Login question
 

I was thinking about why we have this immensely stupid login question.

to be short: why?

i know this was implemented when there was dinosaurs and stuff around but i dont really see why we need this _shit_ anymore :)
Everyone hates it and its the first thing new players gets annoyed by when signing up.

Re: Login question
 

/signed

But its to stop bots of course.

Also why not just have 5+2 instead of 51+85, yeah maths isnt hard, but at 5 in the morning I cant even speak let alone count.

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Start > Programs > Accessories > Calculator

Its not hard.

Re: Login question
 

if someone needs a calculator to access a game he paid for, there's something wrong.
I agree the math should be very easy (some questions already are).

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or better yet, the "type this word in" stuff that's much easier

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its more like there is no point on having a question at all. no other games ive played have a login question.

and what can a bot possible do ingame that will be so wrong?

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The current captcha is utterly retarded.

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What makes you think people will restrict themselves to one bot?
As for what would be so wrong - well for starters you could have an effectively unlimited number of farms, support planets, def whores etc. The only limitation would be how well your 'command and control' could manage them all.
Seriously, have a good think before you ask silly questions next time, it will save you the time and stop you looking silly.

Re: Login question
 

Yes, but this only proves that the MH must clearly be retarded then if they fail to discover an unlimited number of farms and support planets!
And what is the difference between 99-48 and 1+2 for bots, if they "know how to count" then it might aswell just be something silly like 124134*146,67

And why not ask silly questions when there is always someone who is so beyond silly like urself, that they just have to use silly words like silly.

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Why should they even be placed in a position where they have to?
Would you like to manually investigate and close an infinite number of planets at a rate which far exceeds what you can cope with? Signups can be automated as well you know?

Context.
writing something that turns what humans consider simple characters to read into something that the bot can understand is the tricky part. Once thats done it doesnt matter how simplistic or how complicated the question becomes ( although granted, the longer it is, the higher the probability of errors occurring with the parser ). The problem in such parsers is entirely context; just what is the question asking and how to approach answering it.
Currently, 99-48 isnt too strenuous for humans to do anyway, consider it mental stimulation to get what few braincells are left, firing :)

:rolleyes:

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"Click on the picture of the cat".

Re: Login question
 

Well personally i dont struggle with the questions, but 99-48 can be a pain in the ass for a lot of people :)
make them even harder for all i care!

point is it seems pointless! atleast explain why you have this login question by simply writing "This feature is implemented to avoid experienced bot-abuse in the game" or something similar! No offence killmark!

i like Mzyxptlk`s suggestion though! it has potential. lets say you have to click on the cat and when you click on it you have to read about the cat, and not proceed until you have clicked on "i have read and accepted the main purposes of the cat"


just to make the stupidity a bit more stupid, but yet so much more interesting then numbers!

Re: Login question
 

I like the login question, it makes me feel like there's a purpose to me playing this god forsaken game, im improving my mental arithmetic! Im even going to stretch as far as to say thats its a feature that adds a certain depth to the game itself!

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I think someone lost the plot with these bot questions, they seem reasonably easy enough for someone with a bit of coding knowledge to crack them because they're nowhere near random enough. The lines on each image always stay in the same place and the letters are never distorted.

Either make them easier or add some probability so that not everyone has to deal with the CAPTCHA every 2 hours. If a planet only logs in a few times a day they shouldn't need a CAPTCHA, upgraded accounts should be treated slightly better than free accounts with fewer questions. Maybe something similar to Gmail, where their system forces you to login and solve an image if your account shows suspicious activity due to using tools which you shouldn't be using. Multihunters could set a flag on a planet showing suspicious activity which gives them more bot stopping questions.

Throw your customers a bone instead of keeping the login question as it stands which treats everyone with suspicion.

Re: Login question
 

the math questions aint as bad as the "what is the capital of Congo?", questions.... :P so just remember it could be worse.... :|
and also could be alot easier (please ffs)

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At least with the math ones, you can actually answer every one it presents, I remember when they did bother to distort it and manage to cut out half the question...

Keep it the way it is, its better to have to pull out the calculator at 5am than it is to google.

Re: Login question
 

I've been on about this problem for years.

I can't be bothered playing a game that won't let me login half the time because I get the captcha wrong.

It should be changed to 1 + 1 = ?

Stop all this scaremongering nonsense about smarter bots.

Most of the thousand or so people who play this game are complete morons who couldn't boil a kettle, let alone code a bot.

Re: Login question
 

they dont have to all code a bot, it only needs one person to make one - that others simply use.
its not like you coded your irc client from assembler now is it, or that everyone in every alliance codes their own scan parsers, fleet calcing tools, irc bots, etc.

There are plenty of people in the community who are capable of making a bot to do this also. Its not a hard thing to do once you get rid of the bot stopper problem; quite trivial infact. It wouldn't take me more than a week to come out with something functional if i put my mind to it

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Now if only the PA captcha was not a complete joke. You might as well not have it at all.

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Time for an ancient history lesson?

Killmarks bot army attack r6: http://www.superstardom.org/planetar.../botusage.html

Killmarks bot army defence r7: http://www.superstardom.org/planetar...otdefence.html

Re: Login question
 

Its true. Munin played all of our accounts last round.

Re: Login question
 

That explains a lot

:D

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Didnt put too much effort in yours :P

Re: Login question
 

As an experiment a couple of months back, I downloaded a good few samples of the captcha, to see if I could write a computer program that broke it reasonably often.[1]

It didn't take me very long to write a program that got it right about half the time (11 out of 25 samples, I think), and I didn't bother improving it. There is a lot of good OCR software out there, some of which I think can be used if you 'clean up' the text, which is pretty easy because the are so few irregularities in it. Distortion is hard to deal with, I think, but when the text is simply tilted and there are scanlines in it, it's that hard to clean it up. Applications like ImageMagick and libraries like the PIL makes the capcha pretty easy to break.

In other words, the security the botstopper offers is not that good. It's better than nothing, but if someone is good enough to write an undetectable and clever botnet, they'll probably be good enough to break the captcha too.

[1] I've heard that this has been done a few times before. It was not trivially easy, but it wasn't so hard that you'd need to be an expert computer programmer to get it right.

Re: Login question
 

Although never having written bots for planetarion, I have written automation programs for other online games. Mainly for educational purposes or for profit :p (I see no actual point in cheating a game, go ahead call me a hypocrite for making them).

One thing it has taught me is CAPTCHA is generally more harmful to legitmate users than it is to the people who bot, because they simply move onto new games are find ways around them. In the case of an online game which threw random CAPTCHA words at you every 5-10 refreshes we found the best course of action was to have the bots upload the image to our server then link to it in an IRC chat room offering incentives to those who helped complete them.

I'm not going to go into specific details, since I don't want to give anyone too many ideas. However the point is simple, any antimacro system is bypassable. The main thing is finding a point where the system is causing least possible harm to legitimate players and maximum harm to bots. In PA's case there are, afaik no bots. However none of the players like the CAPTCHA codes either, so I'd certainly say it would be ideal to change to either simpler maths or a simpler alternative.

.... That was a long winded post to say something rather simple, so anyone who can't be arsed to read it basically:

In the interest of the players make it easier.

Re: Login question
 

Sounds like an excellent outcome to me. Too bad there aren't any botnets.

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The capture as it is now is a joke. When it was first implemented it was done well, the questions were simple but importantly they required logic to answer them. You can generally code an OCR bot with ease but allowing it to have the logic to answer even simple questions is tough.

However there wasnt many of these and the answers could have been recorded so it was deemed that more questions were needed. Rather than keep the logic puzzles up they went to random questions, often questions with answers hard to type, with multiple ways of answering or which required research done to get in.

These eventually went away and now we are left with math questions. Questions which a bot thats running on whats basically a supercharged calculator can do with no effort. Its harder for humans to login than a bot.

Protection against bots is needed but the method needs rethought as this way prevents more humans from playing than it ever would bots

Re: Login question
 

Signed. If you dont want to remove it, type in word system would be alot faster. Now we have to make our little heads go BOOM with the calculation.

Schools over boys! :banana:

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I'd bet that's probably higher than the success rate of real people logging in! :D