Bots and Gold sellers

[Amplified]

As far as NCSoft not banning bots, well they do ban a lot now.... 3 of my bot accounts have been banned and I know many other people who have had accounts banned. Hopefully it will be like that from the get go in Aion.

[Unforsaken87]

Originally Posted by elliot

Botting/Game currency trading are like a virus that every single MMO company has to deal with. There has been many attempts to stomp them out, but they are very complicating issues. We, as players, should be aware of the complexity of this issue and not just critisize the companies.

1. You can't just "ban" them all.
For those of you who played l2, you all probably know the certain type of behaviors that bots possess, such as hitting guards/delvling or being in straight lines while killing mobs. Bots always have a distinguishable behavior from regular players. Lineage 1 bots had stiff movements. Now that brings out the question: why don't they just ban them all? Note that by saying this, its like saying we should kill all Arabs cuz some of them are terrorists. That was somewhat of a extreme example, but yea. By enforcing harsh punishments on bots, the enforcer team is bound to ban some innocent players.

In certain games, the "bot behaviors" are also shared by certain players. (bad connection, can't speak english, being retarded) As the enforcers cannot go barging into people's rooms to check to see what they are actually doing, it is sometimes somewhat difficult to be sure.

Note this. Bots always come back, while real players sometimes don't.

2. Why should they?
All game companies knows this: bots/incurrency trading are extremely hard to stop and if it was possible, it takes a lot of resources to do it. Having an army of monitors to watch everything in game is very expensive, especially for games that are massive like WoW/Lineage II. Not only that you have to develop a efficient system and procedures dealing with these issues(finding a bot, banning a bot, having a "court" to which possible innocents could appeal at), you have to train the workers. So why should they spend so much resource and effort to defeat this seemingly indestructable enemy? Players are complaining? so? People who play still plays. A profitable amount of players still play lineage despite the unsolved bot issue.

3. Its our fault.
Why is there ingame currency trading sites? Because people buy it. Why are there bots? To produce ingame currency for people to buy and to achieve something in a easy way. Note how everything links back to the actual players. Don't like bots? then stop buying stuff from them. Now YOU might say I DON'T, but there's countless others who do. As long as there are people who buy them, there will be sellers. Bot is a tool to support this evil cycle.

Another problem is that us, the players don't have a real power against the company. Swarm of whiners on forums aren't gonna make them change. We need to show that we mean business, by stop playing the game or taking some kind of organized action. We don't have this. Few individuals will participate in a boycott or anything. People who play will still play no matter what you say. This was witnessed in l2 a couple times. A player in Bartz server had started a petition against NCsoft to deal with the bot issue. Result? He got banned for spamming the forums as he tried to fight the admins deleting his post. People got scared and it died out. The MMOs tend to have a very poor community and organization.
Let's face it. Most of us are just gonna sit in the forums and whine. We can't possibly risk our precious characters that we spend months on.

4. It's part of what makes the game fun.
Most of MMOs have "economies". People sell and buy gear. The game items begin to have certain values. It makes more fun for us players to hunt for these items, invest time on them and know that they are worth something. However, the game economy is the thing that fuels game currency trading and botting. Sometimes you can't afford that godly sword that you want because it will take 1000000 hours of killing a mushroom. You don't have the time or you don't want to spend that much time. "Hey, why can't I just buy it w/ real life money?" and it goes on from there.

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A very effective way of preventing botting/game currency trading is to NOT have a game economy, but this is not an option for most games. It takes away certain fun factors.

Some people say, "hey why not make a perfect bot prevention program?" "Gameguard is ****. NCsoft sucks." For those of you, Why do you think softwares have "updates"? Why do you think Microsoft releases security patches and anti-virus/adware softwares constantly print out new definition updates? Because there are people who do the opposite thing that they do, and unfortunately for the corporates, some of them are better than them at it. Not a single dev team in the face of the universe managed to produce an uncrackable software. If a dev team is to make a software that prevents bot programs, they'll constantly have to check for new bots and make new codes to stop them, which would require a large staff/resource/constant update releases for players.(which brings us back to the part "why should they do it?" Hey companies like Norton and Webroot dedicate their ENTIRE staff in checking for new threats and coming up with solutions and the work never ends. How do you think NCsoft could do it? Like I said before, there's no magical program that stops all bots. A man makes a bullet proof vest and his neighbor makes armor peircing rounds :s

Bot/Game currency trades are part of MMOs. I think we'll just have to live with it.

For one GMs dont have to sit there and watch the charactors moving around to tell if they are bots. GMs can tell if you have the programs running. There are also easier systems they can set up to stop bots. A pm system if your reported by another player. In which if your reported a GM sends u a pm and if you dont answer in a certain amount of time, but somehow your getting xp, moving around, getting items, your banned. ( flaw: leaching, IMO you shouldnt be afk in a party for 20 minutes leaching...if you dont agree then dont play since you cant xp yourself ) Time Flags. If someone is playing 24/7, check what they are doing. Are they in shop mode, if they have that in aion, standing around...or are they moving getting xp 24/7.

Read my above post.

Your right though that players encourage botting, but so do the companies. Its going to exist in all MMOs for many reasons. I just wanna see all those people who bot to the high levels get banned so I can laugh at them.

bored dont feel like typing anymore

[eVenom]

I doubt there will be an effective method of blocking and stopping botters/hackers. There will always be hackers and botters until a mmo actually studies the behavior of hacking/boting and puts in an effective plan to stop them. I don't see any mmos these days trying to invent a new system that will not become a problem for normal players and become too hard for hackers and botters to play. I doubt Aion(at first anyway) will have much to stop botters other than the use of gm's, etc. This applies for just about every mmo.

[elliot]

Originally Posted by Unforsaken87

For one GMs dont have to sit there and watch the charactors moving around to tell if they are bots. GMs can tell if you have the programs running. There are also easier systems they can set up to stop bots. A pm system if your reported by another player. In which if your reported a GM sends u a pm and if you dont answer in a certain amount of time, but somehow your getting xp, moving around, getting items, your banned. ( flaw: leaching, IMO you shouldnt be afk in a party for 20 minutes leaching...if you dont agree then dont play since you cant xp yourself ) Time Flags. If someone is playing 24/7, check what they are doing. Are they in shop mode, if they have that in aion, standing around...or are they moving getting xp 24/7.

Read my above post.

Your right though that players encourage botting, but so do the companies. Its going to exist in all MMOs for many reasons. I just wanna see all those people who bot to the high levels get banned so I can laugh at them.

bored dont feel like typing anymore

I read the NCsoft procedure for banning bots. They don't work. Because the internet is universal, sometimes the players don't speak english. Some of them don't fully understand the user agreement. Even if a gm popped up in their face and moved them around, they could be clueless on what they should be doing, and NCsoft is not about to go around hiring a massive staff for translations.

PM system doesn't work. It is often exploited by people. Like just reporting other people as bots just because they hate them. The report is often unreliable and time wasting.

Recently, Lineage I US branch launched a war against bots on its servers. Literally 200~300 accounts were banned. The average player went down from 800s to 500s. However, the botters started monitoring their bots and the banned ones simply came back. At the end, the player count was back up in a week.

Hacks are blantantly obvious and are easily distinguishable from normal players, while the "bot" behaviors aren't necessarily illegal.

We tend to forget the most important point here. If it was so easy to stop bots/game currency trading, how come it hasn't happened yet? WoW has minimum amount of bots(or that's what we think) but they do exist and they have done very little to stop the currency trading.

Bots/Game currency trades are one of those problems that we are very unlikely to solve. Quite similar to problems like poverty or internet piracy.

[Etra]

elliot, you should take a look at Blizzard's newest update to Warden (They're own personal bot prevention program.) In my opinion, it really is the ideal bot prevention program -- but can also be incredibly dangerous to all WoW players if a "corrupt" employee got their hands on the main system. (Which is why I cancelled my account and uninstalled WoW. ;])

Anyways, there are ways to stop bots. SE did an amazing job last year with banning most bots, and they're still doing a good job. To further show that there are obvious ways to tell who's a bot in that game, all you have to do is type "/sea [Bastok]* all" and you'll pretty much get a list of bots in the area. (Easy to tell since 70 level 24 Tarutarus from Bastok with no subjob should have at least a subjob by then...) My friends used to do this all the time and laugh about it over vent.

Other bots and farmers in other games do show the same behaviors... However, I do think PMing someone to see if they're a bot or not is a little stupid. Could just be a four year-old playing his father's character (I used to know a guy who had his three year-old son farm mats for him. Son enjoyed it, so...)


*Couldn't remember exactly what to type.

[Aseenus]

Originally Posted by Soraan

Well, botting/hacking is not a huge worry, the reason why people are so worried about it is because all the free MMOs use Gameguard..a "Hacking Prevention System" that everyone and their mom can get past. From my experience, games that are P2P are much better with hacking and botting, and have GMs who sole purpose is to seek out these people using them and suspend/delete accounts. NC Soft is a trustworthy company, I wouldn't worry~

LOLLL go to google and search linage 2 buddy :P

[Luscien]

Did none of you read my post? Bots can be eliminated by the players very easily we need to be empowered to do so and thats all.

where did you get the source code for your l2 bot?

[gguus]

Farmers have to eat too, leave them alone xD

[Bibliophile]

forgive me if this has already been said (havent read the entire thread) but i think that bot and GF could be stopped if players were able to kill bots without a penalty like they do in L2. Say that you challenge someone to fight you (a PVP request) once that request is sent the challenged player will have 1 min to say yes or no, if the player (or more probably a bot) click neither the challenger can attack that player without incurring a penalty (like chaotic points in L2).

[2aimless]

there should be no timeban.... just write to the rules etc eula or how this stuff is called that botting that is clearly visible will lead to a ban. and it doesnt matter if the guy purchased a one year abo or only a one month...

Dont give them a fcking chance... this is the only way to stop the "fun botters" who are so cool to get some 1337 botz from ze internet...

the professional botters will possibly use the 2 weeks free trial sht... well they might get enough quina in this time already... no im sure they do because they often use speedhacks in same way!

Hopefully there wont be many botters! and i hope there wont be fcking gameguard.... cmon type new gameguard bypass in google and you will find 20 threads for the newest gg version.

[Aoshi1]

Yeah, there will be bots. There will always be bots. As long as the gm's listen objectively to the petitions and such (and as long as there are bot pk'ers, lol) we should be okay.

[Sovrath]

Originally Posted by Bibliophile

forgive me if this has already been said (havent read the entire thread) but i think that bot and GF could be stopped if players were able to kill bots without a penalty like they do in L2. Say that you challenge someone to fight you (a PVP request) once that request is sent the challenged player will have 1 min to say yes or no, if the player (or more probably a bot) click neither the challenger can attack that player without incurring a penalty (like chaotic points in L2).

naw, that won't work. You could just grief someone all day long by spamming war invites. Or getting numerous toons to do it.

As for the poster's idea for allowing players to deal with bots ingame without penalty. First off, games have penalties. Players moan and complain if a death penalty is too lenient. And if you allow them the ability to train mobs on bots then you also allow them to train on players. Not a big deal if it is a more hardcore pvp game. More of a big deal if it is not. also, what about clans/alliances who actively bot. Aren't they going to try to stop players from hurting the farmers that supply them?

One of our former IT guys used to write bots for EQ. He thought it was the funniest thing and lived for it. Since others share the same idea, it is hard to get players to just rise up and fight bots because they are also going to get players who want the bots.

Again, in a pvp game might not be an issue. Or more correctly, a hardcore one. Get a game that is not hardcore where there are players who don't want to pvp or want pvp on limited terms and you suddenly lose a segment of your market.

Of course, you can make it so items are only bound on one toon and that money can only go to npc traders with items that have fixed prices. But you then get a segment of the community who will complain that there is no real econony therefore no depth therefore not fun.

Short of being extremely strict with how a game works, Elliot is correct. Bots are here to stay.

No one has made hack proof software. Now, couple that with people who have a lot of money and know that there is a lot more money to be made in online trading. They are going to hire out of work programmers who need the money so that they can constantly work around any programs that stop bots.

And in many ways you can spot bots. Of course, just because someone is deleveling on a guard it doesn't make them a bot. Players do actually do this so they can stay in a certain level range. However, a toon that follows the same route over and over again automatically is more likely a bot.

However, now that means you have to hire workers to constantly show up on each server in many areas so that they can remove these bots. That's quite a lot of money. Especially when you take into account health insurance and benefits.

And in the end, people bot because they don't want to spend time raising in lvl or working for money. These are things they find distastful. I remember being in a L2 raid where some of the more hardcore pvp'ers in the other alliance were complaining that they had to be there. They wanted to be out pvp'ing not raiding. This is understandable. Especially if you live for pvp conflict. And of course, (my opinion) raiding in L2 is a bit boring.

So get players who don't like crafting, selling, working the market and you are going to find more players who will invest 15 dollars or so to help them with money.

IN the end, these online games attract all sorts of people and they all have different ideas of what is fun/not fun, right/wrong as well as what they want in game.

So either you have very strict and limited gameplay or there will be more bots.

Also, wow does not have less bots. They might be more proactive in stopping them but it seems that if I signed up for the game I could go to any server and actually order gold for either horde or alliance. Given the amount of servers as well as doubling that for factions I would say they have quite a few bots.

Just because you can't see them doens't mean they aren't there.

[JunSakurada]

Don't necro old threads please, bibli if you wanted to bring this up, intra-race pvp was a good spot, not here and please do read before you post.

[Sovrath]

Originally Posted by Amplified

As far as NCSoft not banning bots, well they do ban a lot now.... 3 of my bot accounts have been banned and I know many other people who have had accounts banned. Hopefully it will be like that from the get go in Aion.

You see, I don't get this.

You bot but you want Aion to be strict on bots? Not that I am judging you. Not my place. But I'm curous as to the duality?

[eternalchaos]

honestly.. I don't have an issue with bot and gold sellers; it is a form of a job.. They are risking being banned and spending money on accounts to keep it going so it is like another wayt o play the game.

However; I am against botters/gold sellers who purposely are trying to corrupt the economy. Example: before GW had universal pricing, Koreans would bot lots of gold, switch to US and Europe servers; buy all the runes and dyes.. rinse and repeat. A Rune of Absoption in US was 100plat.(max value); same rune in Korea was like 2Plat because they just would buy 100 of em, sell 95 of them back to rune trader and keep 5 for themselves. Once they hit the limit on switches they just got another account from the extra money they got selling gold to people.

You also would find korean Monks in major cities only by rune traders; and you could litterally watch your prices jumping 1-2plat every few mins. Stuff like that ****es me off; but harmless botting like what is going on in HG:L doesn't. I mean so you botted HG:L.. big deal; you bought 10billion palladium.. it don't affect the economy or the game as most people don't bot; so if you start jacking up prices no one will buy the stuff as they can't afford it/others are selling it at a more realistic value