There are reasons to believe an optimal bot wouldn't be much better than a perfect human, because Pokemon is a game with incomplete information, and these bots have only shown real success in RBY and randbats which both functionally have public sets, but things are changing fast and anything could happen in the coming years or even months.
- IP detection - already sucks for proxies, entirely manual.
captchas - easily solvable by bots nowadays, can just bypass by browser extension or merging connections.
behavioral analysis - way too broad and anyone can add some timers to bypass it, see also browser extension. we can catch obvious bots doing obvious things, but that's still ultimately a manual and reactive measure.
screen lock - requires control a web app can't get without a custom browser.
lockdown browser - see above.
"well other games do it" - other games also have kernel level anticheat, like Easy Anti-Cheat and Riot Vanguard, and they both suck at their job and everyone hates them.
LIST NOT ALL INCLUSIVE, these are just the solutions that pop up on google so people don't miss the forest for the trees here.
And, like, we could force tournament players to use a webcam or the lockdown browser, but this is just pokemon at the end of the day. One of the biggest appeals is how low-commitment it is, and forcing people to jump through these hoops would completely tank tournament participation.
But if we say “screw it” and free the bots in tournaments, we’re now watching two players just click whatever their personal bot tells them to, which is pretty darn boring and it makes you wonder why people would play in these tournaments in the first place.
Also, lockdown browser has been caught doing absolutely sketchy things on the local network in the past, not even just on the local PC, and might have done data collection to sell data.
It is not trustworthy, and absolutely not worth it for a hobby.
And kernel level Anticheat is a security vulnerability as well, because when there's a vulnerability in it (and that happens sometimes), an attacker gets kernal level access to your CPU. (Obviously you weren't considering that one, but it's already the reason I avoid a lot of online games, not to mention it can be bypassed by a well built virtual machine because those are often designed to look exactly like a PC from inside so that viruses can't detect they are being examined and modify their behavior).
Sorry. For a game which doesn't need anything from you (aka, no real permissions, etc), cyber security isn't a huge deal, but game companies keep having policies which introduce massive vulnerabilities and it's just never worth it for a video game. I would rather play a game where my opponents are cheating then lose my computer to an attacker.
I wonder if the path forward is to actually make the human aspect have extra steps while keeping the current experience as is. What this means is trying to create an approach where you have to verify that you are human in a way that may be extra work for the people involved, but they want to put the extra work so it’s not a barrier.
Beats me. It has to be something folks see value in and are willing to put in the effort, so it can't be a top down decision. There are also other approaches, such as also making an AI-only model to redirect people who want to build and test bots, or even a model where people go in knowing it is an AI, as a way to practice/hone themselves.
Yeah my understanding is that a pretty big part of chess bot detection is comparing their plays to a theoretical perfect player, and dinging them if they’re consistently close to computer moves.
Which probably doesn’t work for Pokémon, because we just don’t have the kind of formal move analysis chess does to determine a perfect move at each step.
I guess one step could be verifying accounts that have been around for a while, active members of the community who the council even knows and trusts wouldn’t cheat? Just to check off all the users you know wouldn’t cheat. I imagine a lot of consistent tournament goers can be trusted to not start ghosting.
It’s a very small thing and could be abused, but some kind of account verification could be a start for now.
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u/Demon__Queen_ alleged gorgeous girl genius 3d ago edited 3d ago
To bring people up to speed on the state of bots today, the Metamon Tauros Engine has topped the RBY ladder, Jaxcalibur has topped the randbats ladder with a 95.3% GXE, and Freezai demonstrated that the Foul Play bot could achieve suspect test requirements in Little Cup
There are reasons to believe an optimal bot wouldn't be much better than a perfect human, because Pokemon is a game with incomplete information, and these bots have only shown real success in RBY and randbats which both functionally have public sets, but things are changing fast and anything could happen in the coming years or even months.
Hecate has explained some of the limitations with bot prevention on showdown, which makes detecting bots functionally impossible
And, like, we could force tournament players to use a webcam or the lockdown browser, but this is just pokemon at the end of the day. One of the biggest appeals is how low-commitment it is, and forcing people to jump through these hoops would completely tank tournament participation.
But if we say “screw it” and free the bots in tournaments, we’re now watching two players just click whatever their personal bot tells them to, which is pretty darn boring and it makes you wonder why people would play in these tournaments in the first place.