Bot Checks

Contents:
  1. Bot Checks
  2. Suspension
  3. Bot Check Difficulties
  4. Frequently Asked Questions
  5. Fun Facts

Bot Checks

During the game you will receive bot checks. These checks make sure that you are actually playing the game yourself instead of a Bot. On the bot check page you will see a page with the following (notated in bold text):

This page is brought to you by, followed with an image of 2 words, being 3 or 4 letter words.

Please type the top 3 or 4 letter word: _______

You have 2 minutes to respond.

Notes:

  • All displayed letters are lower case, but you can answer in upper case.
  • You can re-read the intro here [1].
  • If you accidentally click Back or otherwise exit this page, you can get back to it by clicking on the link again.

What this means is:

  • You have to type the top 3 or 4 letter word in the box below the actual image. The letters are displayed lower case but you can answer in both lower and upper case.
  • You have 2 minutes to respond, to actually fill in the bot check and enter it.
  • When accidently clicking Back or going to another page, you can bring back up this bot check page by trying to continue to fight or forge again.
  • If you fail the first bot check, by typing the wrong answer, you will be given a second chance. You should see "That was incorrect. Please try again." on the next bot check page.
  • If you fail the second chance 'or' do not fill in the bot check within 2 minutes, the system will suspend your Fighting and Forging abilities.

Suspension

When being suspended you will be unable to fight or forge until either the 60 minute duration has run out, or you payed the fine. When trying to fight or forge you will be sent to another page in which you see the information about the suspension.

You should see the following, but probably with different times and fine costs:

Your privilege to fight was suspended for 60 minutes starting at 7:13 AM EST. Current server time is Thu Nov 3 07:13:51 2005.

You may fight again when that time has elapsed, or you may continue immediately after paying a fine of $14,956. Click here to pay $14,956 and continue fighting.

  • The suspension lasts for 60 minutes and when updating the page you will see the timer go down to 0.
  • During the suspension your Battle Allocation (BA) will not replenish itself. (You can however buy additional BA, but can't use it.)
  • The height of the fine is based on your Minion Power (MPR). So, the higher your MPR is, the higher your fine will be.
  • The height of the fine goes down the longer you wait.
  • There is no way to bypass this fine other than waiting or paying.

Bot Check Difficulties

Some bot checks are harder than others, and they are all randomly generated and all unique, even with the same words used.

Some more help about bot checks can be found on this page of the game: http:/challenge/help.tcl

Also a Bot Check Trainer, which can be handy when not being too good at reading cursive can be found here: http://cb.dontpanic.nl/botcheck/

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do you (still) have 'challenge questions', aka bot checks?
Because CB is built on open standards, it's possible to write a bot to play for you, either with a click scripting tool or something more advanced like libwww-perl. (The changes introduced at the beginning 2003 make click scripting significantly more difficult but not impossible.)
Why must they be so difficult?
They are difficult, true. Intentionally so; several previous incarnations of the bot check were defeated by bot authors. In its current form, it is difficult enough that it is safe to say that if you can defeat it, you should contact a local university professor in AI to get your work published. The cursive, overlapping words, distortion, time limit, and low try limit are all part of what makes it tough to defeat. (So don't bother complaining about them.) For instance -- say someone had a bot that could answer correctly 20% of the time. Even this much is difficult, but may be possible. With two tries, his bot passes 36% of the time; still low enough to raise a red flags for the admins. With 5 tries, he's up to 68%. This will take longer for us to notice. (Or, he can have the bot try four times -- 59% success -- and have it call him for the fifth if it fails.) Despite the initial difficulty, humans invariably learn to read them quickly when they want to. Don't get discouraged; admins can clear your suspension if necessary. (But don't bother asking unless you're new. :)
I still need help!
That's not a question, but if you're still having difficulty reading them, you can get a quick review of what cursive letters look like: http://www.handwritingforkids.com/handwrite/tcguidel.gif or practice using a botcheck trainer [2].
I've got a bot check but the image is just a red X!
That's still not a question. However, your browser didn't load the image for some reason. First, right-click on it and select Load Image (control-click if you're on a Mac). If that doesn't work, hit the Back button in your browser, then hit Forward. If that doesn't work, reload the page -- don't worry, you will get the exact same bot-check back. Failing that, close your browser completely and then re-open it, come back to CarnageBlender, and re-do whatever it was that you did to get the bot-check -- again, don't worry, you'll get the same one. If none of the above worked, just guess an answer; it will probably be wrong but you always have 2 tries, and guessing wrong will force a new image to be generated.
I got suspended but I never saw a challenge question.
The solution to this is simple: LET YOUR BATTLES FINISH. Especially after leaving fighting for another activity. Browsers are fairly simpleminded clients; any request supercedes all previous requests, finished or not. So the server could try to send you the challenge message, but if you click somewhere else before the page finishes loading, you won't see it. Two minutes later, when it expires, you're suspended.
Why don't you use different colored text/background to make it even harder?
This only makes it harder for humans. It's trivial for a program to determine which color belongs to the actual lettering, and ignore the rest.

Fun Facts

The bot check example on this page is a real one, it isn't faked. User Shade received his own fine and realized there was not a page on bot checks, so he created one and added his fine as an example.

    last edited by AdminNightStrike at Aug 29 2008 - Edit Bot Checks

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