system trains, waits 30 minutes then trains again. What if the system randomly showed the user an image containing numbers and letters that had to be typed in. At this point our simple system becomes unable to continue, and all advantage has been lost, victory to the developers!, but what if the system being used was smart enough to read the letters and numbers within the image and typed them into the game and then trained. This sort of system is available and has been used in the past.
OCR technology (Optical Character Recognition) systems can be used to read the letters and numbers within this type of system. This means that if people really are determined to cheat they potentially still can.
What Pirate Quest have done now to to make the images totally unreadable to anything other than humans is to use "gestures" as opposed to letters and numbers. I guess there are some great programmers that would be able to work round this somehow, but if they are that good then they probably have more important things to do. This is simple out of the reach of the people who attempt to cheat at this sort of game. This system really levels the playing field and makes it a lot harder for users who are tying to manipulate the system.
Not only is this system a lot harder to trick it is also a lot easier for the end user to read. It really is very clear and simple to use. In an ideal world we wouldn't need to use anti-cheating systems like this but in reality there are people out there who are determined to manipulate games like this to their advantage, let's hope this new system will act as a sufficient deterrent to prevent this type of thing from happening.
You may wonder why people choose to try and cheat at games like this, well there are two main reasons. The first reason is simply to enable them to be a better player at the game. The second reason is because there will be people willing to pay for a strong account. In theory there is money to be made by creating accounts, getting them into a powerful playing position then selling them on. Warcraft accounts for example have been known to change hands for large sums of money.
The new system introduced by Pirate Quest reassures me that the developers and staff are keen to keep the game as fair as possible. This is best for all honest players and will ensure the game remains fun and enjoyable to all.
