How is this not against the rules?

The point is not, that it would be easy to auto-ban some bots or multiaccounts. I never said anything about a "no-false-negative"-problem. The point is false positives. And your pseudo-code would result in a lot:

• A player can't even send 80% of his resource production to anyone, pushing protection limits this depending on the connection between the accounts (same pc/ip, sitter relation, no connection)
• If a player sends the pushing protection limit it can have many reasons, for instance kingdom-intern temporary pushing e.g. to compensate recent off losses (which is fine and no multiaccounting), an agreement between farmer and farm (which is fine aswell), ...
• If a player is farmed beyond good and evil he maybe is just a farm and no multiaccount?? There are at least 15 players in my current game world who lose 80%+ of their production to me without them being my multis
• A player not reading messages could be using the app and not see/read them there
• A player insta-reading all messages might just have left the chat windows opened ...
• If the game requires me to solve some fucking captchas every day I would insta-quit it, because I'm retarded and need like 10+ tries at every single one, those fuckers are just annoying. Or imagine making an offplan and not be able to time attacks due to these fuckers
• If a newbie doesn't know how to behave when being farmed, barracks etc. are being destroyed (which isn't that unusual) and are farmed 24/7 you just can't do too much
• How to you tell a program to differenciate between "random letters" and normal village names. For instance, once I named my villages after a chess game (like 01. e2-e4 e7-e5, 02. Ng8-f3 Nb8-c6, ...), I know one who named it after chemical elements (which involve a lot of numbers and letters), and so on.

You just can't come up with a good, relieable auto-ban system that has a 0% false positive rate. As I said, from a programmer's view it's just too easy to hide MA/Botusing. Sure, you can catch some idiots that are MAing, but that's the case right now with manual-only checks aswell. So no improvement there. And you can code detection versus a specific bot, but those will probably change their behaviour often enough.
The point is, to relieably tell apart human from bot and MA behaviour, you need to think and analyse a lot. This is likely a bachelor thesis and more worth of analysing, to be honest, I can understand that they don't implement it. AND - I wouldn't want any system that can even think of banning a non-bot / non-ma mistakenly. Why? Obviously the devs won't tell the detection mechanisms, so the MHs & CMs have to rely on what the system sais. So if it's a false positive ... he's just fucked.
There are reasons, why this isn't a thing (yet?).

Quote from Batcountry#EN

Mate - it's the entire fucking Turkish alliance doing it on Com3, not individual players - with just a quick look at them before deleting there's at least 5 multi accounts they are using that they aren't even bothering to hide and several more that are incredibly suspicious

5 multi's == the whole alliance?

Quote from Batcountry#EN

if I'm going to spend my time and money playing a game (win or lose) I'd rather find one with real players

Last time I checked multi's were run by real players

Quote from Ammanurt

why stop at 2 accounts to begin with? Why not have everyone in your kingdom temporarily build a 2nd, 3rd and 4th account, supply their first one with resources either directly or by allowing them to be farmed

You do realize there's a pretty low cap to how many resources you can supply / raid from players in your own kingdom, accounts on same ip, etc?

Quote from Ammanurt

Hey, according to your logic, you're putting in 4x the time, so this is all completely fine right? No problems here?? Flawless game-design...?! Do I need to point out the obvious problem here? If you're going to put in 2x the amount of time for the extra benefit, do it on your own account

That's a statement, not a "problem"

Quote from Ammanurt

There was a thread somewhere recently about multiacounters starting a new account and then teleporting 15-croppers to their main player's kingdom. If this sort of thing doesn't convince you that this game shouldn't be named Travian, I don't know what would

That's not possible anymore with the new update

Quote from Deacon

someone would need to check IP's and MAC's, but ech, why should we bother MH and Admins for little problem like that, game is almost dead anyway, right?

MACs can't be checked on a browser game. IPs are so easy to spoof that it's not even worth checking

Quote from Batcountry#EN

the developers are either too lazy or too stupid to find a way to fix the problem themselves

You don't need to be smart to understand how to fix the problems we are discussing here, some basic understanding of how these systems work is all you need. And I can tell you that multiaccounting and botting is not fixable / preventable easily. The algorithms that you would require to determine whether someone is a multi or botting (for any bot that's worth its money), are very complicated, would take at least a week to flag someone as multi/bot and would simply be out of budget for Travian to implement
I can write you a bot that will be indistinguishable from a real player. It would take me, at most, 4 hours (this isn't because I'm good, this is literally how easy it is to write bots on T5), to allow for things like auto building and farming. If I lets say, intentionally, leave a mistake somewhere in the code which could be used to identify the bot by Travian, lets say I reuse the same unix timestamp accidentally in 2 packets. For Travian to implement an algorithm to detect that, and mark you as a bot, with all the processes that have to happen in a software company, will take them at least a week. So that's 4hr of my work, which is worth like 60$ in time, vs a week of theirs, which is worth like 20 000$ in time, and then it would take me 5 minutes to patch the issue that they are using to detect the bot. That's 0.1$ of my time to wipe out 20 000$ of their time. You can see how uneconomical this is. It literally does not make any sense whatsoever for them to try and implement this.

Their best bet is to rework the gameplay to make it so multiaccounting and botting has as little impact on the game overall as it can. And that's exactly what they're doing. That's why we have caps on how many res you can send someone or farm from someone in your own alliance. That's why they disabled relocating 15c. That's why they made it so easy to get resources without farming.

Quote from Batcountry#EN

Exactly - it's a two second fix that would greatly reduce the problem but they still haven't implemented it for some reason. And they wouldn't even need to run it on a test server - it's already been tried before on different versions and they know it works.

Not how it works. The way previous versions worked is completely different from T5 and should not be compared at all when it comes to anti-multi and anti-bot measures

Quote from Batcountry#EN

But they've chosen to ignore this issue for too long and will have nobody else to blame when Kingdoms continues to lose players at the rate it currently is.

So you believe that the developers, who are being paid to work their 8 hours a day, who have managers, who are overlooked by the cto, who is overlooked by ceo, all said "lets not spend 2 seconds fixing this issue that is killing our revenue, lets instead ignore it"?

Quote from Ammanurt

Hmm, hard to make a anti-multiaccounting algorithm? Probably, but you don't have to go too far to remove a lot of the easy-to-catch stuff. The objective is to stop most of the botting and multiaccounting, while having a human check before the ban is confirmed. Some ideas:

Java

//some pseudocode:


for Player p : Players:
boolean ban = false;


if (resourcesSentToOnePlayerPerDay, directly or indirectly, => e.g. 80% of his resource production)
    ban = true;
//Player not playing to the benefit of his own account, bannable offense. Possible multiaccount.


if(Player not growing, not building troops yet staying active and allowing himself to be farmed)
    ban = true;
//same


if(messages never read, or instantly read, but never responded to in a "human-like" fashion")
    ban = true;
//this is probably a bot.


if(area contains lots of players/villages with no actual names, but just "new village" or random letters, and resource streams are mostly going to the same person/group of people)
    ban = true;


//likely multiaccounts/bots


if(player has lots of timed farming/other attacks over a period of time)
if(!doCaptcha()) 
    ban=true;
//I'm sure real players won't mind proving they're a bot from time to time, right?

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This is just from the top of my head. I'm sure there are more patterns that you could use to see who's botting/mh'ing. And there isn't much an intelligent developer can do about most of these. It will always require some vigilance - you have to keep up with the new ways of cheating, but implementing these would be a good first step. And yeah, you would definitely need the rule about playing to the benefit of your own account, but I've always assumed that, among all their other oversights, the devs just forgot to add that one.

Majority of what you posted is just not how it works. The amount of false positives this would produce is insane and is simply not the way to deal with this

Quote from Batcountry#EN

Well it was you (unless there are two Georgies working in the admin team) who reduced the punishment of one cheat after he had a cry about how much money he spends on gold.

Are you happy for me to publicly share the message exchange I have seen without getting banned from the forum, or would you rather continue to try and maintain the illusion that this never happens

Hi again,
unfortunately not as conversations with the staff cannot be posted here, but you can email the address mentioned above so we can review this case. However, as it is regarding another player we won't be able to share any information with you but our team will still look into it.
In a very rare situations a punishment can be slightly reduced due to e.g. very long response time but not because of Gold usage.

Kind regards
Georgi