I'm not sure about this if it would be too bothersome against players who don't bot or not.

but first of all you have recorded stats on all players like just a rough example is that the game keeps track of how many monster kills a player makes every week and how much each day of that week.

Then it looks at how many kills per day the average player achievies..

the more kills you make as in the more you grind monsters the more likely you will get the botting prevention popup.

the less you grind the less likely it will popup and bother you.

the popup is a captcha i think it scalled.. those things most forums want you to type a word from a image or something when creating a account.

and it gives you maybe 5 mins to do it so you don't have to all of a sudden in middle of fight type that.

it just popups somewhere not in middle of the screen.. not too big window.. and not if you're fighting a player. and it will try to only do it when no other players are on the screen but if it has to wait too long then it does it anyway if theres always another player on screen while his grinding monsters.
it will do this while fighting monsters because thats when the bot will most likely be running.

havent seen this in a game before but it should work right and i dont think it would be too big problem against innocent players if you do it right.
i dont know what botting preventions games normally use but it doesnt work at least because most games have "a lot" of botters... depends on incentive.
gold sellers for example.

Not really. The only thing it would do is annoy your most active players.

While it might affect a casual booster who might bot while they're away from the computer, the more problematic organized botters usually have human operators overseeing accounts.

GMs have been using chat as a makeshift "captcha" against suspicious players for a long time, PMing them to check their responses - One of the reasons farms still need manpower.

oh well...

I'd like to suggest designing the actual game mechanics to require human judgment so a bot wouldn't cut it. But then, that would cut off a lot of legit customers of these grinding games.

I'd like to suggest designing the actual game mechanics to require human judgment so a bot wouldn't cut it. But then, that would cut off a lot of legit customers of these grinding games.

how exactly would you design mechanics so they couldnt make a bot for it?

I also don't think it's that easy to make games less grindy.

It's just how mmorpg's are in nature.
Some mmorpg's lately have less grind ofcourse like.. let me think of some..

APB I guess which was strangely classified as an mmo but it was server based and not persistant just like a regular fps.
100 players per server just like battlefied 2+3 has.

uhm..

I don't know can't think of anything more out of the top of my head..
Well I guess planetside 2 as well i haven't played it yet though I have just downloaded it the other night so I need to play it some.

how exactly would you design mechanics so they couldnt make a bot for it?

There are any number of things that can be easy for a human (so the grindy character of the game is not necessarily affected), but hard for bot AI. I'd mainly try to put in positional strategy and pattern recognition, threats for the player/bot which are extremely lethal while being easy to avoid. The key is that there should be no content anywhere in the game that a bot can go through on autopilot while getting a worthwhile stream of income/loot.

[quote name='glhf' timestamp='1353613111' post='5003299']
how exactly would you design mechanics so they couldnt make a bot for it?

There are any number of things that can be easy for a human (so the grindy character of the game is not necessarily affected), but hard for bot AI. I'd mainly try to put in positional strategy and pattern recognition, threats for the player/bot which are extremely lethal while being easy to avoid. The key is that there should be no content anywhere in the game that a bot can go through on autopilot while getting a worthwhile stream of income/loot.
[/quote]

If you can it would be great if you could give even a more detailed example hehe.

I have thought a lot about botting in pvp and those people who can make bots can "easily" make bots that dominate in pvp as long as it's 1v1.
There's not much you can do as designer to stop botting in 1v1 pvp.

But in team pvp it gets insanely hard to make a good bot.. there's just too many factors and ifs.
The more players the harder it is to make a bot.

But when you grind mobs you are just one player so i can't think of any good way to do what you're advicing.