Suggestions

No support for getting rid of the captcha because it prevents botting. As someone who played FR while botting was a problem... yeah, we really don't want to go back to that era.

However, I agree that the current captchas are really bad. I have decent eyesight and even I struggle with them. I support a way to make captchas more accessible- such as having simpler backgrounds, not layering dragons on backgrounds that are the same colour as they are, having an audio captcha option, etc.

Support offering alternative options - if nothing else, something keyboard-navigable would be nice for people like myself who use the Coli keyboard controls to avoid hand strain.

[quote name="Jemadar" date="2021-07-04 10:40:28" ] 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. [/quote] That's not what I meant. I mean, it picks a food type from the possible food types that dragon can eat, and tells you, "this dragon is hungry for x", x being a specified food type. The food names and descriptions could also be shown, just not the food type text or icon. That way, it should be pretty easy for a human, but difficult for a bot due to natural language processing being something bots and even neural networks are not good at yet.

[quote name="Jemadar" date="2021-07-04 11:00:43" ] [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. [/quote] I have different assumptions. I assume people bot because a bot can click faster than a human, because FR's coliseum mouse controls cause repetitive stress injuries, because the keyboard controls are awkward at best, because the mobile coli crashes frequently, because they have arthritis/carpal tunnel, because they want to do 2 things at once (which does not require them to be away from the computer, like reading or playing in another tab, just program the bot to stop when it hits a captcha), any number of reasons. These captchas only stop one very simple type of botting, with the easiest workaround in the world: check the screen every few minutes. Script an alert if you can. Without the captchas, nothing much changes for the bots. Compare that to a blind, visually impaired, or mobility impaired user's experience: locked out of one of the most fundamental parts of the site. The captchas stay when you refresh, and clicking randomly gets you locked out for a while. You can't grind for festivals. You can't train fodder. Most of the fairgrounds games are completely inaccessible, so you can't make money that way. I could go on. And let's not ignore the fact that we don't have MP/AH captchas. Botting is ridiculously easy to do there. In addition, this steals resources from other players, unlike in the coli, where you are generating resources. We are harming real people because we're mad about others getting a few extra pixel items.

[quote name="LightingStrikes" date="2021-07-04 13:13:40" ] [quote name="Jemadar" date="2021-07-04 11:00:43" ] [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. [/quote] I have different assumptions. I assume people bot because a bot can click faster than a human, because FR's coliseum mouse controls cause repetitive stress injuries, because the keyboard controls are awkward at best, because the mobile coli crashes frequently, because they have arthritis/carpal tunnel, because they want to do 2 things at once (which does not require them to be away from the computer, like reading or playing in another tab, just program the bot to stop when it hits a captcha), any number of reasons. These captchas only stop one very simple type of botting, with the easiest workaround in the world: check the screen every few minutes. Script an alert if you can. Without the captchas, nothing much changes for the bots. Compare that to a blind, visually impaired, or mobility impaired user's experience: locked out of one of the most fundamental parts of the site. The captchas stay when you refresh, and clicking randomly gets you locked out for a while. You can't grind for festivals. You can't train fodder. Most of the fairgrounds games are completely inaccessible, so you can't make money that way. I could go on. And let's not ignore the fact that we don't have MP/AH captchas. Botting is ridiculously easy to do there. In addition, this steals resources from other players, unlike in the coli, where you are generating resources. We are harming real people because we're mad about others getting a few extra pixel items. [/quote] The vast majority of people that I have seen bot because they want something for little effort. It doesn't matter how easy or hard a game is, how bad for your health a game is, or whether it affects health or not, etc.. people bot it because they want the rewards. Most of the time, the botting in MP/AH is mitigated because there are about 2-3K people online at any given time, and those players are buying/selling/sniping at any given time, so a bot might *try* to buy up all of a particular item, but it is, in general, pretty easy to see when one person can get 10 items while everyone else can only get 1 item out of each restock. (or on the AH). However, generating resources in a multiplayer game can be just as harmful as 'stealing' them. By generating those resources, the botters are causing inflation of currency and deflation of items. Basically, it costs all players, including those who cannot or do not want to use the coliseum, MORE to obtain things because the items they get that can also be generated by the coliseum are now worth less than they were before, and, due to chests and hoard selling, treasure is now worth less than it was before, because there is an excess of treasure being generated, treasure that normally wouldn't have been. This in turn makes it even more lucrative to bot other parts of the site, such as sniping, because there is now a much larger difference between what non-coli items are generated for (cost in the MP or free through gathering etc..) and what they can be sold for on the AH (due to inflation), but this has the effect of driving those prices down because now there are a large amount of excess items being generated due to botting, which, again makes those items worthless. To be quite frank, in a multiplayer game, I see no excuse to cheat/bot, because that player is hurting OTHER players who are playing the game according to the rules. I can understand the frustration of not being able to do something, I have had to skip events on other sites, or just quit other sites before because I just couldn't do something, but I still don't believe that is an 'excuse' to cheat.

[quote name="Winterwald" date="2021-07-04 21:01:46" ] Like someone else said, cheaters gonna cheat. Big whoop, just catch them in ban waves. You know it's a problem when even people with perfectly fine vision have trouble solving it. [/quote] The problem with this is that by the time they are caught, the damage has already been done. Which is why most petsites try to *prevent* cheaters from being able to cheat rather than just wait until they do cheat and then punish them.

I support alternatives to the captchas, but not to skip or remove them.

As to why there’s no captcha for the AH/MP/etc to prevent botting, is probably because it’s not rewarding or profitable. Which is why people generally bot in the in the first place