What can be done against the filthy bots

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 ?

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Comments

Arya_Yeshe

In my experience dealing with such people works best if you have free PvP, then you can just kill them all and farm them if they drop loot.

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.

Falkath

For sure killing them is the best way to stop them, but corruption isn't something you'll want to stack just for the sake of killing a bot over and over

Arya_Yeshe

Falkath wrote: »

For sure killing them is the best way to stop them, but corruption isn't something you'll want to stack just for the sake of killing a bot over and over

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

tautau

Perma-ban all botters and other types of cheaters, is my opinion. Thankfully, this appears to be the opinion shared by IS. From the wiki:

"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]"

Ninja Kitty

yes, I also hope they definitely make botting AND multiboxing against the TOS

novercalis

man, I would pay to play as a GM and hunt RMTers, cheaters and botters down

That in itself is a game I am all for.

darthaden

It's impossible to eliminate botting 100% but Ashes will be more difficult than your average MMO to bot in for many reasons.

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.

prymortal

Anti cheat that monitors for scripts. In game Reporting with location/time/image attachments. IP bans. Block VPN IP's (Boohoo oh no I need VPN to play but I also hate bots wah wah).
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.

Dogemon

Anything that this game can try to stop the bots has been tried by wow
Including open world pvp, anticheats, paid and volunteer gms monitoring the world
There really is just no way to stop them

Sunboy

KYC all accounts.

akabear

Used to be 100% against bots, but after NW base material supply was kept in check by bots now on the fence!

Dogemon

akabear wrote: »

Used to be 100% against bots, but after NW base material supply was kept in check by bots now on the fence!

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

Ironhope

Dogemon wrote: »

paid and volunteer gms monitoring the world

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.

Dogemon

Ironhope wrote: »

Dogemon wrote: »

paid and volunteer gms monitoring the world

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

Ironhope

Dogemon wrote: »

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.

Dogemon

Ironhope wrote: »

Dogemon wrote: »

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

Ironhope

Dogemon wrote: »

I sincerely doubt they did that because it was costing them money,

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.

Dogemon wrote: »

as you said there was no shortage of janny volunteers like you willing to work for free

As I said, you need actual emplyees to watch over the volunteers and Blizzard fired the people who would have done that.

Dogemon wrote: »

I also sincerely doubt they fired them just because they wanted to support botting just to screw with the players

It is a valid theory at least and maybe at least part of what happened.

volsh

novercalis wrote: »

man, I would pay to play as a GM and hunt RMTers, cheaters and botters down

That in itself is a game I am all for.

Hell yeah I'd join you for that!!

Arya_Yeshe

The simple fact that you can run only one instance of the game cuts a lot of botting out

Asgermon

Arya_Yeshe wrote: »

The simple fact that you can run only one instance of the game cuts a lot of botting out

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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