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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Bots again....
PenguinPaladin
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Bots come up alot. Some people say they are unavoidable, some people argue alot will slow or stop them...
Where do bots fit in ashes of ceation.
With a subscription based payment method, and slow progression. Bots will be "more of an investment" than in some other games
With a game heavily reliant on social structure, having players revolve around nodes, no group finding functions, and heavy mechanics to focus on making players communicate with one another, like tavern, open world pvp, and a larger party size of 8. Bot will be more or less easily discovered and in turn farmed themselves, making them less profitable for the high investment they would require.
Gatherables placment will have some rng and weather paterns further change this so bot will be less effective overall at gathering. Gatherables will be fought over by players at tines already, and bots may be out competed.
With the curruption system and true open world pvp, that cant be opted out of known bots will just be killed repeatedly. While there is curruption, if a bot stays green and currupts its attacker it drops more loot than if it were to fight back. And if it were to fight back and keep more of its loot. Nothing prevents players from killing it repeatedly. Also with death giving negative exp and sudo-deleveling you, reducing your stats. A bot dying repeatedly would become even weaker and easier to kill repeatedly.
Caravans. Even if bots gathering goods become prevalent, the movement of those goods is something that needs to be handled as well.
Processing. The most likely place to find bots in my opinion. Would like some thoughts on how the processing method works more to see how bots may very well fit there. And think of ways to further desuade that.
TLDR at the very least boting in ashes will be more work for less reward than in other games. And botting would probably be most effective in processing overall.
Where do bots fit in ashes of ceation.
With a subscription based payment method, and slow progression. Bots will be "more of an investment" than in some other games
With a game heavily reliant on social structure, having players revolve around nodes, no group finding functions, and heavy mechanics to focus on making players communicate with one another, like tavern, open world pvp, and a larger party size of 8. Bot will be more or less easily discovered and in turn farmed themselves, making them less profitable for the high investment they would require.
Gatherables placment will have some rng and weather paterns further change this so bot will be less effective overall at gathering. Gatherables will be fought over by players at tines already, and bots may be out competed.
With the curruption system and true open world pvp, that cant be opted out of known bots will just be killed repeatedly. While there is curruption, if a bot stays green and currupts its attacker it drops more loot than if it were to fight back. And if it were to fight back and keep more of its loot. Nothing prevents players from killing it repeatedly. Also with death giving negative exp and sudo-deleveling you, reducing your stats. A bot dying repeatedly would become even weaker and easier to kill repeatedly.
Caravans. Even if bots gathering goods become prevalent, the movement of those goods is something that needs to be handled as well.
Processing. The most likely place to find bots in my opinion. Would like some thoughts on how the processing method works more to see how bots may very well fit there. And think of ways to further desuade that.
TLDR at the very least boting in ashes will be more work for less reward than in other games. And botting would probably be most effective in processing overall.
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2. IF we have some of the skills we did in L2, like fake death, we can kill bots without going red. Gather a train of mobs, run to the bot, fake death, mobs kill bot. Pick up their drops, then train another bot.
3. If a player or a guild deserves a reputation as a botter, it is up to us...the player community...to shun and ridicule them. For example, if the 'LeetDudes' guild bots, nobody ally with them. War them, Siege them, PK them. Don't let cheaters prosper in AoC!
If the real world price of in-game currency and resources is high, then people who develop bots for a living and those who run them for a living will try even harder. And let's not forget about Venezuelans (which are going through a humanitarian crisis) who will "legitimately" play 18 hours per day to sell gold and make 10 bucks a week. If they get a new account banned once every month, they still made enough money to pay their bills and buy food.
If Ashes is a success and gold is valuable (valuable in-game, scarce), which I hope both will be true, RMT will be a huge problem, both from botting and from gold farmers. Hell, I'd bet there are people who played Alpha 1, cracked open the client and are already working on bots for that old client.
Like @tautau pointed out, the only real solution to solve RMT in general, botting or not, is effective game moderation. It's very hard, if not impossible, to make a game bot proof. But, even if Intrepid is able to do it, there are still thousands of people who will farm gold for a living because it pays better than working a regular job (or in some cases there are no jobs at all).
So, unfortunately, the only solution is to implement things like region blocking (for example blocking Venezuelan IPs from joining servers outside of SA), VPN blocking(it's easy to find out which IPs the big VPN providers use, so you need to constantly update and block them), permanent HWID banning (once a MAC address or other kind of HWID is banned, they're unable to play the game unless they spoof their HWID which isn't trivial for most people) and have people to investigate RMT, for example Intrepid itself buy gold to find RMT accounts, investigate them and permanently ban every account, IP, HWID involved, both buyers and sellers.
TL;DR: RMT will, without a doubt, be a big problem in Ashes. It depends if Intrepid wants to invest money to actively stop it, which in the short term means losing money, but in the long term and morally is the right thing to do.
RMT will be the major issue in ashes i believe also. To the point intrepid should probably look into having double or triple in game GM's on release. And crack down hard from the get go, and as more people give up on it reduce the size of staff if possible as things go along
I disagree. You don't need GMs 24/7. You need pattern detection software running 24/7 and regular working hour GMs to investigate the accounts the software tells you to investigate, apart from player reports.
I believe nobody would disagree that, back in the day, WoW had the best GMs ever. Obviously they only existed because Blizzard gave a shit about their game and could afford them. I believe Intrepid will remind us of the Blizzard that is now dead.
I mean honestly, with the path ashes is on... if they keep going with the quality they seem to be going for, yes.
Honestly if they put out a "gm package" where i could get priority responces on my reported players id personally pay more a month for it. If the game is good, and they are willing to maintain it in that way, i am not against it costing what it needs to
And the higher cost just makes boting and geting banned that much more of an investment monetarily. You know what. You've got me. Raise the subscription fee.
They could even do this through.... monthly cosmetics.... you could subscribe to receive embers monthly or something to allow for teirs of further investment towards these goals of having more GM's.
Its hard to quantify how many sales you will receive with only a cosmetic shop available. If you could somewhat stabalize how much money you can expect to make through the shop, like a subscription to embers monthly, you can more reasonably budget for these things.
Its not an expencive game i am afraid of. Its an expensive game that is also a shitty product. If the product is of quality, charge what you must.
Attempt to interact with it. Try and fight it. Kill it a few times if you keep seeing it on the same areas... act like an npc in a social game, then be treated like one.
Try to annoy him... you are such a troll at heart.
"Hey man whats up"
No response, eh whatever... run into the same guy at the same place the next day. "Hey buddy" no response or reaction again... flag him and hit him.
And so on. Im not saying, hey, hey, hey are you a bot, hey, hey. But its a long time investment game. If i notice you never talk to anyone, and act like a bot. Im killing you every time i see you. Report me if your not a bot, ill explain to the gm that the dude plays like a bot.
A variety of automated ways to tell if a character is a bot, but they all depend on how much information the game logs.
For example, if the game logs your actions, bots usually repeat the same actions over and over again. Good bots don't perform the same action every X seconds, they usually add a little RNG to add some milliseconds to every action, but still isn't too hard to detect.
Another example, if the game somewhat tracks your cursor movement, bots don't move their mouse like normal human beings, so that's another easy way to detect automated software performing actions.
More robust ways of recognizing a bot is to implement machine learning algorithms in some specific activities to create patterns for what real players do. If a character being played by a real human being is an outlier every now and then, it's fine, you're only an outlier. But if a character is repeatedly being recognized as an outlier for hours or days straight, you've probably found a bot.
There are many ways, models and strategies that help find bots, but in other words, pattern recognition software is one solution if the game logs the right information. Funnily enough, many bots use pattern recognition and computer vision algorithms to perform actions in games.
Blurring or altering visual data at the level where a human still considers it to be 'the same' is easy to get around.
The easier way to catch a bot is to do it in a reverse 'mousetrap' style. Occasionally spawn something that is 'glitched' and can't be interacted with, looks like a resource, but doesn't actually deplete or move.
Watch and see which characters suspiciously keep going back to the same spot, or get stuck there, when a human would have 'realized something was wrong' and stopped.
This is an oversimplification of the methodology, and it works for lots of things. If you find you can't make something that bots won't figure out how to do correctly, instead make something slightly frustrating to a human but that a bot will continue to try to do, incorrectly.
80k?! I'm coming to work for you!!!
What's to report? Open World PvP is a pillar of the game.
A GM that is in game is there for PR, not to handle bots.
Take that same person, give them data from various flags in the game, and they can catch and ban bots at a much faster rate.
It took me a long time to understand why people thought that Blizzard cared about the game early on - it was clear to me that they didnt. However, if you have more GM interaction than any other game, people that have no clue will completely miss the seeds of a broken economy that are being planted, and thing the game with all the online GM's is just the greatest.
I dont say "in game" as activly playing and not receiving reports or working. I say "in game" as in actively effecting what is happening in game. Baning cheaters and responding to reports......... who wants on staff players of the game?
Firstly there's the subscriptions paywall.
Secondly there will be active GMs, so reporting will be very useful.
Third ashes are not a barren corporate company so they will actually put reasonable resources into removing bots, with all these factors combined I don't see bots being an issue.
The 2 main reasons I'd say bots are a problems is current games is 1. F2P & 2. game owners are lazy, don't put enough resources towards it, but ashes team put love into their game it'll be fine.
May want to check out the top of this thread for some of your bots concerns
Thank you! This helps!
spoiler alert: GMs are just people in a call center in latin america making 3-5 an hour
roblox does it, and many others. why wouldnt intrepid do it too? i mean it makes sense. id totally apply
The best parallel I could draw here is "every other mmo has most/all their content in instances because that's easier for player to do. Why wouldn't Intrepid do that too?".
No way, there are lots of skilled people who would gladly GM for MUCH less than that. Remember, GMs, like most jobs that can be done remotely, are most cost effective to hire from another country outside of the western world.
Yea for anyone botting at this kind of level changing your MAC address and buying a bulk of static IPs is noob work.
BTW this is one of the most intelligent takes I've heard from someone regarding the issue, most people write the problem off as if a few GMs and some anti-bot software are going to solve the issue, far far far from it.
I was thinking about ordering some gold myself personally just to feed their IG info to Intrepid. It's unrealistic that AoC would be willing to do this themselves I'd imagine, but could you imagine how hilarious it would be if the community stepped up and wrecked gold sellers lol? Once they nab one they can effectively "zoom in" on the IP for logs and chain ban a ton of them.
I'll be doing this for a sizable portion of my game time. I'd rather spend a good chunk of my time working on this and getting corrupted than to live in AoC with farmers and botters.
Jagex, the creators of OSRS has anti-bot mechanisms that are the best in the industry and if you do a little digging you can find the botting community have already gotten to a point where this is useless apart from driving up the price of the botting "software".
What they do is have people record their regular movements and keypresses for a while and then throw it into software that patternizes it's movements based on the recordings.
Jagex has done so well with their software that they can even detect this, but only if the script is used publicly. So what scripters have done is they make custom scripts for each individual person and as long as they aren't used by a lot of people(released publicly), the ban rate is almost 0.
These private scripts cost a LOT more than public scripts, but its nearly a foolproof way of subverting the anti-bot software.
We need to do nothing more than take a look at a company with MANY active GMs, money to be made by cracking down on bots(because they sell in game sub tokens), and has the best anti-bot software in the industry. I speak, of Jagex.
They can barely make a dent in botting, it's gotten too well done. At this point real players are getting banned because Jagex has such a difficult time differentiating between them and botters.
Yes, please do your part and buy gold then doxx the living shit out of them to Intrepid. Easy chain bans.