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Old thread, I know, but there's a thought that's been nagging at me for a while and this seems like the best place for it.

There have been various programs designed to automate the solving of captchas. Usually they solve the audio variant of the captcha, as it's easier, but Flight Rising's image captchas are a lot more straight-forward and significantly less varied than the entire, AI-run database of images that is reCaptcha.

So if somebody wrote a program that could solve the coliseum captchas with an equal or higher success rate than the average human player, do you think FR staff would finally reassess the coliseum captcha system?

[quote name="Chemistfail" date="2020-01-07 16:26:09" ] [quote name="GrimoireBlack" date="2020-01-02 05:28:08" ] Unpopular opinion: We shouldn't punish honest players for what cheaters do. If the measures that are taken to stop botters LARGELY hurt people that play by the book, it's not worth it to me. The Camping screen /barely/ works on mobile and I've gotten banned from the Coli a few times because of it. On desktop I have very little trouble, but it's still a dang game of Where's Waldo sometimes to find the stupid dragon. People are gonna cheat. It's inevitable in every single game that has any measurable exploit. It's difficult to curb the use of third party software in a browser-based game, but to me, the solution isn't to make the game harder for people that have never and will never break the rules. The reason I don't bot is not because of the captchas. It's because it's against the rules. I'm not risking my account. I've spent real money here, lol. If someone else wants to get themselves banned that's their deal. [/quote] Mood. Cheaters gonna cheat [/quote] Agree. It's honestly embarrassing that the captcha has lasted this long, and it's one factor that continuously makes me wonder how long I want to stay here hoping for fixes to these basic issues.

No support for skipping it, but huge support to make the captcha accessible. The captcha is one of the reasons why I hate the coliseum.

[quote name="Teeka" date="2021-07-03 19:26:45" ] [quote name="MidnightFlygon" date="2021-07-03 15:18:03" ] Old thread, I know, but there's a thought that's been nagging at me for a while and this seems like the best place for it. There have been various programs designed to automate the solving of captchas. Usually they solve the audio variant of the captcha, as it's easier, but Flight Rising's image captchas are a lot more straight-forward and significantly less varied than the entire, AI-run database of images that is reCaptcha. So if somebody wrote a program that could solve the coliseum captchas with an equal or higher success rate than the average human player, do you think FR staff would finally reassess the coliseum captcha system? [/quote] They'd probably ditch the captcha system and introduce battle charges or something similar. Maybe every battle makes your dragon hungry so that after a certain number of battles, be they wins or losses, your team gets too hungry to fight, so you have to break your streak to feed them and then start all over again. Or you need to do a task of some sort to get a battle pass to get into the coli to begin with and if you quit or lose you need to do the task again, like give a random item, drawn from Pinkerton's pool to 'Craig the Coli Champion' that's justified lore wise as being necessary to keep the coli open. he gives you the pass, you go to another page, hand it over which opens a link to the coli and then you pick your party there and start. All sorts of miserable, redundant measures could be taken to make the coli even more unplayable. The captcha system we have sucks, but it could be way, way worse. [/quote] pretty much this, or they would go to some of the other captcha options, which while nice for people who can do them, would be worse for people who CAN'T do them (I hate the 'find all the X' captchas because does this pixel here belong to that X or does it belong to the background and so on, or the 'type these letters and numbers in' type, which while could be nice, are wavy, put on busy backgrounds and often have random lines that change the numbers and letters to different number and letters). Basically, if it is found that there is a problem of people getting around the current captcha using bots, they aren't going to just shrug and throw up their hands and say 'oh well, we tried, get rid of the captcha system and let the botters have their way', they are instead going to try to prevent those botters from 'winning' and, while it might mean something better for us all, in that they might reevaluate the current captcha and figure out a better system, it probably will just be something worse that make coli'ing even more inaccessible than it is now.

[quote name="Teeka" date="2021-07-03 19:26:45" ] Maybe every battle makes your dragon hungry so that after a certain number of battles, be they wins or losses, your team gets too hungry to fight, so you have to break your streak to feed them and then start all over again. [/quote] Something like this, but without breaking the streak could possibly work tbh? Like, maybe it brings up a menu of the food items in your hoard, picks one of your dragons, and says that that dragon is hungry for x (in order to prevent just using all imps to get around it), and you have to pick a food item of the correct type as a way of verifying that you're human that isn't so dependent on luck + having good vision. Maybe don't show the "food type" icons or text, just the picture, name and description, that way it would be more difficult to automate. It's not unbreakable, but neither is the current system, and I think it could work a lot better for players that are vision impaired as well. Actually, you could probably do it without even using the player's own items, just show a selection of different food items and have the player pick one of the right kind.

[quote name="MidnightFlygon" date="2021-07-04 09:46:26" ] [quote name="Teeka" date="2021-07-03 19:26:45" ] Maybe every battle makes your dragon hungry so that after a certain number of battles, be they wins or losses, your team gets too hungry to fight, so you have to break your streak to feed them and then start all over again. [/quote] Something like this, but without breaking the streak could possibly work tbh? Like, maybe it brings up a menu of the food items in your hoard, picks one of your dragons, and says that that dragon is hungry for x (in order to prevent just using all imps to get around it), and you have to pick a food item of the correct type as a way of verifying that you're human that isn't so dependent on luck + having good vision. Maybe don't show the "food type" icons or text, just the picture, name and description, that way it would be more difficult to automate. It's not unbreakable, but neither is the current system, and I think it could work a lot better for players that are vision impaired as well. Actually, you could probably do it without even using the player's own items, just show a selection of different food items and have the player pick one of the right kind. [/quote] To be honest? I would hate this, and I feel this could end up being super hard for players. I honestly have no clue what each breed eats, so if it brought up random dragons and said 'pick something this dragon would eat' I wouldn't really know, nor would I always be able to even pick out 'okay, pick the insect out of this lineup' all the time. Especially if it just pulled from random food items. To me, the biggest issues with the current captcha is that 1. It doesn't scale well, so that if you do try to make it bigger, it just gets blurry, 2. the super busy backgrounds on some of them, 3. the fact that some dragons can be the exact same color as the background and 4. the fact that sometimes even clicking on the dragon doesn't register as clicking on the dragon. I feel that fixing those four issues, without even having to choose a different captcha would eliminate a huge amount of the problems. But, I really wouldn't like to see the captcha system go from exclusing one set to excluding a different set, with a lot of overlap. Needing to remember/know what each food item is classified as (there would be some super obvious ones, of course, but there are some that aren't quite as obvious, and if they weren't identified through the icon or through filtering, I wouldn't know what is what all the time), or being able to remember what each dragon breed eats would be, to me, much harder than the current system, because it requires a lot more memorization than simply remembering dragon outlines.

[quote name="BlueJaysFeather" date="2021-07-03 21:27:30" ] [quote name="Chemistfail" date="2020-01-07 16:26:09" ] [quote name="GrimoireBlack" date="2020-01-02 05:28:08" ] Unpopular opinion: We shouldn't punish honest players for what cheaters do. If the measures that are taken to stop botters LARGELY hurt people that play by the book, it's not worth it to me. The Camping screen /barely/ works on mobile and I've gotten banned from the Coli a few times because of it. On desktop I have very little trouble, but it's still a dang game of Where's Waldo sometimes to find the stupid dragon. People are gonna cheat. It's inevitable in every single game that has any measurable exploit. It's difficult to curb the use of third party software in a browser-based game, but to me, the solution isn't to make the game harder for people that have never and will never break the rules. The reason I don't bot is not because of the captchas. It's because it's against the rules. I'm not risking my account. I've spent real money here, lol. If someone else wants to get themselves banned that's their deal. [/quote] Mood. Cheaters gonna cheat [/quote] Agree. It's honestly embarrassing that the captcha has lasted this long, and it's one factor that continuously makes me wonder how long I want to stay here hoping for fixes to these basic issues. [/quote] And I would like to point out the big, glaring flaw in all of this: a human can do the captcha for the bot. Write a script, automate it, stop it when the camping screen comes up. Solve the captcha, resume script. Lather, rinse, repeat. FR is gaining absolutely nothing, but blind players are losing everything.

[quote name="LightingStrikes" date="2021-07-04 10:50:41" ] [quote name="BlueJaysFeather" date="2021-07-03 21:27:30" ] [quote name="Chemistfail" date="2020-01-07 16:26:09" ] [quote name="GrimoireBlack" date="2020-01-02 05:28:08" ] Unpopular opinion: We shouldn't punish honest players for what cheaters do. If the measures that are taken to stop botters LARGELY hurt people that play by the book, it's not worth it to me. The Camping screen /barely/ works on mobile and I've gotten banned from the Coli a few times because of it. On desktop I have very little trouble, but it's still a dang game of Where's Waldo sometimes to find the stupid dragon. People are gonna cheat. It's inevitable in every single game that has any measurable exploit. It's difficult to curb the use of third party software in a browser-based game, but to me, the solution isn't to make the game harder for people that have never and will never break the rules. The reason I don't bot is not because of the captchas. It's because it's against the rules. I'm not risking my account. I've spent real money here, lol. If someone else wants to get themselves banned that's their deal. [/quote] Mood. Cheaters gonna cheat [/quote] Agree. It's honestly embarrassing that the captcha has lasted this long, and it's one factor that continuously makes me wonder how long I want to stay here hoping for fixes to these basic issues. [/quote] And I would like to point out the big, glaring flaw in all of this: a human can do the captcha for the bot. Write a script, automate it, stop it when the camping screen comes up. Solve the captcha, resume script. Lather, rinse, repeat. FR is gaining absolutely nothing, but blind players are losing everything. [/quote] This isn't quite true, yeah, a human could do the captcha for the bot, but that still requires that human to be there every time the captch comes up. Most people who want to bot, I assume, want to just leave it to work while they do something else, either online or even away from the device that is running the bot. Even the current captcha system is probably stopping some bots, simply because those players don't want to have to stick around to click a button every so often. (and if they can't see the captcha themselves, they can get locked outas well) With this logic, no captcha would 'gain FR anything' because the same could be said of literally any captcha system out there. A player could write a script, automate it, then click through the captcha and repeat. So I wouldn't say that FR is gaining nothing, because they are stopping bots. The captcha system needs to be better, absolutely, and there are a great many posts discussing variants and ways to create a better system.