LCP Detection - How your Gathering Bot could be banned

[Azile66]

I posted my same article on the Honor Buddy forums located here: Azile LCP detection Post
LCP (Lowest Common Prefix) White Paper can be viewed here:Bot Detection in MMOs

First off, let me say I really feel for you guys in EU/US facing the bannings that seem at an all time high.

I am an Ex-Pat living and playing/botting WoW in China on China servers. So we face a few differences than you do in EU/US. First, we pay for game time by the minute, not by a flat fee for the month. So in many ways, in China WoW, Bots are actually profitable to the game company who runs the Blizzard WoW here. Keep in mind, it is a different company who admins WoW in China, it is not Blizzard. While this does mean we can get away with running our bots and not face bans currently.

This does mean we can develop and write plugins, profiles etc and test the hell out of them in China without facing a risk to banning even testing.

I have been writing private profiles and selling them for a while to USA/EU customers but have stopped because it is obvious to me that no matter the fact that the private profile was created on China servers and is truly "private" to whoever I sell it to (meaning that when you get it, it has never even been run one time in EU/US, even while being created/tested), that these private GB2 profiles are getting nailed by Blizzard anyhow.

So I developed a new method that 100% beats the concept of LCP detection. Now the profiles I sell are custom made and expected that the end user uses the new app in order to keep the profile completely off the LCP radar (Takes 5 seconds to mash the profile through the app and have it revised and ready to be used fresh). My profiles + Randomizer do 3 things:

1) Completely beats any form of LCP detection Blizzard could be using server side.
2) Completely beats any efficiency detection vs NPH or route travelling.
3) Gets your bot off the beaten well travelled known "highways" and "routes", less chance of being reported by competing players as you spend less time travelling along their optimized and efficient paths.

But this is not my point.

My main point I am writing about is HOW are they detecting you guys.

The theories so far:

1) "They can detect HonorBuddy running" - Well I do not buy this theory and most pros on these boards agree with me that Blizz is not detecting HB running. It is illegal from my understanding and would not be the route Blizz would take given that there are better and more permanent ways to catch botters now and in the future.

2) "NPH is too high, they catch us" - Well it could be that, but honestly we would simply react by running our bots differently and less efficiently than any normal player, despite lower NPH, we would not care as its better to have 70% efficiency and not get caught than the run super bots capable of 500+ NPH etc. - I do not believe this is how.

3) "They download public profiles and use those to catch people who do not bot smart!" - Nope, I do not buy this either. Too many of you are reporting getting nailed when running private profiles.

4) "Player reports!" - Ya, players reporting you would do it and certainly it accounts for some of the bannings. CRZ has put more people in the lesser used zones and this creates more opportunity for bots to get reported. But it should not cause such an increase in bannings and certainly not create the bannings where ppl ran in slow zones at odd hours for a few hours and got nailed.

5) "CTM (Click to Move)!" - No. The HB devs have time and time again explained that they cannot tell how we move, whether by CTM or WASD.

6) "LCP detection" - I believe this is the situation. And not only individual LCP, but they have managed to chart it across players. It would need to be using data from players and mashing it up to catch Questing profiles etc, because no one player will run the same routes over and over while questing enough to really trigger it. Yet it gets caught. Reason why is simple, those questing bots are run using public profiles and therefore over time, those "known LCP paths" are learned by Blizzard's servers and anyone hitting a threshold of even 20+ LCP could easily get nailed even before they hit level 20. And for gathering it is worse. Run a public gathering profile? You are nailed. They already have the comparable LCP for your profile as soon as someone has run it a few times. Private profile or a custom script? Sure. It will be ok for a little bit, but think of it this way, Profile LCP is generated while being created if you fly the route using zaprecorder etc, then you run it once or twice...three times, four times...and within 2 hours of running it, you are now flagged as a bot because you just tripped up using your own private profile. Point is, a "set path" profile will trigger this detection no matter how private it is. LCP detection would account 100% for most of the bannings going on whether you use private or public profiles, it would catch you.

What it really means, is that botters, especially gather bots are going to need to actively use counter-measures to the concept of LCP. In fact, it requires testing on the EU/US servers to be sure that this is what is taking place, but I cannot really think of another method that would account for the bannings other than LCP. The system I developed and others have posted about, while it lowers efficiency, it completely beats any form of LCP detection since LCP relies on repeated strings of hotspots being hit in sequence, something that is impossible for a human to relicate repeatedly over time.

If your botting method does not actively beat LCP detection, I would honestly recommend to not Bot it. You will eventually get caught whether you run 2 hours or 12 hours.

And my recommendations for the devs:

1) Abandon CTM, it still carries a future level of risk.
2) Rewrite GB2 to either work "zones" at complete random and have profiles now set to just list blackspots. So a profile would be set to <Zone> and just have Blackspots.
-And/Or
3) Rewrite GB2 to have the option to run "random Hotspots", so it picks a hot spot from your list at random, then another at random and so on, thereby beating LCP as it never paths the same sequences.

Thanks and good luck to all you botters in EU/USA facing these problems.

Anyone wishing for more information or custom profiles I design and Randomizer App, please PM me.

Azile

[firung]

delete please..

[Azile66]

delete please..

Sorry I meant to post it in the Bots and Programs section, not World of Warcraft General.

If someone can move for me to the correct forum I would appreciate it.

Thanks.

[Novamas90]

Very nice post

[Sklug]

I don't doubt that this is a method they are looking into identifying people with.

I would like to add though, that I don't believe Blizz is going to ONLY look at this method. Ya, they aren't scanning your programs, and Nodes per hour is probably an unreliable number (someone farming for 8 hrs straight is prob more of a red flag), but I am sure they have something there... I remember when farmers had teleport hacks to each node, whilst being underground back in WOTLK particularly. Those people prob got 2000 nodes p/hour lol. There is probably some threshold built into the software to catch that quickly if it ever pops up again.

With that being said, the most intriguing idea and only real way to get around this is for bot makers to create maybe a map for each zone that has built in rules, such as blackoutzones not to go, obstacles mapped out, etc... Def would be much more annoying to build a map, but it would solve the LCP detection problem. Also you would cover the entire map in some open randomized flight pattern. That itself I don't think would be too challenging. The real challenge is having to re-build map creation and streamlining the process to make said features easy to implement. Not a small task, but probably worth the investment now.

I would also like to point out that a temporary solution around this is just to create ridiculously LARGE paths that loop randomly around dozens of times and spawn multiple zones, thus it would take 2 or 3 hrs just to make one full cycle. Then, you can set your bot to say a 5 hr cycle and know that it will only loop twice and since it is so large, the small amount of loops on such a massive cycle probably would not flag it.

I enjoyed your post though +5rep

[esp3rae]

Thanks for sharing (+rep of course !), and i love Chineses (especially those who sell gems / mounts / hauting spirit cheap )

Separate issue : I saw these sellers change faction or teleport from orgrimmar to Booty Bay with char lvl 1, it exists a software to do this (in private server yes, but in official) ?

[stoneharry]

delete please..

Sorry I meant to post it in the Bots and Programs section, not World of Warcraft General.

If someone can move for me to the correct forum I would appreciate it.

Thanks.

The thread has been moved to the intended section. In future, you can report your own thread requesting this if you make that mistake.

Thanks for sharing (+rep of course !), and i love Chineses (especially those who sell gems / mounts / hauting spirit cheap )

Separate issue : I saw these sellers change faction or teleport from orgrimmar to Booty Bay with char lvl 1, it exists a software to do this (in private server yes, but in official) ?

Teleportation methods have always existed on retail servers, however they regularly get fixed. When a new method is found it is usually kept private in a smaller audience, such as the elite or higher sections here for example. Whether there are any methods working at this current time on retail, I do not know.


Regarding the original post, a interesting read and theory.

[Gexdex]

whole theory is crap. Simple node per hour limiter will help u to avoid all bans.Try it and u will see. 0.5 node per min is safe for example at any pub. profile and farm 24/7