Im beginning to fear US Aion cant do much about bots

[Muta]

In posting this thread, did you want reassurance or affirmation?

If you want reassurance, don't worry, I am sure the botting will be handled well.

If you want affirmation, oh god yes, bots will be rampant, this game sucks.

Note that none of those are my real answer, but they seem to be what you are looking for, 50/50 shot.

[Anuxinamoon]

Originally Posted by SinBoy

do you have a link to that documentary?

It was on TV last year sometime, I'll try to find it again!

[SinBoy]

Originally Posted by Anuxinamoon

It was on TV last year sometime, I'll try to find it again!

thanks~~~~~

[Faliandra]

Originally Posted by Chalky

The only way to deal with bots is to ban them and keep banning them as fast as possible so that it costs the gold sellers as much as possible.

I'm not sure how the game works in Taiwan (anyone able to shed light on this?) but with our game you have to buy a $30 copy of the game in order to create an account, which makes it much more expensive to keep pumping out new accounts than it is somewhere like China where you can make new accounts for free then pay by the hour.

This means the situation will always be better for us simply because the bar is raised for how much investment it takes to start a bot farming network.

If you think about what it takes to create a bot, they have to buy a $30 account, then bot with it for at least a couple of weeks in order to reach a level where they can farm well. During those couple of weeks, they will be making no money from the bot, so if they are caught during that time then the gold farmer loses the $30. They then have to spend another $30, and spend another two weeks getting it up to a decent level to farm.

There is a tipping point there, where if you ban them frequently enough the bot farmers spend their whole time trying to get bots to the right level to farm, and lose far more money buying new accounts to replace the ones that get banned than they make through selling their gold.

It's not a simple case of "no matter how many you ban, there will always be more". It's an economy, people trying to make a profit where there are costs and margins. You just have to stop it from being profitable and suddenly all the botters go off somewhere else that IS profitable. And that's all you need, just make it easier to go somewhere else and it's problem solved.

+1


also, you have to consider EVEN if some of the bots make it to the point where they can start farming well and make enough money to start offering the ingame money, they would still have to sell the money at a high price, due to all the costs that they will have to face. Expensive gold = less buyers= less profit
Now, I have played a lot of MMORPGs, especially f2p ones where bots obviously cant be stopped, since they keep creating new accounts for free and also can keep playing for free.
When they start out, their money is usually a lot more expensive, and sometimes they screw up the whole market with it, there'll be some crazy huge inflation, and you'll see the goldfarmers keep lowering their prices. sometimes there are even several different goldfarmer companies who will try to underprice each other and the gold prices will get cheaper and cheaper, tempting even more people to buy their gold because it's cheap and because the inflation makes it almost impossible for them to get decent gear. this is especially true for those people who only start playing the game 1 or 2 years after it's been launched with no new server to play on.

Getting to this point in Aion really seems a lot lot harder to me. Of course there's no guarantee for it, but it really could turn out just like Chalky said, IF people keep reporting them and the GMs keep it rolling.
There's gotta be a limit to the expenses of those farming companies. Unless they wanna risk going broke.

[Tangman]

Sheen, the reason you dont see many bots is because they are porting around in instances with hacks (OMG?? YES THEY ExIST IN THE GODS GIFT WOW TOO!) and obtaining gold, hell I've bought tons of things from china bots, they sell bulks and they sell cheap. I rather buy mats for 300 flasks from them than bother with the AH and the idiots associated with it.

Bots exist, bots cant get removed, deal with it.

If bots are a problem, dont play aion, hell dont play wow either since it has them. Stick to RTS games, or FPS - but man, some FPS have bots too, I mess around in unreal tournament with full bot enemies
Ditch FPS then, but mhm, I believe RTS has a bot you can play against too.

Sorry chap, don't play games, bots exist in em'

[Anuxinamoon]

Originally Posted by SinBoy

thanks~~~~~

I think it was called

The New Cyberspace Worlds

But I have no idea now it was so long ago and I can't find any clips to watch

[Squat]

Originally Posted by SinBoy

do you have a link to that documentary?

Youtube is your friend.

[Marina]

Originally Posted by Draconais

They could make botting software unable to work with Aion. And if people manage to get around that, make something that detects botting software and then auto life-ban.

How do you DETECT BOTTING SOFTWARE ?
Aion checks for dll injection / debugging and uses Themia to pack dll's already, people just inject theyr dll when the AION Client is still in process of loading its Imports so it doesn't matter. The only way to fight bots is to hire gms that ban them when reported.

[MrTwilliger]

The problem isn't whether or not we are banning bots, but rather that bots exist in the first place. The only way to truly stop botting is to make the community not bot to begin with, to make a large spread wave of legitimate game play.

On my last MMO, SRO, it was terribly bot infested. A bunch of people got sick of it and made a secluded legit server, a lot of different legits gathered to play under this "confederation". I was a part of it, it was great fun. Sure it had its controversy but it proved that with a bit of community spirit, even ex botters (like the confederations founders) can play how the game was meant to be. If we get enough people to try.. hopefully we can prevent botting from the start.

[Moonlight Shadow]

When I played Lineage II, I'd go around training bots and stealing their loot and writing down their names. At the end of my bot harassment sessions, I'd report to NC Soft all the bots I found. None of them would ever get banned even though some of them I reported many times over and over again.

I quit the game and came back about 1-2 years later to find that the exact same bots I had reported many times were still farming the same areas or maybe another new area close by.

As long as I see some bots getting banned compared to none, I won't mind there being bots.

[Aryan]

The bots will be dealt with. Does that answer your question ?

[jmp003]

I know this may sound silly, but if there was a team of 10 hell even 5 that would teleport to a player whenever report bot was pressed wouldn't that dramatically decrease the amount of bots?

edit: spelling

[Aryan]

Originally Posted by jmp003

I know this may sound silly, but if there was a team of 10 hell even 5 that would teleport to a player whenever report bot was pressed wouldn't that dramatically decrease the amount of bots?

edit: spelling

Realistically a company would not hire a person to solely focus on bots. They delegate such matters to GMs to deal with. So it would be down to the GM to get rid of them. Additionally, bot reports aren't regarded as a matter to be dealt with immediately. A typical delay of a few minutes (A good GM response time) is plenty acceptable.

Personally though I would rather have another GM on the server and make it a part of all GM's duties to actively seek out botting activities in popular areas when they are not dealing with reports. Aka, pick up the slack.

[LadyGray]

Originally Posted by Tangman

Sheen, the reason you dont see many bots is because they are porting around in instances with hacks (OMG?? YES THEY ExIST IN THE GODS GIFT WOW TOO!) and obtaining gold, hell I've bought tons of things from china bots, they sell bulks and they sell cheap. I rather buy mats for 300 flasks from them than bother with the AH and the idiots associated with it....

This is the real reason there are bots...

As long as there are fools who pay them for things, there will be people to bot the items.

I used to play GW. We used to sit around in Citadel and watch the monk bots come and go... It was rather funny to watch, sometimes. A whole river of nearly naked, tattooed monk/whatevers zoning in, running to the NPC and then running out the "door" We just got used to it.

But, truthfully, even if NCSoft were extremely proactive in banning bots, we will never be rid of them. If there is a dime to be made, they will be there with the rest of us.

The things that we can do to combat them in Aion are a bit more effective than other games, and I don't just mean reporting them. For one, the same rift system that allows griefers to gank noobs, will allow us to go gank the bots when we see them. If I were a botter, I would get really tired of checking my bot only to find that it has been killed repeatedly and is making no money.

But, having said that, I still maintain that the best way to combat the bots is to simply STOP BUYING THEIR GOODS!!!! If we make it so that their return on their investment is lowered to the point that there is no profit, then, and only then will we see no bots.

[Marina]

Asmodian: Brusthonin Turtles 20, Morheim Desert Loch 26-27 Hexigg / Bakus

these areas are always infested with bots for example :P

/E: Most chinafarm companys don't bot, its normal people that do.