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

Asgermon

Why not let the community help the GM's and introduce a system similar to CS GO Overwatch?
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?

Arya_Yeshe

It works simply recording a video and uploading to a google drive or something

Lotrick

They could ban person, not account. Although this approach is harder on both developers and players (who would be required to provide and confirm personal info via some documents when creating an account).

novercalis

Private Discord with Volunteers and Paid GMs

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

Goalid

Let mayor's label suspected botters as "enemies of the state" so that GMs can have a better log of whose activity to look at, and then in the meantime have those bots be KOS in your node with no corruption penalty, and they get more and more XP debt.

Arya_Yeshe

I mean we would gank them, but there's corruption, so Intrepid brought the responsability on themselves on this

novercalis

Juror System?

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.

Depraved

novercalis wrote: »

Juror System?

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

tautau

No to volunteers or jurors (some are well intentioned, but many are not).

novercalis

tautau wrote: »

No to volunteers or jurors (some are well intentioned, but many are not).

which one are not or has issue?

Arya_Yeshe

I don't want to overburden Intrepid by creating a juror system

reporting and calling the gms is enough for obvious botting

novercalis

Arya_Yeshe wrote: »

I don't want to overburden Intrepid by creating a juror system

reporting and calling the gms is enough for obvious botting

but GMs may be busy with tickets as well, and we are gonna continue to allow the bot to bot away, crashing or over-saturating a market.

Atleast here, 10-15-20 people saw someone with a bot like behavior and made the reports. We are the first of the filter system, identify if it's real bot or not. Does this bot player talk back? if so, not a bot, juror sets him free and in the long run, saves GM time, so they can focus on other equally important tickets they got for the day.

I dont believe this system is hard to create at all either.

Also forgot to mention - juror should have a UI / juror page. Like in WoW, at the end of the arena/Battleground, you can see player names, KDA, etc. But this will show the name/guild/node and a time stamp of when those players made the report, to Identify if this was a false report that ppl tried to abuse and bully. Those Juror will have the special ability to auto create a report/ticket of bad faith players trying to abuse a mechanics.

GM can intervene on a low priority call for that and handle the, if any, punishment.

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