Botting hurts Pokémon Showdown because it breaks the core promise of fair, human competition. For players, bots can warp ladder results and usage stats, making tiers feel inaccurate and games less meaningful. When Pokemon rise or fall in usage due to automation instead of real play, the metagame stops reflecting what people actually enjoy or succeed with. Spectators are affected too, as mass replay scraping and automated viewing turn what should be community-driven engagement into data farming.
For staff, botting is exhausting and damaging. It creates extra mod work, muddies the data used for tiering decisions, and can make good-faith decisions look questionable from the outside. Heavy-handed solutions like constant CAPTCHAs would hurt real users, but doing nothing allows bots to quietly influence the system.
A solution I thought of is a trust score type of system paired with targeted recaptcha requests. Accounts that behave like real people earn trust and never see friction, while suspicious behavior from players or spectators, triggers a CAPTCHA on login or high-impact actions. Usage and ladder impact from low-trust accounts can also be reduced or ignored entirely. This keeps bots from mattering at all, protects competitive integrity, and does so without punishing legitimate users.
Let me know what you think and if this could be a viable solution.
For staff, botting is exhausting and damaging. It creates extra mod work, muddies the data used for tiering decisions, and can make good-faith decisions look questionable from the outside. Heavy-handed solutions like constant CAPTCHAs would hurt real users, but doing nothing allows bots to quietly influence the system.
A solution I thought of is a trust score type of system paired with targeted recaptcha requests. Accounts that behave like real people earn trust and never see friction, while suspicious behavior from players or spectators, triggers a CAPTCHA on login or high-impact actions. Usage and ladder impact from low-trust accounts can also be reduced or ignored entirely. This keeps bots from mattering at all, protects competitive integrity, and does so without punishing legitimate users.
Let me know what you think and if this could be a viable solution.
