Intro
There's no such thing as "anti-bot" and there will never be.
If it can be accessed, there will be bots!

All that decide if there will be botters or not, is if the game is popular or not.
Even smaller games, even with as little as 5 players could have bots working on them.
And those people creating bots, are often very skilled and experienced in coding, to be able to overcome new systems or new clients.

People often think that if you make a completely new client from scratch, that current bots wont work on, would make botters go away.
This is not true, just think about it, if that statement would be true, there wouldn't be any bots anywhere because every game once was new and had no bots working for them.

People often tend to think it's a vital option to "update" the client on daily basis to keep botters out.
This is not a good option either, 9 out of 10 cases, it take longer time to update the client so the bot wont work, than it takes the bot-dev to update their bot.
Updating the client can take anything from an hour to days, but lets say we just want the bot not to recognize the client, it would still take an hour. (changing codes, compiling a rather complex source into a program file, and distribute the new client to downloadable places).
For that one hour, it would take the bot-dev 5 minutes, to do minimal changes in his bot to recognize the new client and use same information as it.
Easier said, it take longer time and more efforts to update an client, than it takes for a bot-dev to adjust his bot for the changes.

The best anyone can do, is keep trying to get rid of them.
But the thing is to be careful at it too, if you remove botters too quickly and in large scale, bot-devs will think of ways to get around it.
And with frequent actions against cheaters, bot-devs can debug it, experiment and work it out and suddenly the old way of getting rid of them will not work anymore.



How to report a cheater
You can report anyone in the game using the command !reportbot.

You need some parameters to make the report legit.
The proper way to use the command is !reportbot, PLAYERNAME, DESCRIPTION.
PLAYERNAME = Name of the player.
DESCRIPTION = What is the player doing and why you think it's a cheater?

Additional to the command, you need to be close to the player, at maximum you can be a few SQM offscreen, which is helpful for auto-logout bots.

NEVER spamm around that a player is cheating.
Spamming around in channels or social places that a player is cheating will not help getting the player deleted quicker, it will rather lower your scores of being trusted with reports.
It also might get you banished for spamming.

It happens from time to time, that someone writes a message about someone cheating, in every channel he can find in the game and on discord.
And when someone does that, they get warnings or banishment, depending on where and how extensive their spamming is.



Be careful when reporting!
Your account has a score of how skilled you are on making reports!
If you report everyone you see your score will be lowered and your reports will get less and less chance for being taken seriously.

When reporting, make sure that the player you're about to report, is cheating at the moment when you're reporting it!
If you're right and become good at making reports, your reports will be prioritized and much more likely to be taken seriously.



How long does it take for a cheater to be deleted
When you make a report, it will be checked according to the order it was sent in with, and how your personal score of reports are looking.
If the report is valid, and the character reported was cheating, he will be scheduled for deletion very quickly.

However, the scheduled deletion is random and can be anything from a few hours, to a few days.



Is deletions always accurate?
We run RetroCores seriously, and we don't want anyone to get deleted unfairly.
An accidental deletion is a BIG NO for us on RetroCores.

So whenever players are deleted, it's 99-100% accurate depending on the cause of the deletion.
If the deletion was performed by automatic systems, it will say "processed report" in the violation of the character, and that's a 100% rate accurate.

If it's something else, it means that the account was deleted by a staff member, and then it's with 99% accuracy.
If an account deletion turns up to been invalid, that someone in the staff made a mistake, the account and character will be restored rather quickly once it is brought up to admins attention.

If you are a cheater, and see your chance you could try to lie your way out of a deletion, know this.
If you contact admins, and lie about your deletion, you will be blocked from ever being able to contact admin again.
Admin Marcus is the only one in staff that can check history and determine with 100% accuracy if you where cheating or not, so lying wouldn't get you anywhere but getting blocked, which could be a bad idea in case you might need direct admin help one day.



Why isn't cheaters deleted instantly?
As mentioned at the intro, we need to protect ourselves from making bots even harder to catch!

We have an automatic system that help us dealing with reports, a system that even admin uses to make sure manual deletions was made for the right reason.
This automatic system is unknown, nobody but Admin Marcus knows how it works, it's our Top-Secret thing.
And we keep it that way to ensure nobody can figure out how to bypass it.

This system is what helps us making sure that nobody that's playing fair and square is accidentally deleted.
But we need to protect it from bot-devs and debugging people!

So to ensure the system stays safe, we can't delete cheaters instantly on the spot, but we need to drag it out randomly.
Because if we deleted cheaters on the spot, bot-devs and similar would be able to "debug" and test the system out, and gather information and ideas how to avoid it.

You may know of BattleEye, which is a protection service games uses to get rid of cheaters.
Ever since the high peak of PUBG, there's now millions of bots bypassing BattleEye.

And that's what happens, when something becomes popular, and is widely used and that is near predictable, you can experiment on it, debug it, and try find ways to go around it.

This is why, we are delaying deletions randomly.
To ensure our greatest tool to ensure fair deletions, stay valid and with the accuracy it does today.



Why isn't the player I reported for a long time deleted?
If you think someone is cheating, and you've reported this player for a long time, there's multiple reasons as to why he might not been deleted yet.

Possible reasons:

• Your personal valid-report score could be so low that they're only dealt with when there's absolutely no other reports to deal with, which could take weeks or even months.
• You might be mistaken, and are trying to report someone who isn't cheating.
• You might be right and the player does cheat from time to time, but sadly none of your reports was made while he was cheating.
• The character might already have a scheduled deletion that will come shortly.

Accept that you might be wrong!
If you've reported a player but nothing happens, you must realize that you could be wrong.
It's not a healthy way to play a game being annoyed that "the cheater isn't getting deleted".
Because it could be as simple as you where mistaken.



RetroCores deals with cheaters quicker than you expect!
We often hear people saying that RetroCores loves cheaters and that nobody is deleted based on that someone they reported isn't instantly deleted.
This is just pure nonsense, either they're incredible ignorant, having a little too heated feelings or are part of a disinformation campaign.

Truth to be told, RetroCores have deleted almost 16,000 accounts in less than 2 years!
You can see deletion list and count in cheaters list.

Relative topics that could be good to understand under heat of passion when it comes to cheaters would be:
FAQ -Disinformation campaigns, trolls and haters.
FAQ -How to contact staff with best chance of success.
FAQ -Admins never accept 'side money' nor taking sides with teams or players.





Not everyone is cheating!
You've heard the phrase "if he's worse than me, he's a noob, if he's better than me he's a cheater!"?
That phrase is actually very real and is the ground for majority of reports in all types of games.

A lot of reports are based on coincidence, bad luck or that the suspected cheater might have certain skill in situations that most doesn't.
And this is happening in RetroCores just the same as many other games!

But there's many people being reported, simply because the reporter just can't see that anyone would do the things the player does.
Lots of reports are based on personal experiences of players and personal opinions, which make a lot of reports incorrect.
Most of you who read this, could agree that nobody would stand still and fish constantly for 5 hours.
But in truth, there's people like that out there, there's even worse people than that.

Most of you would agree, nobody could hunt in same cave for 5 days with no more than 3 hours of offline time.
While it have already happened in many games, including RetroCores.
We had a streamer that for some odd reason, decided to become first lvl 100 knight by hunting nothing but tortoises in spring of 2021.
Luckily for spectators, he was streaming while doing it, so for most part he was not accused of being a cheater.
There was a few reports on him, but not as many there would be if he didn't stream it.

And that for an example, you need to consider that there's crazy people out there, doing crazy things that's far more exhausting than you could imagine.
Don't judge people by your own opinions, what's impossible for you to imagine, someone else do for fun.

You also have to consider, not everyone is as skilled at RetroCores/Tibia as you or better.
We still have completely new people in RetroCores of all ages.

In the staff, we've seen a lot of things that most players would refuse to believe in, chances are that you who are reading this right now will think it's just something made up, while in truth it's not.
We've seen players of 2 years of age, and we've seen players of 90 years age being online.

Sometimes, there's players who love the game so much, they'd love to teach their children or their parents or relatives/friends.
And that happens more often than you'd think.
We have a fan that sent us a video of his children playing RetroCores, his 2 year old daughter and 4 year old son, sitting at the kitchen table with 2 laptops, slaying rats in Thais sewers.

We've had another case there a players father loved to play RetroCores, but couldn't understand the concept of messages, or even English.
He couldn't understand how the chat works, and didn't care for messages that would show up on screen from time to time, or when other players messaged to him.
In the eyes of a player, he was an AFK bot ignoring players and hunting apes in Banuta.
But all he was, where an old champ enjoying a simple game and didn't bother to interact with other players.

We've seen a lot of this around RetroCores, and sadly, majority of players in RetroCores think the player base is of age 12 - 25.
Anything younger or older is non-existing.
And to 99% certainty, majority thinks that all players who end up in RetroCores, have at least 6 months of gaming experience from other games before joining RetroCores.
To be honest, most people in RetroCores believe all players that would ever come here, have played tibia before.
Which isn't always the case.

With this in mind, you can never be entirely sure someone is cheating.
Just because he's ignoring you, or wont pick up obviously valuable items, doesn't mean he's a cheater, he could as well be a beginner in the game and/or not understand English or how the chat's are working.