Dev post: Tackling botting in Habbo

How do we deal with botting?

Hi all,

Over the past several years, botting has become an increasingly prominent issue in Habbo, with the community repeatedly voicing its concerns.

We have introduced measures to combat it over the years, but ultimately, fighting bots will always be a cat-and-mouse game. The more incentive botters have to remain active, the more effort they will put into bypassing technical restrictions.

The easier and most reliable approach is therefore to take away their incentive. Back when the Vault was introduced during H2020, free credits were given out for level progression. This flooded the Hotel with bots automating level progression. The solution was not to prevent every bot from existing, but to remove the automatable source of free credits.

We now want to follow a similar approach for the two main ways in which botters currently disrupt the hotel:

• Boosting rooms in the Navigator, often with inappropriate room names

• Causing disruption inside rooms by organizing raids

Interestingly, both of these are issues that need to be addressed anyway, even if botters were not a thing.

Upcoming experimentation

Hot Rooms

First, we’ll update the Navigator. The top category will no longer be “Most Populated Rooms”; instead, we’ll create a new “Hot Rooms” category.

Room rankings in this category will take into account multiple parameters, such as genuine activity, instead of only looking at the number of Habbos inside. This should make it much harder to push a room to the top using bots while also improving the rooms shown to genuine players.

Some of the exact signals used for this will intentionally remain undisclosed, as revealing them would be counterproductive.

Raid Protection

Secondly, we’ll introduce Raid Protection inside rooms.

This will be a new menu inside the room settings that can be accessed by the room owner and Habbos with room rights. For official rooms, Ambassadors will be able to access these settings as well.

Raids will be detected using algorithms that identify disruptive behaviour and unusual activity inside rooms. Depending on the type of room, the room creator can configure how sensitive this detection should be. A relaxed room might use a high sensitivity, while a super-active gaming room should probably use a lower sensitivity.

When a raid is detected, the room owner can temporarily restrict new Habbos from entering the room. How strict this protection should be and how long it should remain active can also be configured.

Conclusion

These are important steps towards preventing abusive behaviour in Habbo and significantly reducing the incentives botters currently have. Note that both changes will initially be experimental and may not work as intended, at first. We’ll continue to tweak and balance them based on how they perform in practice.

It’s never possible to promise anything when it comes to fighting bots. However, the road forward is clear, and there’s good reason to be optimistic.

With climate change, there’s also an increased chance that the botters will see sunlight and touch grass.

- sirjonasxx