how to handle bots at launch

ArchivedUser

i think bots and gold sellers will be a big problem at launch, i think they should host the game, like a prep-launch week or they do a test wee, the shut the servers offline for maintenance to do 3 things. Fix server stability. at launch games suffer from excess of players. Ban gold bot accounts, and lock character creation. temporarily locking character creation for a day or 2 will make the servers stable, let the game developers look for bots and look for exploiters. like theirs always a dupe glitch at 1st launch

ArchivedUser

There is an extensive alpha and beta phase planned that should have most of those issues worked out. Alpha and beta will also be wiped. The alpha/beta server will then become the test server. There most likely won't be bots in alpha/beta since those are paid packages. Come launch there will be a two day headstart on selected servers, once again, populated by those who bought packages with that access in it. Botting and exploiting are a huge issue for the developers who have outlined multiple known and secret ways that activity will be monitored. The whole premise of the game is the database is tracking your every move. Not too difficult to set parameters to look for certain behaviours. That, coupled with the 3rd party anti-cheat vendor we know about, in-game mods, and an active playerbase reporting, not too worried about it. Making it unprofitable for gold sellers to be able to spam accounts since there is no free trial is also key. Gold sellers will avoid a sub game just for that reason.

ArchivedUser

There is something, while not at all limited to Chinese players (some people are actually paid to do this sort of thing), that should be considered to make sure the game doesn't run away from a particular city that gets ahead early.  This might be where events and resource spawning may come in.