Bots in War Thunder: what they are and how we plan to get rid of them
We’d like to address an issue that has become increasingly prevalent in our community: the issue of bots that some of you encounter during battles, primarily due to their unnatural behavior. There are also player accounts with strange stats that raise a few eyebrows. We feel it is essential to keep our community informed about the nature of these bots and our plans to combat them.
Firstly, we want to express our sincere gratitude to all of you who have reported this problem and continue to do so. Your proactive participation is what makes our community strong and resilient. The recent surge in the number of bots operating in our game has been a concern for all of us and we’re working hard to tackle the problem.
Over the past few months, we have been conducting a comprehensive study to understand how these bots operate, what motivates their creators, and, most importantly, how we can most effectively combat them. This is not an easy task, because in many cases, real players move and fight in battle similar to how these bots do, not identically of course - but we need to be careful and eliminate any margin of error, and make sure we can avoid any false positives when detecting them.
Bots are primarily used to artificially boost accounts, which are then sold for profit - a practice which sometimes also involves the illicit use of stolen credit card information. There are also cases where bot software is sold to those who wish to boost their player accounts themselves. All these practices breach our game rules, and hurt both our players and the game as a whole.
At present, our immediate response is obviously to detect and ban any bots we encounter. For example, last weekend we studied hundreds of player reports and banned 215 accounts that were definitely using bots. Hence, we’d like to emphasize that purchasing bots or boosted accounts will - sooner or later - lead to an account ban, meaning the loss of both money and in-game progress. We’re also kindly asking you to report all bots via the in-game reporting system. Your support will allow us to get rid of those bots even quicker.
We acknowledge and deeply regret instances where some past reports did not result in user bans as expected. Your voices do matter to us, and every report is critical for maintaining the game's fairness and integrity. To address this, we're currently in the process of overhauling our report processing system to ensure a quicker and more effective response time. Furthermore, to streamline our understanding and handling of the bot problem, we will be introducing separate categories specifically for bot reporting in a few days.
However, we fully understand that banning each individual bot-linked account is a temporary solution and are, therefore, dedicated to finding a long-term solution to ensure a proper gameplay experience in War Thunder is maintained. We are exploring various options and are even prepared to implement drastic measures such as CAPTCHA (before battle or in battle) for accounts that we identify as suspicious, if necessary, to curb bot usage.
We will have a clearer understanding of the timeline once we release our next major update and Economy Roadmap updates that currently require most of our time. Rest assured that our commitment to resolving this issue remains unwavering and our efforts are geared towards implementing these countermeasures as soon as possible.
Thank you for your patience, understanding, and continued support. We look forward to sharing more updates with you soon.
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