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What can be done against the filthy bots
Falkath
Member
Hello, as a lot of MMO players I've had a lot of bad experiences with bots or players just using hacks to take advantage of the economy, sometimes to benefit their main character but also RMT.
So far the way Ashes of Creation is built is already really well done against botting. The fact that the whole world is a PvP zone, and any bot will be killable by any player, gives the possibility to players to already police around on their nodes to get rid of bots against a corruption, but it can be removed anyway. Steven also said there will be active GMs in servers looking out for them.
Will this be enough ?
It is never enough, first because botting is still too easy and even getting an "alt" account banned for botting isn't a major loss as the abuser would only lose the rest of the month as sub and the materials that were on it.
What more can be done than banning?
The fact that we'll need to equip tools to start harvesting materials is already a little expense that the bots owners need work for. However, a greater stop would be to push gatherers to acquire better equipment to be as efficient as a player, and this equipment should be hard to acquire. Either expensive to craft or tricky to acquire through quest lines. It could be a complete set of gatherer gear (Which Steven said it would go under our actual combat gear) that makes it stupid to play with the basic default one even for bots. In addition to reserve the rarest resources for high proficiency gatherers (such as end game ores could only be picked by max leveled miners) would ask a lot of commitment to the bots to be effective, and so a lot harder for them to be relevant compared to a regular player following the rules.
Anything that would make the loss of a bot more painful to the abuser is a step towards a bot-free world of Verra
What else could be done ?
So far the way Ashes of Creation is built is already really well done against botting. The fact that the whole world is a PvP zone, and any bot will be killable by any player, gives the possibility to players to already police around on their nodes to get rid of bots against a corruption, but it can be removed anyway. Steven also said there will be active GMs in servers looking out for them.
Will this be enough ?
It is never enough, first because botting is still too easy and even getting an "alt" account banned for botting isn't a major loss as the abuser would only lose the rest of the month as sub and the materials that were on it.
What more can be done than banning?
The fact that we'll need to equip tools to start harvesting materials is already a little expense that the bots owners need work for. However, a greater stop would be to push gatherers to acquire better equipment to be as efficient as a player, and this equipment should be hard to acquire. Either expensive to craft or tricky to acquire through quest lines. It could be a complete set of gatherer gear (Which Steven said it would go under our actual combat gear) that makes it stupid to play with the basic default one even for bots. In addition to reserve the rarest resources for high proficiency gatherers (such as end game ores could only be picked by max leveled miners) would ask a lot of commitment to the bots to be effective, and so a lot harder for them to be relevant compared to a regular player following the rules.
Anything that would make the loss of a bot more painful to the abuser is a step towards a bot-free world of Verra
What else could be done ?
2
Comments
In AoC there will be guild wars, node wars, ganking (but there's a corruption system that debuffs you), you could also PvE grief them.
PvE griefing is the most terrifying for sure and effective too, maybe guild wars could come in second place.
We'll see, in the last video the devs commented that there will be ways of dealing with over harvesting, we don't know what it is yet, but I believe there will be prohibitive policies!
If we can prohibit harvesting something in our node for a period of time, then we would be able to freely kill all the bots as I suggested here:
Turn purple the gatheres who are stealing lumber
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/54345/turn-purple-the-gatheres-who-are-stealing-lumber
"Security systems will be in place to combat cheating, exploiting, botting, gold selling/real money transactions (RMT), item duplication and other things that affect the economy starting from Alpha-0.[1][2][3][4]
These systems collect user data and flag abnormal activities for investigation. This combined with player reporting functions generates a live "heat map" that draws attention to unusual behavior.[1][4]
We do have already built into the game on the outset is essentially behavioral metrics. So in the game, as a player does normal things and they acquire normal gold, that's all good and well, but if there starts to be item IDs that appear on the player account that are out of the norm, like either a large amount of gold, or significant legendary items, what it does in the back-end it flags the account for view so that we can take a look at where did this item come from. Is it coming from a known gold seller or a flagged bot, or whatever; and then we investigate. So we're going to be pretty hard on the ability for players to subvert the natural economy systems by RMT or botting.[1] – Steven Sharif
Botters, cheaters, gold sellers, and RMTers, will face harsh penalties from the active GM/community team.[5][4]"
That in itself is a game I am all for.
1. As the OP already mentioned PVP is always on.
2. Steven is planning on having Gm's in game at all times on every server to kick bots on the spot. Report them and a GM will teleport to the spot to verify if it is indeed a bot. If they feel it is that account will be disabled on the spot
3. Open world dungeons will make it more difficult for bots to farm them without getting caught. You won't see 100's of Death Knights farming old world instances like you do in classic WOW
4. The node system and the seasonal system will also make it more difficult. Ashes won't be a static world. things change. Where a mine is today there might not be one tomorrow depending on node development and the season, Where a vendor npc is today might change tomorrow as well. Where something is today on your server might not be in the same location on any other server. Botters will have to update their routes on a regular basis to keep up with the ever changing world.
5. I don't believe he's officially told us what the punishment will be but Steven has already stated gold buying won't be tolerated. I'm assuming it'll be a permeant account ban making the risk of buying gold greater than the rewards for doing so.
I'm sure there's other reasons as well but that's what I can think of off the top of my head.
Monitoring "hack" (Script kiddie) forums & matching user names to monitor, taking action to get a list of purchases via courts then matching IRL names.
Gold sellers easier to monitor because trades to account & from account monitoring server side. Limit trades, Lock people into guilds for 30days if guilds have banks.
Block Yandex E-mail accounts. (Obviously this is an issue for RU players). But you will find the sold accounts & RMT accounts most often use this.
If you want to piss off the playerbase use Cellphone verification. I myself don't own a one, Also here in NZ prepaid (refereed to as burners in USA) are the standard. So many many issues & justified complaints doing this.
As I said before all they need to do is hire 1 experienced GM & that person can educate them on how to deal with botting/RMT issues.
Active GM's, Gm events & if they play on personal accounts can make a difference. But reports of GM abuse need to be swift & punishing if this is the case as they often abuse it. ~ Like Steven in videos to date.
Including open world pvp, anticheats, paid and volunteer gms monitoring the world
There really is just no way to stop them
honestly yeah, the only people really affected by bots is the bottom line of the company
bots can help new players by keeping common material prices low
I'm far from an expert on the matter but haven't virtually all these people been fired by Blizzard at one point?
I do remember a huge scandal regarding this and the utter inability to find any GM a couple of years ago when I played Classic WoW.
I sincerely doubt that having a couple of people per server just running around hunting bots isn't enough to keep them in check.
At one point it just gets financially unfeasible for the botter to keep paying for new accounts.
that is true, they eventually fired all volunteer and paid GMs that patrol the world
chalk it up to them supporting botting and purposely trying to make the game a botfest, but I believe blizzard have had over 10 years of experience trying to deal with RMTers and bots, so they must know something we don't
I sincerely doubt that.
The decission to fire the live service squad was made almost certainly by the finance-management branch of the company, by people who realistically never played the game in their life and couldn't describe a raid to save their said life.
The sad reality is that Blizzard degenerated into an absolute, souless cash grab, with 100% of the decision power coming from people 3+ levels removed from the game designers/moderators.
I am no game developer and I have never been GM in any game in my life but I sincerely doubt the problem can't be solved by having a few people, even volunters running around banning bots. If they ban somebody abusively, said person can be unbanned by a proper admin and if the volunteer is abusive his rights can be revoked.
I would do that for fun, they wouldn't even have to pay me. Although I probably wouldn't be very productive because I will realistically end up playing like 12 hours a week at most.
I sincerely doubt they did that because it was costing them money, as you said there was no shortage of janny volunteers like you willing to work for free
I also sincerely doubt they fired them just because they wanted to support botting just to screw with the players
You're saying this assuming the people in charge were knowledgeable in this reagrd/wise enough to care.
We're also assuming that the amount of money lost to people getting angry because of bots is notably greater than the amount of money needed for employees & the amount of money paid by botters. This might objectively not be the case.
As I said, you need actual emplyees to watch over the volunteers and Blizzard fired the people who would have done that.
It is a valid theory at least and maybe at least part of what happened.
Hell yeah I'd join you for that!!
I don't think so. it's easy to set up tons of virtual systems and run one instance on each... it doesn't even cost much if you know your way around...
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In CS GO Overwatch, you watch replays of reported players and can then rate whether the (anonymized) player in the video uses hacks or does other forbidden things. This way a flood of reports can be pre-filtered by the community and the justified reports can be picked out for the GM's.
I don't know how best to set up a similar system for an MMORG, since there are probably far more reasons to report someone in an MMORPG than in CSGO and they are not all verifiable through replay.
Or what do you think?
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Volunteers dont really have access to VC with GMs but a small line of communication in Discord
Have a system like ARK, where In-Game Chat is connected to Discord. The only chat that gets transferred over is Reports.
GMs handles Tickets, Volunteers investigate Reports.
Volunteers follows up on Report, observe and confirms (10 minutes observation). In a specific channel - Volunteer submits the report with Result/Confirmation.
GMs puts in the admin command to ban
You can also have the volunteer record the behavior and submit that as proof as well for another level of verification - or need 3 volunteers to confirm & initiate a ban
What AoC definitely needs is 3 GMs (8 hours shifts) per server.
During those 8 hours, there should always be 1 active GM and 5-10 Volunteers, assisting GMs with reports, while the GM is handling CS Tickets.
The Discord will filter out, false flag, false reports and find real botters.
As for RMT vs Volunteers - uncertain if they should have any role on this or be given any tools. This is a slippery slope and should belong in TICKETS for GMs to investigate. Maybe another group of Individuals, PAID, to focus on RMTs
After a X amount of Report - the server randomly collects volunteers and/or random players X nodes away from the accused as Jurors.
These Jurors will have a Juror Chat access, visible to all players in the server to read. The Accused will have access to the chat. The system Server will inform the Juror why this player is accused of.
(Back tracking)
Report functions will have a small menu for players to dispute. The following reportable offenses are:
* Spam (If found guilty, loses chat priv for X time)
* Botting (If found guilty, goes to jail until GM arrive)
* RMT (If found guilty, goes to jail until GM arrive)
* Inappropriate Name (If found guilty, NO JAIL, however a ticket is sent to GM for further investigation)
* Inappropriate Language / Chat (If found guilty, loses chat priv for X time, Ticket created and sent to GM for further investigation)
* Hacking/Exploits (No JURY - A ticket is created and sent to GM, high alert status. If Possible - flags the account and somehow it can start recording their action for the next 2-3 minutes.)
Consequence of abusing system - Since most of the jail actions requires GM intervention - If World Chat felt, this was abuse and GM having access to logs to see who made the reports and determines a node/guild attempted to use this system in a nefarious ways - they can be temp banned. Checks and Balance.
(Back on Track now)
So now the Juror will know, what type of accusation this player received. The Accused can speak and make their case. Make an apology. World chat or Node Chat can maybe chime in to help defend or bury the accuse. If not - it's up to the jurors. Each Case last 10 minutes before a verdict / vote begins.
Bots probably wont be able to chat, since they are AFK.
RMT sellers probably wouldnt be able to articulate and defend themselves.
damn no. i don't want my sexting with tulnars to be known by other elves
which one are not or has issue?