Major Arena Update and Reset

Hey guys,

We just rolled a whole bunch of new changes live into the arena, including some new monster abilities, critical hits against monsters, and even captcha (sorry bot makers).

For all details, see the changelog here


Also, in about 10 minutes, we will be resetting the arena to level the playing field. Levels, money, items will all be reset.

Have fun!

My idea! My idea! :P

You mean all of us will be back at level 1 and all the money I have in the bank will be lost !?

Oh, and excuse my ignorance, but what is 'captcha' ? Is it like capture !?

Captcha's are those images on forms where you have to type in
what they say [used to stop bots submitting forms.]

Oh, and resetting everything sucks! I was just about to get level
30 and buy a Katana on ASP Free.

Awww...

I was getting rich, but I guess resetting is a good idea if it all works better.

Captcha? Where's the fun in that?

Yeah, I was writing a bot script for fun - but I never got near to actually battling with it. At least I have more free time now

By the way, nice move taking out the newlines! It was an interesting challenge

No kidding!!!! I caught the captcha a little while back, then just now got:



And do not forget to go to the update your character option! You will probably like having more than 0/0 HP!

Do Player vs Player only count toward Stats now?

if you do a captcha then could you put the battle form (where you select what to do and hit submit) before the entire battle transcript, it gets long and i don't like to scroll that much

What did you expect from a forum full of programmers? I love a challenge.
That captcha doesn't look too hard. From what I've read about captcha, the two keys to making them hard to break are including background noise (even a small amount) and varying the vertical position of each character. This captcha does not do the latter, and has no black pixels in the background noise, so I ought to be able to filter out the former. Now if I can find a character recognition component for .Net....

But I can take a hint. No bot for me. It was fun while it lasted.

exactly what i thought, that captcha is easy to crack, just desaturate it, crank up the contrast, then compare each letter in your known font to that (if you apply the right filters, you can get a clean image to use and a pixel for pixel comparison will work), the font is easy to figure out, and the size is constant, adding a small random rotation with random placement and a bit of blurring would help a lot with that

[edit]
appears they are not generated on the fly, i already got a repeated captcha, suggesting a simple md5 will do

I don't know about blurring or rotation, you want it to stay human readable. The two simple suggestions I had would be enough- you could even use a static background for the noise because people aren't going to notice it doesn't change. Here's a simple example:


It should be just about as readable, and should have a smaller file size and generate faster because there's only two colors- black and white.

[edit]
for some reason I can't get the link to the image to work, so here it is another way:
http://lh6.google.com/image/jcoehoorn/RafzCSldU3I/AAAAAAAAAB4/BE3L9zyNMDc/Captcha1.JPG