Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
There should be sub tokens in AoC
PherPhur
Member
Intrepid might as well make some money gold selling through sub tokens before the game inevitably implodes on itself from gold farmers and bots. At least then extremely poor people from poor countries will be able to play before it happens.
I don't think people understand how much gold farming is going to destroy this game. It's more centered around PvP than any MMO I have seen and it's very market heavy. Just wait until people find out someones dropping 20k to outpace everyone in the game and become and unstoppable force within a few weeks. Buying all the dragon eggs, being completely decked out in legendaries, them and their band of P2W buddies, a band of paid mercenaries, paying to have unstoppable caravans. Owning all the castles and taxing at a ridiculous rate to make even more money and solidify their spot at the top. Fun!
I don't think people understand how much gold farming is going to destroy this game. It's more centered around PvP than any MMO I have seen and it's very market heavy. Just wait until people find out someones dropping 20k to outpace everyone in the game and become and unstoppable force within a few weeks. Buying all the dragon eggs, being completely decked out in legendaries, them and their band of P2W buddies, a band of paid mercenaries, paying to have unstoppable caravans. Owning all the castles and taxing at a ridiculous rate to make even more money and solidify their spot at the top. Fun!
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If intrepid actually tries, as they say they will, the game will be just fine, other companies don't even try, and that misleads people thinking it's impossible to ban bots and RMT - when it's actually really easy.
Ehm, no. It's a stupid idea. Go play wow if that is what you want to be able to do
That's some strong copium if i've ever seen it. "actually really easy". Actually at the current moment it's impossible to do anything but put a scratch in RMT and bots.
All you need to do is look at one of the oldest and still popular MMOs to find how this situation will truly play out, OSRS.
No one in the history of gaming has ever devised a system so complex to stop botting and has such a strong offense against gold buying. It's still subverted, constantly. They have good reason to try as hard as they can as well because they essentially sell gold with game time tokens. Does what they do make a dent in RMT and botting, sure. Is it a massive dent, not really. And they've been at this for 20 years.
Bots are so hard to tell from actual players and the systems designed so well that actual players are getting banned for beings bots.
There's no way to make a massive dent without removing player traded currency from the game, limiting trade slot windows, reducing stack size, not having a lot of items on a global drop table with varying degrees of rarity, not having an automated auction house, having a highly dynamic world and then doing what Jagex has done to top it off.
Although, despite bartering being more social, complex and engaging, people dogpile me for even mentioning the phrase "remove currency". It's like trying to have an intervention for a heroin user and suggesting something more satisfying but less problematic. Cringeeee
I'm not entirely sure we'll know who does and who doesn't. We certainly will have a hard to impossible time telling for the bots and gold farmers aside from messaging everyone out farming and waiting for a human like response lol.
For people P2W'ing.. my guess would be to assume everyone slingshotting above everyone else is doing it and band together to take them down. Which will be my approach.
The dragon egg problem and consumables which will surely have a very low supply with very high demand for a long time issue on the other hand... That will remain a huge issue for as long as I can tell.
Yeah that's not how the game and endgame resources is going to work at all. Never played Eve Online right?
A captcha for so many flags would be a nice tool in the toolkit. Sometimes I just feel like someone out grinding is a bot and I'd love to know that my report has a real and immediate check. I'd imagine most people would be against that though considering it wouldn't take too much to abuse the system on a guild leader of a guild you are at war with.
I'd like it though, as long as the captcha doesn't pop up during combat.
Thanks for some constructive thoughts on the issue, it's very rare regarding this topic.
I take it you're going to tell me how the supply is so high that the items never run out. Dragon eggs will never be like that. Actually a lot of things won't be like that for a long time, but dragon eggs will never be like that.
No, quite the opposite. Supply of the legendary stuff will be controlled by the big guilds/alliances. Regardless of how much ingame gold anyone has.
Delusional. A useful tool to have for a game that's already out, fun, has no sign of changing and you just desperately need to justify downplaying the critism and keep playing in an imaginary gaming heaven *cough* WoW, GW2, BDO *cough*.
For a game in alpha though? Super cringe.
RMT weakens once bots are pushed back against.
If you see profitable bottable designs in Alpha-2, make noise.
Other than that it's just 'slightly more players than one would like' and 'people who buy gold from those players, who should be banned anyway'.
Ashes combat seems to be way more complex, so it's gonna be even harder to make a human-like bot that's gonna be indistinguishable from a live player.
This is not an OSRS issue.
It is not complex to make bots that act like people.
If anything it's the opposite. It's harder for an optimized player to not appear to be a bot.
Writing bots for combat is not as hard as you might think.
Writing bots that will get regular players banned and make people have to tiptoe around it, is even more interesting because it slows down the process of catching them.
I'm genuinely worried for myself in this game because I 'play like a bot' AND I make no effort to hide the fact that I know how to write them. I'm gonna be under investigation like half the time.
Oh you mean to say it won't even be for sale. That would be refreshing, though very unrealistic. I don't know if EVE just restricts the ability to even sell these things or if the community is so old they haven't found out about a system similar to GDKPs in WoW.
But we will most likely see these things for sale(from what I understand they can be sold, I know dragon eggs can be) from people looking to get money to do other things in game such as build up another node or declare a war on a node(which has been said by Steven to cost as much as the value of the node, i.e. insanely expensive, enough to warrant selling legendaries and dragon eggs).
It definitely does weaken them, but only a dent, which is fine, I just expect more talk and resolution on the issue. The bots are so incredibly well done these days that they are indistinguishable from real players.
I don't expect to see bots in Alpha-2, but they will certainly come pouring in shortly after launch, likes flies on shit(money, not AoC)
It might be a smaller increase in players relative to the overall population, but they will be bots and gold farmers, people who do just that. I wouldn't call it "slight" at all. And there are no workable mechanisms to ban gold buyers. Never really has been apart from direct proof. For all any person or system knows someone is just being given that gold for any number of reasons apart from buying it. Same goes for gold farmers and sellers.
This is actually MORESO the reason why I assume they will combat them by building strong systems and economies where botting itself is difficult to make a profit with.
The rest of the game's design lends itself toward RMT, so if there's gonna be a counter, this will be it.
Negative ghostrider. I only feel compelled to speak my mind on this issue because I've dabbled in botting enough to know. It's all about color detection and scripting events, everything else is just key presses.
The way OSRS tackles the issue best is detecting mouse patterns that are unnatural, to which the botters have done tasks manually many times and devised scripts that take that data and repeat it and randomize it with variations derived from it. As long as the scripts are custom for each person they bypass bot detection 100% of the time.
If they aren't custom, as long as they aren't public and used by everyone and their grandmothers, they have a pretty low ban rate.
Selling currency tokens is P2W. So, by telling Intrepid they 'should' do this, you're recommending that Intrepid prevent fires in their building by burning it to the ground. Brilliant.
RMT is not going to be 100% stopped. Can Intrepid set policy, reinforce that policy with best practice, and reduce RMT where they can as much as possible? That's what we're all hoping for. But if they reduce the impact by 80% (theoretically) would this be enough to not burn down the building? If not, what's your threshold? 90%? 95%?
If you want 100% security with 0% impact of botting and/or RMT on an mmo the best strategy is to not launch the game.
I'm lowkey not being serious. I'm just pissed this is such a big issue that so many people are passionate about not being in a game, one of the major features that is suppose to set AoC apart from it's competitors, yet when it's looking them in their face, during the alpha of a game that developers take community discussion about to mind, people don't seem to want to address the issue.
Instead, acting delusional as if it's already taken care of or not even really an issue(despite not liking P2W). Reminds me of the GW2 threads on reddit with nearly everyone claiming the game isnt P2W. I've never seen so much delusion in my entire life, and that says a lot lol.
IT WILL come, no gaming company has found a way to stop it, even ones that have been fighting it for 20 years, have developed breathtakingly complex systems against it, and have money to be made by doing so.
So what makes our input any different?
Well there is a way to put a huge dent in it. It just requires many systems, a few which AoC already have like a highly dynamic world, WPvP, bot detection software, a report button and GMs to address those reports. These alone make a somewhat small dent.
A few of the other systems are highly controversial for 2 reasons, 1. because they put a wrench in peoples ability to mathematically calculate how to get rich from a market and 2. because they make trading slightly more difficult. These would be things like removing currency or removing the ability to trade currency(replacing it with a barter system), removing an automated auction house(because it almost instantly allows items to replace currency), limiting the amount of slots in a trade window(to prevent items from replacing currency), limiting stack size especially on high value items(to prevent items from replacing currency), having no global drop table with a high variety of items with different drop chances like runes or orbs in d2 and PoE(to prevent items from replacing currency), and last but not least possibly making legendaries or meta level items bind on pickup as in WoW.
There are other methods which are semi-controversial like what one user here posted about having a report system that after so many makes a person have to enter a captcha. I really like this because if it has a longer cooldown and doesn't pop up during combat, it isn't too intrusive if it gets abused and it would help the botting situation tremendously. Although it's a little immersion breaking.