Ncsoft doing things wrong

[Axciel]

When i first started i had to mute most of the chats to avoid the bots despite me wanting to communicate with rest of the players through region / faction chat. I wish you could filter the bots from saying the same link on a different account to prevent gold sellers from spamming the same link 7 more times.

 

 

i can't believe they allowed players to type anything they want in party finder chat, the sole purpose of this chat should be for recruiting members not spamming gold sites, what's even worse is that you can announce at lv.1 so it lets botters on alts spam the chat.

 

[thewaitisCrazy]

wow..

[BestCatGirl]

chat is literally going so fast because of the gold sellers that i can't even see what actual people are saying. 

[Axciel]

it's sad players have to wait because of the enormous amount of bots given free reign over the game full time so this afk timer does nothing to the bots and only hurts players, probably more beneficial to ncsoft considering that's more cash for them if players decide to buy premium membership..

[Seemslegit]

18 minutes ago, Axciel said:

it's sad players have to wait because of the enormous amount of bots given free reign over the game full time so this afk timer does nothing to the bots and only hurts players, probably more beneficial to ncsoft considering that's more cash for them if players decide to buy premium membership..

Tinfoilhat on : Or maybe the bots are theirs ? :D

[thewaitisCrazy]

Just now, Seemslegit said:

Tinfoilhat on : Or maybe the bots are theirs ? :D

ohhhh, a tinfoil hat magically formed on top of my head upon reading your post :3 

[Handygoat]

At this point I think almost everyone wants the afk timer to go away, so I can leave my pc on overnight while I sleep and hopefully when I wake up I'll only need to wait 2 more hours to get in and wouln't get kicked when I'm making my breakfast away from my pc. The thing about bots is they're ridiculously hard to stop, and half the time you affect players more than bots with the devs solutions; afk timers, so they'll put a macro on the bots to move and any players that take a break will be kicked... so that solved... nothing?

Level cap on the bots? They'll macro farm to the level required. New players want to learn something? Nope you level up yourself noobie.

Only premium can use world chat? They'll use a portion of their profits to pay for it, in the end still netting profit. Free players? No team for you

[Kyokai]

Oh snap it's Taiwan server all over again,.

I'd give it 72 hours before NCsoft gives up trying to ban bots and just lets them roam free.

That's an extra 48 hours more than Taiwan server.

[EbonWolf]

You should see their twitter. They aren't even addressing the issues. The lack of moderation on here shows they give no *cricket*. But hey dumbasses keep paying. 

[omeed]

15 minutes ago, Axciel said:

it's sad players have to wait because of the enormous amount of bots given free reign over the game full time so this afk timer does nothing to the bots and only hurts players, probably more beneficial to ncsoft considering that's more cash for them if players decide to buy premium membership..

 

We're monitoring closely and don't believe there are an "enormous amount of bots." There are definitely bots and spammers, who are being banned as quickly as possible. 

 

We're also bringing some additional measures online to help with it. Preventing this kind of spam is a high priority - and also difficult, as they adjust their tactics very quickly. 

 

We - in no way - benefit from long queues. Sure, a few people may buy premium membership to skip them, but we'd make substantially more money from having everyone who wants to play in the game, hence the focus on bringing up additional servers. 

[TinLyn]

24 minutes ago, omeed said:

 

We're monitoring closely and don't believe there are an "enormous amount of bots." There are definitely bots and spammers, who are being banned as quickly as possible. 

 

We're also bringing some additional measures online to help with it. Preventing this kind of spam is a high priority - and also difficult, as they adjust their tactics very quickly. 

 

We - in no way - benefit from long queues. Sure, a few people may buy premium membership to skip them, but we'd make substantially more money from having everyone who wants to play in the game, hence the focus on bringing up additional servers. 

Thank you for the update Omeed.  While I have mixed feelings about NCSoft, it does help improve your customer satisfaction when you make posts such as these.

[EbonWolf]

1 minute ago, TinLyn said:

Thank you for the update Omeed.  While I have mixed feelings about NCSoft, it does help improve your customer satisfaction when you make posts such as these.

Only took them a couple days. 

[Sakia]

25 minutes ago, omeed said:

 

We're monitoring closely and don't believe there are an "enormous amount of bots." There are definitely bots and spammers, who are being banned as quickly as possible. 

 

We're also bringing some additional measures online to help with it. Preventing this kind of spam is a high priority - and also difficult, as they adjust their tactics very quickly. 

 

We - in no way - benefit from long queues. Sure, a few people may buy premium membership to skip them, but we'd make substantially more money from having everyone who wants to play in the game, hence the focus on bringing up additional servers. 

 

Omeed, I have a question regarding these measures.

 

Why is it always reactionary to come up with answers to coping with RTM and botters? In every MMO launch to date, all developers are always reactionary to this subject, as if they don't expect their servers and their games to be inundated by bad actors. Did NC not have a plan in place to proactively take care of this issue from the start?

[MindFreaK]

No tinfoil hats needed. They wont do much to stop the gold spammers. If any of you played Lineage 2, you would know how it is there...

[Shoshin]

15 hours ago, Sakia said:

 

Omeed, I have a question regarding these measures.

 

Why is it always reactionary to come up with answers to coping with RTM and botters? In every MMO launch to date, all developers are always reactionary to this subject, as if they don't expect their servers and their games to be inundated by bad actors. Did NC not have a plan in place to proactively take care of this issue from the start?

 

Sakia, the main reason for this is that gold selling has become a very large industry. Players are impatient and want their items sooner rather than later and there are quite a few people out there with more money to spend from their jobs than they have time to spend grinding for gold in games. This industry continues to grow without a real end in sight, becuase players continue buying the gold.

 

The point of the above statement is that with an industry like that, the "botters' are waging a war on MMOs. Just as Developers of MMOs are trying to establish counter-measures to botting and gold farming for their games, these much larger industries are developing measures to get around those counter-measures. The generic programs like GameGuard will not stop botters, they will really only work against the average player who doesn't know how to circumvent those programs. The developers, then, are forced to come up with unique methods in order to counter the botters in their game. Things such as developing a code that would keep track of all transactions in game over a certain amount of currency that they would then need to go investigate themselves, or a code that monitored the global chats and looked for keywords that again they would have to go and investigate themselves. 

 

The main issue is that this game is free to play. This means that if I want to go make 50 different accounts using different IP addresses and then use them to farm and sell gold then it costs me no money to do so, only time. And honestly not that much time. If I make an account using a fake IP address, go farm 50 gold on it, someone comes and buys that gold and and I give it to them and henceforth delete said account after the transaction then how do you expect the developers to find me? They don't know my real IP address, account name, email, nothing... All they know is there was an account that at such and such time traded 50 gold to this player and so they're going to ban that IP, but the botter has already made five new accounts and done the same thing by the time NCSoft can even get to the first account. I mean... unless you WANT them to create a program that looks for suspicious activity and auto-bans players from the game based on that suspicious activity and then the player would have to submit a ticket and explain what that suspicious activity was in actuality in the hopes that NCSoft will unban the account while in the meantime you can't even play. 

[EhUEHUHE]

Oh wrong as in providing us with a badly optimized game that runs on an ancient engine , that kind of wrong . Yep totally agree .

[Goji]

Botting isn't something that can be beaten; BOTs have free reign over World of Warcraft as well, and if Blizzard couldn't beat them with their infinite resources and huge subscriber base a F2P MMO doesn't have much of a prayer.  Hopefully NC figures out their server-load issues so they won't be causing massive queue's, and maybe they can get creative with "ignore" options for chat, but the BOTS aren't going anywhere. 

 

The only way to get rid of gold-sellers is to get rid of gold.  Diablo3 was only able to stifle gold/item sellers by completely removing the games economy and making everything bind on pickup. 

[EhUEHUHE]

Bl

5 minutes ago, Goji said:

Botting isn't something that can be beaten; BOTs have free reign over World of Warcraft as well, and if Blizzard couldn't beat them with their infinite resources and huge subscriber base a F2P MMO doesn't have much of a prayer.  Hopefully NC figures out their server-load issues so they won't be causing massive queue's, and maybe they can get creative with "ignore" options for chat, but the BOTS aren't going anywhere. 

 

The only way to get rid of gold-sellers is to get rid of gold.  Diablo3 was only able to stifle gold/item sellers by completely removing the games economy and making everything bind on pickup. 

Except in WoW you have to pay for your account lol

[Piper]

10 minutes ago, Goji said:

Botting isn't something that can be beaten; BOTs have free reign over World of Warcraft as well, and if Blizzard couldn't beat them with their infinite resources and huge subscriber base a F2P MMO doesn't have much of a prayer.  Hopefully NC figures out their server-load issues so they won't be causing massive queue's, and maybe they can get creative with "ignore" options for chat, but the BOTS aren't going anywhere. 

 

The only way to get rid of gold-sellers is to get rid of gold.  Diablo3 was only able to stifle gold/item sellers by completely removing the games economy and making everything bind on pickup. 

 

Except WoW handled the problem. The last few years I played WoW I saw zero spam bots. Zero. They gave players the option to ignore players under level 20 and, although this wouldn't apply to this game, they don't allow trial accounts access to any chat channels. It's just not a problem on WoW and hasn't been for a long time.

 

Gold sellers aren't running amok in Wildstar. Nor are they holding chat hostage in RIFT. Other F2P titles are also pretty much spam bot free. There are a number of things that can be done to alleviate the bot problem: give players an option to ignore lower level players, don't allow access to chat channels until level 10 or 15 or whatever, get some GM's in the game monitoring chat . . .

 

It's not that the problem can't be solved, it's that the solution would take resources.

[Goji]

9 minutes ago, Piper said:

Except WoW handled the problem. The last few years I played WoW I saw zero spam bots. Zero. They gave players the option to ignore players under level 20 and, although this wouldn't apply to this game, they don't allow trial accounts access to any chat channels. It's just not a problem on WoW and hasn't been for a long time.

 

Gold sellers aren't running amok in Wildstar. Nor are they holding chat hostage in RIFT. Other F2P titles are also pretty much spam bot free. There are a number of things that can be done to alleviate the bot problem: give players an option to ignore lower level players, don't allow access to chat channels until level 10 or 15 or whatever, get some GM's in the game monitoring chat . . .

 

It's not that the problem can't be solved, it's that the solution would take resources.

 

I already stated that NC could add options to their chat channels to mitigate the amount of goldspam we actually see; it wouldn't really be that difficult or resource intensive at all.  Just to be clear, though, just because you're not seeing it in chat doesn't mean they're not running amok in those games.  I was merely stating that you'll never be able to get rid of gold-sellers, not that there isn't anything NCSoft could do to help us ignore them.

 

Either way it feels like whoever's handling the NA/EU launch has enough crap to deal with right now in just getting everything stable.  Quality of life implements I assume will be prioritized later. 

[ZacBard]

It's a free to play company that only hosts the game with minimal support so you can't expect them to have someone monitor the game and manually ban the bots.