If these botchecks are so unbeatable by bots...... (in General)

Then why the heck do I get one every 5-10 battles.

Really disrupts the flow of the game, especially when you get started on farming someone.

Is a botcheck every 5 battles really needed? According to Jon and others, these botchecks are as unbeatable by bots as any out there.

Did you not see the changelog about the new Enchant Defence spell? It's called 'Irritate'......

Slow down your farming to a controlled pace and you'll likely find you're getting much less of them. Farming too hard seems to about double the number of checks I get.

Take an overall average. Over a week. Every 5 battles? I'm not seeing that, not at any speed. Not for any extended length of time, and not based on any game factors.

It's easy to forget the long stretches of no checks. Just this morning I must have rattled off 40 battles before I got a check. I was clicking fast and even farmed a few people several battles in a row.

As soon as you try to add a "minimum battles between checks" algorithm, you aren't random any more, and a bot can use that. I see different theories all the time on what controls bot frequency: CPU load, number of battles, faster clicks... I have yet to see any tangible evidence of this from any one else or from my 3+ years of playing CB. My theory is that Jonathan uses a super-secret advanced technique for triggering bot checks: RAND().

Speed decides it.

Normally when I am forging, I don't get any (or at least very few) until later. When I get down to 60 BA and 5 minutes left on computer I probably get 5-10 checks in those last 5-10 minutes. Speed I think decides it, based on the fact that a bot would probably use BA very quickly.

I think the main reason it's like the way it is comes from trying to stop people just using bots in short bursts... but eh what do I know?

So, you are saying that for all players at all times, Jonathan is keeping track of time between clicks for every forge or battle operation? When the server is at its busiest, Jonathan is adding MORE load to the server by having to keep track of how fast everyone is clicking (it's not as trivial as you think)? I see no reason to believe that Jonathan is doing any such thing (plus, it sounds kind of silly).

What is FAR more likely to be the varying factor is perception. When a person is in a hurry, the bot checks seem more frequent, more annoying, more "out to get me!" I am still waiting for someone to offer empirical evidence that Jonathan is doing anything other than a random call to bot checks at all times. The only thing I have personally noticed is that I cannot recall every getting two bot checks in a row, other than back when store visits required them.

Bot checks aren't time based, they are average click based I think.

If 10+ people fight a battle at the same time, only one or two of them get a check. Copy this to an entire 160 bot checks, this still is only a fraction of the amounts of battles.

Sometimes you get lucky, other times you don't.

The speed at which you're spending BA may also mess with your perception of how frequently you're getting bot checks. Say, for example, you get a check for every 20 BA used. If you have a full 160 BA and gradually spend it over 30 minutes, you'll get 8 bot checks, and it averages out to 16 bot checks per hour. Now say you blaze through that 160 BA in 5 minutes - now your average is 96 checks per hour. Couple that with occasional statistical anomalies, like getting a bot check every 10 BA instead of every 20 for a while because the random number generator hates you, and it can be rather bothersome.
But, that's the price we pay - a bit of annoyance for many to thwart the efforts of a few to abuse the system. Them's the breaks.
And another random thought on the matter - they probably have to be frequent enough that it's not profitable at all to simply have a bot that fails all bot checks. If you only got one every 30 BA, then a bot could burn 30 BA, fail a bot check, be booted for an hour during which that BA regenerates, and resume. Which sounds useless until you realize that it can still make use of 240 BA during that 8-hour block of time that most of us spend sleeping.

/me meant clicks

By the way. and no it's not psychological, it's just true. When I start clicking faster I get more checks.

Godwolf: prove it. And yes, you will get more checks, but do you get more checks/action. That's the ratio that matters.

Also indeed the faster you burn your BA, the more the system thinks you could be a program which is programmed to burn it as fast as possible and get tested.

Simple isn't it?

Everyone gets frequent botchecks, not because they are unbeatable by bots, but because there is a certain % a bot passes or not.
If a bot has a 10% chance of guessing the check correctly (in 2 attempts), and there were only 10 botchecks in a day, the bot would fail 1 check on average per day, and would miss only 1 hour in 24. Same numbers, but then with 100 botchecks a day, it would miss 10 out of 24 hours, which would most likely not be worth it.
I have no idea what the actual success percentage of a good bot would be, but this is the main reason why CB keeps annoying you ;)

According to yesterday's logs, you got 65 botchecks. You also requested a total of 1575 battles. That's an average of 24.2 battles per botcheck.

An algorithm that sends you more bot checks if you're using more BA would make sense - until the people make the bots figure it out. Then they program the bots to use BA slower and circumvent the problem.
Maybe it is the case that faster clicking means more bot checks, but if it were the case then I expect most clever bot writers could figure this out and change the bots appropriately, so it's not a terribly effective safeguard.

An algorithm that sends you more bot checks if you're using more BA would make sense - until the people make the bots figure it out. Then they program the bots to use BA slower and circumvent the problem.

That's a good thing. At a certain point, it diminishes the usefulness of bots to the point where using an undetectable bot reaps less rewards than normal playing. Bot or no bot, it only gets so much BA per period of time. If you configure the bot to remain under the detectable botcheck threshold, now it has to play slowly and continuously, which is then detectable by other means.

Detecting bots doesn't have to be the goal--eliminating their advantage (and therefor their attractiveness) will do just as well.

Bart, can you use your wonderful awk skills to get that same average over all 7 days of the week, for a two or three (names undisclosed) users? These bot check threads get old, and, in my opinion, the more we can dispel the "I think it based on..." ideas, the better.

If I ever quit this game bot checks will be the cause of it.

Bot checks are only annoying if you play at the top and during wacky exp time. I think it has something to do when the group at your range is fighting too or something. I know that I got lots less of bot check at low MPR, maybe not lot less but at least a normal bot check rate.

Remember that the bot checks only exist to thwart those who would circumvent the rules... so, if you find them to be so painful to tolerate, do not blame the bot checks but rather the society that makes such measures so necessary.

"If you only got one every 30 BA, then a bot could burn 30 BA, fail a bot check, be booted for an hour during which that BA regenerates, and resume."

For a start, this statement is completely incorrect, when you get a fight ban your BA regeneration is also frozen so a bot that fails one every so many battles is far from an advantage..

"I have no idea what the actual success percentage of a good bot would be..."

I think a good example would be of BadAsh's: over about five weeks of using his bot, BadAsh was able to answer 1297 successful bot checks and failed 313 bot checks. Seems like this could be considered a "reasonably good" bot for estimation purposes. Of course, this was before Jon made the bot checks more difficult.

QQ more