Rejected An Idea to Help Handle Bots and Increase the Player Base

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DeletedUser25583

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Recently I learned about a program in Santa Rosa, California, USA in which teenagers are given the opportunity to drag race against police officers. Before this program was implemented, there was a large problem with illegal street racing in Santa Rosa, but ever since this program was implemented, illegal street racing declined dramatically. Other side effects included an improved relationship between the public and police officers, and many people were signing up who would not have raced normally. I found a short news article about it here, for those who are interested. Keep this in mind as you read ahead.

That program made me think about two large problems in Tribal Wars, namely bots and a shrinking player base.
I started playing Tribal Wars on world 6, but recently (about 1.5 years ago) I started teaching myself the programming language python as well as learning some coding at my university. Coding is one of my hobbies now, as it is for thousands and thousands of people in the world. Now, everyone should know that not only is Tribal Wars an amazing game, but it is nearly a perfect programmer's playground.

Before you read any further, know that I do NOT support violating any of the game rules.

I know that it is possible to write code for a bot that can precisely control the attack/support commands of every single village, respond to incoming attacks, automatically add building upgrades to the queue, farm continuously for hours, and the list never ends. Basically, it's extremely unfair to any normal player, even if they have a premium account with the account manager active.

So here is my idea, and I hope this is actually considered before immediately being dismissed. What if there were a world or server in which player-made bots and scripts were freely allowed? This would obviously not completely eliminate the problem of bots or illegal scripts in the normal worlds, but it would at least give many people with programming skills and knowledge a place to go. In addition, this could easily help bring in new players as I believe programmers would flock toward this opportunity and challenge. Winning this world would not only be a competition of game knowledge, skill, and teamwork/coordination, but also a challenge of who can design and implement the best system(s) to manage their villages. Essentially a "battle between programmers".

Think about this. If you control 100-200 villages, your enemy controls 100-200 villages, and you both know that you are both using bots, what new strategies would you implement to gain the upper hand? You can both easily send the most optimal all-out attacks with near perfect landing times while simultaneously supporting your front-line villages and much much more... but your enemy can (and is) doing the same thing. Prediction becomes more relevant as well as many other aspects of the game. On a side note, I think very large-scale battles with lightning fast commands in a game as deep and complex as Tribal Wars would be much more dramatic and exciting this way.

Of course, there would still be rules, though the question of which rules would be up to the developers to decide.
Though I stated that it would be a "battle between programmers", everyone would be welcome to join. Players could use someone else's bot/scripts if they don't know how to code, or they could just play normally.

If this world were created, Tribal Wars developers would have copious data to study the behavior of several different types of bots. Using that knowledge it would be much easier to identify bots in the normal worlds and administer appropriate actions against offending players. I am not quite sure how they detect bots now, but as a student of industrial engineering, I can easily think of a several ways to handle that amount of data. They include linear classifiers, classification AIs, and simply looking for patterns in the behavior of bots and the frequency that they make requests from the server.

The last point I want to make is that this would encourage people to develop their programming skills or even start programming entirely. In the modern day, this is an exceptionally valuable skill, and encouraging young people (and even not so young people) to delve into the area of programming is an amazing and commendable thing to do, especially as a company.

Thanks,
Ken
 

Jirki88

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Tribal Wars Team
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This idea is rejected, because we're not going to start supporting botting. If you want to bot you should set up a LAN server (there is source code (that might need fixing by some industrious individual wanting to use it) out there though we won't link it since we don't support it anymore).
 
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