Bot Hunters

Fast approaching is the release a few of the games I've actually been looking forward to this year. Pyre and the new Life is Strange stories are coming out this summer and I am super excited for both. I am most excited for Pyre because it's coming from a gaming company I actually trust to produce quality gameplay and storytelling. I'm just expecting the Life is Strange episodes to emotionally destroy me. I hope to put these two up there with Horizon in games that actually impressed me this year. Outlast 2 was one Shauna and I were looking forward to, but man was it lacking.

Over the past couple of weeks at work I've teamed up with one of my coworkers in dev and we've been hunting bots on one of the sites I do tech support for. It's actually been quite interesting because each person has gamed the system in very different ways. I mean, the results are essentially the same, but each one tried a different strategy and had varying results. I could safely say I'd know exactly how to fool us/our system and get away with it, but I definitely do not have the skills for it currently. Anyhow, I've gotten really good at spotting suspicious behaviour on the site. I feel like a cross between a bounty hunter and a detective...only like the most lame one in existence.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43yqdd/look-at-this-massive-click-fraud-farm-that-was-just-busted-in-thailand

It's a common problem rife on social media sites. Unfortunately, all it's going to take is a more clever person to beat the system. It's almost worth not doing anything since we know how to catch people as is and would be akin to a trap. It's just...a lot of work investigating each case. So we're automating detection and likely putting in a recaptcha to give bots a hard time. My coworker already explained how this could be circumvented, but it requires a non-trivial amount of work on the cheater's side (i.e. they need to actually know what they're doing).

Anyhow, it's keeping me busy at work and I get to make a lot of spreadsheets, which is keeping my inner data nerd at bay. I've only crashed Excel twice since this started and one of them was because I tried to extract and open a  report including 6 months worth of activity on a site with over 500,000 users. That was my bad.

The best part is some of the smart ones that have been confronted with their cheating and banished are trying to get more information out of us stating that it's not enough evidence to condemn them. It's so tempting to slap them in the face with it, but it's unwise to give smart people the tools they can use to best you in the future.


Update on the dude who said I was annoying (one of them at least...I think there's a club): He has started his own Dungeon Siege LP (no voice unfortunately) and has-----WAIT FOR IT-----changed his dislike to a like on my video since I was so nice. I'll be sure not to spend it all in one place.

Also, the D&D campaign Mesk was going to run is now cancelled, which is a little disappointing because I was looking forward to that. I hope he picks it up again, but I guess for now I can turn my attention and focus back to completing my writing and RPG.