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Bots & You

Do people think botting will be a problem in ashes of creation, the scourge of so may mmo's. IS will make promises that they will police their game curb botting and not allow it to take hold. But as we know there are those out there with big wallets who like to get ahead by purchasing gold amongst other services.

My question is, what will you do if you come across a bot in the world? Killing the bot which no doubt will not fight back results in corruption for you will people be willing to take the corruption hit? Or will you simply report the offending account.

Personally I will kill the bot and will take pleasure in the act, though I will make sure it is a bot first. Really can't stand bots and what damage they can do to the economy of a game, skewing prices and flooding markets with raw materials, plus those who buy gold are honestly no better.

I do hope there are measures in place to prevent botting from becoming a problem, the last mmo I played had huge problems with bots and still does, I gave up reporting them as a month later the same bots would still be there. I truly hope ashes has effective measures in place to stop botting before it even starts.


Comments

  • Bots will always be an issue. They have only become more complex in recent years, and I am sure they will be way more advanced by the time AoC releases. In my opinion, the best thing you can do is just report the bot. 

    Corruption could be tricky with them, but feel free to kill them if you like. Honestly, I always kited mobs onto bots and had characters on multiple factions just to deal with them.
  • ArchivedUserArchivedUser Guest
    edited November 2017
    Recently i found out there is an actual loot drop system on death. Source @Czar .  This brings a whole new light on the Corruption system.  --- To answer your question.

    *Intrepid studios wants to have an active in-game GM presence.  Someone that is active in game, that are able to go around the world and cleanse the world as seeing fit. Banning bots on the spot. Etc Etc.  
  • I do hope there is an in game GM presence, honestly think it is needed, a more immediate response to in game problems is essential IMO. Corruption while not ideal I am willing to put up with, better to make life hard for the bots than  do nothing, though kiting mobs onto them is an option.
  • Varkun said:
    I do hope there is an in game GM presence, honestly think it is needed, a more immediate response to in game problems is essential IMO. Corruption while not ideal I am willing to put up with, better to make life hard for the bots than  do nothing, though kiting mobs onto them is an option.
    Kiting mobs is a very good option. :)
  • As long as we have a good base of players that are deticated  to the idea of AOC bots wont take a big foot hold onto the game. Maybe the GMs will give the power to certain members in the game to ban ppl who are bots.  Of course those members will be strictly managed and will only be players that IS trust. 
  • Killing a bot, causing you corruption and then simply reporting it doesn't make much sense.
    The bot will simply respawn and continue its work and at some point be banned anyway, so you got corrupted for nothing.

    Personally, for said reasons, I will not bother killing bots. A simple report should suffice and I hope the management team will look into the reports rather than "Don't worry about it, no big deal".

  • FliP said:
    Killing a bot, causing you corruption and then simply reporting it doesn't make much sense.
    The bot will simply respawn and continue its work and at some point be banned anyway, so you got corrupted for nothing.

    Personally, for said reasons, I will not bother killing bots. A simple report should suffice and I hope the management team will look into the reports rather than "Don't worry about it, no big deal".


    I agree with you that a simple report should be enough, its just that my experience with the current game I play suggests otherwise. I report the train of bots running in a circle and a month later they are still there, day in day out. I just hope ashes will be much more proactive when it comes to botting, and with the economy being one of the pillars of the game rampant botting will skew the economy badly. 
  • Varkun said:
    I do hope there is an in game GM presence, honestly think it is needed, a more immediate response to in game problems is essential IMO. Corruption while not ideal I am willing to put up with, better to make life hard for the bots than  do nothing, though kiting mobs onto them is an option.
    What you really need to do is main a tank or make sure to have a second character be a tank and do as the Tera pros do and kite mobs to bot put shield up wait for bot to die and spam them with messages as they are dying. LANCERS FTW
  • Bots left unchecked would undoubtedly become a cancer on the economy and the very integrity that is essential to this title becoming historic.

    We would all like to say that the community in and of itself will provocatively not tolerate bots, nor ever turn to a website to purchase commodity. Unfortunately this is not human nature. To be competitive and always seek the advantage is what most people would do given the chance. This being the case, it becomes 100% the responsibility of the management to be vigilant on this particular issue. There are some catch 22's however;

    AoC is managed well and has great value -> more incentive for bots to exist
    More bots that exist -> less value AoC has overall and is more difficult to manage well.

    More bot accounts that exist -> more revenue for IS to use on things like preventing bots.
    Spending more revenue preventing/banning bots -> less revenue from the lack of bot accounts

    That being said, the less bots and better job IS does, the more quality long term accounts will exist thus being the best case scenario for all. The steps that they have said to be taking so far sound like a good deal of thought was put into this issue.

    - Subscription (bots don't like this, but it won't stop them) 
    - No world wide mail system (bots handlers will have to meet you or near you, more labor, they don't like this)
    - Slow travel only (even more labor to deliver a product, very inconvenient)
    - GM to be active and in the servers (not something you see very often)

    I have high hopes for this, but yo know what they say;

    "Where there's a will, there's a way."

    -CS
  • I have a question on this.  When bots are in a system do they have a login feature that requires it to execute the scripts that run them to activate?  I have never used them or looked into how they worked so I am curious.    

    On the account side is it possible to negate the script with a feature that has to keep the person involved?  Make it impossible for the Bot to work without human interaction.  This comes down to Intrepid having the ability to something like this.   Just my 2.4246 cents on this.

     

    Ox

  • botting can be anything from key recorders to scripts that run a game for you. Any system that plays the game for you and requires no human input after setup.
  • So basically these people that deploy these can do it at will and there is nothing that can be done about them?

    Just curious? 

    Ox
  • Oxillion said:
    So basically these people that deploy these can do it at will and there is nothing that can be done about them?

    Just curious? 

    Ox
    There can.

    The ToS is not up yet, but it will most likely include a line that goes something like "We reserve the right to monitor what programs you are running on your PC".

    If their algorythm or whatevey they use catches you running a fishy program and the game at the same time, they will investigate you. If it turns out that you have been using keypressers or macro recorders while playing their game, good riddance to your account.

    Bot users I can understand, since half of their work goes into how to not get detected, but people using keypressers are just begging to get banned.
  • FliP said:
    Oxillion said:
    So basically these people that deploy these can do it at will and there is nothing that can be done about them?

    Just curious? 

    Ox
    There can.

    The ToS is not up yet, but it will most likely include a line that goes something like "We reserve the right to monitor what programs you are running on your PC".

    If their algorythm or whatevey they use catches you running a fishy program and the game at the same time, they will investigate you. If it turns out that you have been using keypressers or macro recorders while playing their game, good riddance to your account.

    Bot users I can understand, since half of their work goes into how to not get detected, but people using keypressers are just begging to get banned.

    I guess I am a purest when it comes to games and what the developer created.  When people are openly thwarting that with this sort of activity it tends to get me angry.  I hopped out to the web to see if there was anything out there and to my dismay the first page alone was sites on how to do this and not get caught.  My first thought was why play the game?  Second thing was gold miners.  I remember this from WoW and many other games that had that problem.  I just shake my head at this stuff.  What I did find comical is the crowds that support this stuff.  It helps farming materials and the like.  Once again, the same questions came up.   I don’t have an answer to how to stop them, but I hope to hell Intrepid does.

     

     

    Ox


  • maybe have something that counts how many times the bot has been flagged by passers as a bot. once it hits a few hundred or something the bot becomes red and killable to players for no corruption penalty.

    OBV. this is a rough idea and has a major flaw. people abusing it to screw with real players. maybe set the number required to be to high to do that or just get everyone abusing it banned instead(teach em not to be douches at least).

    my main point is, maybe there is a system that could be used to allow players to better call out and deal with bots as well as mods. 
  • If I can spot a bot, I will kill a bot. Nothing more frustrating than seeing a bot of your own faction that you cannot kill. No factions in Ashes so everyone should be free game.

    Most bots are pretty careful not to use AoE skills so often training monsters to them does not work. Best is to either kill them, or kill the things they are killing which makes it worthless for them to do. If they are gathering and you cant gather I guess it is just killing then.
  • I will do what I did in ESO whenever I encountered bots.......since they were always on your side you couldn't target and kill them so instead I monitored their patterns/activities and completely disrupted them. I did this by either killing what they were killing before the bots could or train mobs onto them which resulted in the bots dying. This pissed off more than a few Chinese / bot groups >:)

    I figure I can do the exact same thing in AoC without accruing a single corruption tick ;)
  • I truly think they won't be as much of a problem as everyone is getting all worked up about. For gathering bots, spawns will be random, not in a pattern they can program to circle around and collect. Since gathering will not be smacking a static node, but will be targetting the ground, then hitting the QTE for a successful gather, this will also be hard for them to automate. For combat bots the above mechanic of pulling mobs onto them will work just fine. Add the report features, the almost universal ability now for people to stream/record play, (as opposed to years past when only those with high end machines would bother) and active monitoring of logs through Panopticon and other software safeguards they are putting in place, the bot crowd will find that it isn't profitable to be constantly creating $15 accounts to have them wiped clean or banned.
  • Also, with the challenge (hopefully) of levelling characters in Ashes, having an account banned will be more meaningful and require a much bigger time investment than to recuperate than is required in many other MMOs.

    This and the points mentioned by @UnknownSystemError are the reasons I am not worried about bots.
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