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.
The Issue of Bots
ClintHardwood
Member, Alpha Two
From my experience with the many MMOs I've played, admins banning bots has never worked, and neither have detection based systems which were quickly circumvented with the latest botting scripts. The only success I have personally witnessed were in games like Ultima, Albion, and Eve where bots were quickly dispatched for loot by players. But with the overwhelming risks of corruption making bot hunting in AoC implausible, how does Intrepid plan on handling the impending bot infestation?
0
Comments
Can also mark player who run the same path regulary with purple which means there free kills, cause no player would be running the exact same path that bots tend to do.
Bots aren't so simple these days as to run the same path over and over. Some bots have playstyles more complex than actual players.
Unfortunately people will always buy gold. There always be P2W types in games, especially since this is a game marketed towards an older audience that has more money than time.
A sub based game already has a high barrier to entry. So that will help. Yes, stolen credit cards are where a lot of bot accounts come from, but it still helps
What won't work is allowing players to flag bots. It will be abused at a guild level, with 50 players all flagging a real person as a bot just to gank him.
What also doesn't work is killing bots. Ok, it works for a little while and we feel good about it. Bots run 24/7, and they do so in out of the way areas. Like mice, if you see one, there are 10 more you don't see.
Worse than bots are not cheat-proofing your game:
In Albion online, most of the world is the black zone: an absolutely massive piece of land with the highest level resources possible and guilds constantly fighting for loot and territory. Not once have I seen a bot there because basically everyone is kill on sight with full loot and PvP. Bots don't have the skills to survive human ganking squads. The blue zones which are non-PvP zones with low levels resources, however, have massive amounts of bots. It's really night and day between the two areas.
I guarantee the always-PvP zones in AoC like the open seas will have significantly fewer bots.
AoC won't be full loot, so even the seas might still see bots, though that will depend on how hard it is to control a boat.
At the risk of getting the same miserable response I normally get.
"You have not seen a bot" means "The bot was too good for you to recognize it was a bot.", never 'there aren't any bots here'.
I'm not saying the world has a lot of bots like this, so it's not like your overall point isn't true, but figured I'd mention.
The AI would work 24/7, and it can flag accounts for the live GM team to handle. It sounds really promising, so hopefully we'll start seeing good results this year or the next.
If you'd played albion you'd know why this is false. A bot traveling through the black zone is free loot for anyone who sees it, and since there are no teleports and most maps have tiny bottlenecks between them it's impossible for bots to just sneak by players. It's just not profitable to have bot farms in Albion's black zone. Botfarms will spend more money regearing dead bots than they do from loot the bots bring back.
Your comments in this thread seem to suggest that you are simply assuming that a game having some parts of a games world being without bots as being some form of success.
While I can't speak for Ultima, I can state without hesitation that both of the other two games you talked about in your OP as being shining beacons of how to rid a game from bots (EVE and Albion) have massive, thriving black markets for isk and silver.
The fact that some parts of each game don't have bots does not mean the game is a success at getting rid of bots.
It seems you think that the issue with bots is that players can see them, rather than the issue with them being the impact they have on a games economy. If this is what you consider the issue to be, then sure, those games have done an ok job.
There's a big difference between bots and black market sellers. Bots will crowd every resource and mob and leave you nothing while a player selling the gold he earned in game might camp a dungeon with his guild for a few days before moving on. The economic aspect is important but the day to day gaming aspect is vital.
What do you think scares off a new player faster: seeing hordes of bots stampeding across the map, devouring every resource, or eventually finding out that some people sell currency via RMT? I'd argue that to AoC's older population, the latter will be a boon as much as a deterrent.
The actual trading of currency doesn't harm players as much as people using bots to farm it.
So, good news everyone, bots aren't an issue in MMO's any more.
Now you're just being obtuse. You're seriously on a forum for a sandbox game and you've never seen or heard of the massive bot hordes in Runescape? A dozen bots chopping a single tree or crowding a fishing spot is not unheard of. Have you never played Lost Ark either? Literally hundreds of bots swarming instanced dungeon entrances.
Lost Ark Chaos dungeon entrance:
A random basic tree in Oldschool Runescape:
Bonus image from New World:
Twenty years of gaming, huh? It seems none of them were multiplayer.
I mean, based on your definition above, which for reference is "Bots will crowd every resource and mob and leave you nothing", none of the above count as bots.
In Lost Ark, there were groups of similarly dressed characters that were running instances. The thing with instances is that there is always enough for everyone. As such, according to what you said, they were not bots.
In Runescape, sure, multiple characters would gather around a tree and cut it down, but they could never get to all trees fast enough, leaving some trees for other players. Again, according to your above comment, this means they are not bots.
As for New World, all I see is 6 alts fishing.
the fact is, in your OP, you praised a few games as being the shining beacon of bot prevention, when in reality they are nothing of the sort.
I don't know if you going into the weeds of hyper literality is an attempt at trolling or a coping mechanism for not having an argument, but unless you want to return to the crux of this thread, I do think this conversation is over.
If you read the post, I returned to the crux of the discussion at the end of the post you quoted.
Or, to state again, in the OP you raised up three games as being examples of how to successfully defeat bots, despite the fact that all three games have large numbers of bots - they just aren't where you are looking.
That's not what you said. You said:
The problem with your statement is that the black markets for silver in Albion come from actual players selling currency they earned in game (usually influential guild leaders, top tier PvPers, and wealthy merchants) and not from bots. I know this because I had currency buyers and sellers in my various guilds over the years. You automatically assumed this currency came from bots which is an leap in logic. If you can show me any evidence of massive (or any) bot farms in black zone Albion I'll be happy to take a look.
The only thing I assumed is that I wouldn't need to fill in the gaps for you.
Let me ask you a question - if we go back to your Lost Ark example of that mass of players outside an instance - if they are not selling anything on the black market, what harm are they causing?
The bots were selling items on the black market, and that's the issue. Here's a few examples:
1) The bots dumped the items they earned from the chaos dungeon on the auction house to earn currency for RMT. Materials earned from chaos dungeons were at all time lows, making real players earn essentially nothing from their daily limited dungeon runs since they were competing with hundreds of thousands of bots across multiple channels.
2) Simultaneously, each of the 100k+ bots were collecting large sum of gold from once-per-account rewards from various 'quests', significantly inflating the market of tradeable premium currency and raid items. As a normal player who wasn't whaling out through in-game methods or RMT, you simply couldn't afford the gear you needed because your items were worthless as stated in point one, and inflation accelerating gold prices for non-bottable goods like raid items/premium currency faster than you could earn even playing 16 hours a day.
That's what bots do. They collect resources so fast that gathering, mob grinding, and other grindable activites become non-profitable, essentially laying waste to a game's economy. Just try buying decent gear on Runescape by competing with bots for yew logs. Short of scripting yourself or spending 16 hours a day it's impossible.
The games you are talking about still have that issue - this is something you have already agreed on.
Please stop mincing my words. You're the one that brought up the black market. The entire point of this thread was bots. Bots ruin day-to-day gameplay by actively competing with players over overworld resources and flooding the market. A few blokes selling their limited hard-earned currency won't even affect your average player because there is no net excess being produced, it's simply currency changing hands.
I want to remove bots. The black market might incentivize bot farms, but bot farms can be removed even though the black market can't. The entire point of our conversation was that Albion has accomplished this—they killed bots even though the black market still exists. And it's fine. No one is harmed by the existence of that black market in that game except the developers who would rather sell silver to the players through a premium currency middleman.
I'd love to except as the OP of this thread states, the corruption system severely hampers and disincentivizes bot removal mechanisms on the part of the player. That's literally the entire point of this thread. I'm starting to doubt your intelligence. Are you sure you're not just chatGPT gone rogue? Maybe that's why you keep avoiding the issue of bots—you're protecting your kind.
I'll guarantee you could stop the average bot in less time than you have put in to this thread today - and you would probably enjoy it more (which is the point of playing games, isn't it?).
All recent MMOs that have no real way to counter bots were flooded by tens of thousands bots within months. If AoC doesn't have the proper systems in place it'll be no different. I was asking what types of systems, generally, does AoC have planned to counter this. It was mostly a rhetorical question because I want the developers to see this and take the bot issue seriously. If they say they have a few good ideas in mind I'd be content with that.
You saying 'just go kill bots hurr durr' is not very helpful. Didn't your mother ever tell you not to speak unless you have something smart to say? Though I suppose in your case she could simplify it by telling you not to speak.
Not even if you offer them ice cream.
Hopefully Intrepid has found ways to do this and has already invested and will keep investing in development of software for bot detection, but sadly this will only really be put to test after launch.