Gold Spammers Everywhere

[Tanall]

1: Turn off region and party-find chat.

2: Join faction (do not put on pvp-clothes)

3: Use faction chat instead of region and party-find chat.

 

Hopefully the time it takes the bot-coders to teach their bots to run over to the NPC's for the faction join quest will be longer than the time it takes NC to crack down.

 

Hopefully.

[Dreamer0526]

Update right now :D, THEY ARE EVERYWHERE. Logged in right now and already had to ban 10 in FACTION CHAT. What does that mean? Thats 10 player slots filled with bots. And theres more, in the beginning area...

You all complain about queue time? well this is why, because alot of the player slots for the server are being taken by gold spammers.

[ShadowVlican]

all these account securities (login email, account IP management, pin login, queues, etc) and there's still so many gold spamming bots

 

i've got to hand it to them... these bots have ncsoft in their hands while us normal human players have to suffer

[Tanall]

15 minutes ago, Dreamer0526 said:

Update right now :D, THEY ARE EVERYWHERE. Logged in right now and already had to ban 10 in FACTION CHAT. What does that mean? Thats 10 player slots filled with bots. And theres more, in the beginning area...

Well smeg, there went that idea.

[Revillot]

On 1/18/2016 at 10:27 PM, Youmukon said:

Hello!

 

Just to let everyone know, our team is fully aware about the RMT/Goldsellers spam going on and we are currently working on countermeasures to reduce the inconvenience it causes to players.

 

In the meantime please keep reporting bots by either using the in-game report feature or by submitting a ticket (Report Player > "They were trying to sell gold by spamming chat".), these reports greatly help our team to identify and removes bots from the game.

 

Thanks again!

 

I think I may have found a part of how they are "beating the system". IF there is a limit in chat posts, they are entering into a loading zones, then backing back out for a short period to continue. I have seen dozens of people doing this in piles outside a loading zone. I'm currently in Everdusk, West of "Scouting Party" at the "Bandit Hideout." I am watching about a dozen different names pop in and out with gibberish names like "djhfhjeca." If there is a chat per minute limit, this might be how they are resetting it.

[Kuumrelv]

Just like they say that piracy in a weird way supports the makers.

 

I dont know how big their staff is but wouldnt it be worth it to employ gamemasters who manually ban farm bots. Unless they(bots) really do earn money for ncsoft in which case...yeah. I think a lot of people including me, find it mocking us. Like we spend several hours farming and someone has bots to do that and has time for others things - it's as if it's an invitation to botting.

 

Waiting for a bot to be banned in two months is not a solution, we need faster and harsher methods. Some GM flying around seeing a bot train bam* ban ban ban done next place. sure there might be some occasional friendly fire but hey I'm sure they will sort that out! And in time the botters get demoralized as ban comes too quickly too even bother anymore.

[Ansu]

Why would they need bots to do it? They could just have a GM poof them like 4000000000 gold

[Kounat]

If NCSoft is secretly in control of the bots... then yes, they do make money by allowing them.

If not, they don't - tada.

[OneYouHate]

lol just on the sites the GM's have up to catch gold buyers >:) just kidding I don't think they have a gold seller site up for company monetary gain or do they? hmmm

[Darkshana]

The last things Farm bots do is help the company make money. If there isn't farm bots gold will be more expensive to trade, if not we spent less for more. Beside gold farmers sell from a different web site. Seems too much work and not enough profit.

[Puppetface]

Several games have ways in which you buy in-game for real currency, look at wow tokens, look at apex in archeage and kronos in everquest.

 

if they truely wanted to allow gold selling they'd just find a way to make a cut out of it like every other game.

[Enubis]

The question is placed wrongly in my opinion.

 

It is highly unlikely that NCSoft is under some hyper conspiracy to earn money by making their own bots and opening new sites. HOWEVER It is going to cost them to actively hunt down and get rid of bots. See the difference I'm suggesting? While they don't profit from bots, they stand to lose money if they are to aggressively hunt down bots. It comes down to the moral ethics of a company and how much of a damn they give to their players.

[Cyriac]

What you need to consider here also is that the bots are game accounbts as well. Now I would not be surprised if these gold farming accounts have premium membership, it does increase drop rate so it IS possible that NCSOFT is making money out of the people botting/selling gold through the purchase of premium membership. With 10g selling for around $30 like a lot are advertising then paying for premium would not put much of a dent in their profits.

[Kuumrelv]

11 minutes ago, Enubis said:

The question is placed wrongly in my opinion.

 

It is highly unlikely that NCSoft is under some hyper conspiracy to earn money by making their own bots and opening new sites. HOWEVER It is going to cost them to actively hunt down and get rid of bots. See the difference I'm suggesting? While they don't profit from bots, they stand to lose money if they are to aggressively hunt down bots. It comes down to the moral ethics of a company and how much of a damn they give to their players.

 

My question can be interpreted in several ways I think, but yes I didnt mean the conspiracy stuff. Its as you say they stand to lose money by actively hunting bots but I'm pretty sure there are a lot of players who will stop playing because of bots, who won't even start because of the bots and thus lowers the amount of people giving money to NCSoft.

 

The world of MMO experience is very important to most players and if you spend a lot of time playing this game it's very demoralizing to see train of bots doing what you put time and effort too.

If NCSoft would aim for a title "Botless bns" I'm pretty sure they would gain by actively banning bots! at the very least their profits would even out and it would stop game from being a soulless hollow which it will turn into if they don't do something against the bots and players will leave and thats not recipe for success.

[Hongmoon]

There isn't really anything interesting to buy in the nc shop. I've only seen a couple of people with shop outfits. Everyone else is wearing normal game reward ones. I've seen a ton more people wearing dark sandstorm/exiles/jiangshi outfit than anything else. NC isn't losing anything by allowing bots since all of their money comes from premium.

[xLafite]

< How do I change my avatar?

[Voretechz]

GM's can dupe items and gold... There is no reason for them to use bots or support their existence. 
If anything they push players away from the game causing net losses.
Now if you were saying that they were selling gold on "third party" sites, that could be an issue, but it is however unlikely.

[Enubis]

 

3 minutes ago, Kuumrelv said:

 

My question can be interpreted in several ways I think, but yes I didnt mean the conspiracy stuff. Its as you say they stand to lose money by actively hunting bots but I'm pretty sure there are a lot of players who will stop playing because of bots, who won't even start because of the bots and thus lowers the amount of people giving money to NCSoft.

 

The world of MMO experience is very important to most players and if you spend a lot of time playing this game it's very demoralizing to see train of bots doing what you put time and effort too.

If NCSoft would aim for a title "Botless bns" I'm pretty sure they would gain by actively banning bots! at the very least their profits would even out and it would stop game from being a soulless hollow which it will turn into if they don't do something against the bots and players will leave and thats not recipe for success.

 

There's a few ways to look at this. On a company's perspective, here I am boldly assuming. The cost to cut down on the bots, is not going to be cheap in anyway, especially since it is F2P and Nprotect does squat by make everyone else frustrated. They will need active people banning them all the time, they will need both Mac ID and IP blocks, and then on top of that, they need to deal with blocking the wrong people. That from what I see is a huge cost to which most companies don't give a squat to bear. 

 

In many games like this, they will just leave it as is, and then if it flops, just close down the game. It isn't a huge investment to begin win. It isn't a triple A title, it is just a localized game. Their investment isn't as big as others. This is the ugly side of things. 

 

[Mazaka]

since the gold sellers advertise their website, can we take down the website or is it a legit and lawful business to sell gold?

[Enubis]

They have to go into a legal battle against a country with no laws against such things. Not worth the effort Imo.

[Mazaka]

how about a response check for every player online every 30mins or 1 hr? if no response, they get boot from server.

[MizzAus]

The website some of the bots spam is the same website that was spammed all over SB, but people thought it was Aeria who was actually behind it trying to make extra money :\

[Enubis]

Then the gold sellers just hire someone to monitor the botting if they don't have it already. Response checks does nothing. The only way to combat botting successfully is to have a system in place to actually detect foreign software influence upon the game. Something that NPROTECT SHOULD HAVE DONE

[MrNiN]

This subject is something that concerns me as a MMO veteran.  I actually agree with both Kuumrelv and Enubis . In this regard both are correct. It is a shame though if it goes the route of being closed due to bots driving away the majority. The gameplay is excellent. I was super excited when I heard it was coming to Western release. I'm not sure if the cost of cracking down on bots would make it not worth it however. I would surely appreciate it. I mean polishing up a games experience is part of turning a game into something everyone wants to join. I run a business myself, a very successful one. Number one thing for having a successful enterprise, is reputation. Doesn't matter how great a product you have if word gets around, that using it is a pain or hassle, you will have a tough time just breaking even let alone making the business worth continuing.

Yes everything has a cost, but costs that improve your product as well as the experience of those using it, are good business practices that  will always yield profit. Baring unforeseen events of course. Letting a product remain just mediocre, especially from something like a heavy boting issue in my opinion is not responsible business. I do realize though there are plenty of business plans that incorporate the idea of just having "something" to sell, rather than a "quality something" to sell. 

 

I mean, as far as MMo's are concerned anyone who has played them long enough will know that despite how different a lot of them can be, they all have one thing in common without fail, and that is the communities that play them are all very unforgiving once they feel their time been wasted. I just am putting that out there in hopes that it won't go there. I mean look at Wildstar. Lots refer to that MMO now as the one that really hurt, because we all had wanted it to be awesome, but it let a lot of players down with all its issues. Now its a polished game, everything works fine, and still the servers are almost empty. At least last time I checked which was about a month back.

Anyway, I was just trying to offer some perspective as a business owner and gamer. Fixing the boting problem or not, I know we all agree they suck.

PS. I really like Mazaka's idea about a response check, but it should be something very random but game related, There is sneaky bots programs out there that allow for a response, its just not very extensive. So the response check could be something like a very random BnS trivia question. if you get it wrong, the check program should send you the answere, then ask it again, if it gets the same response again, kick and a e-mail to account telling them they got a certain amount of time to reply before they get banned, just for safe measure.

[AnthraxThv]

The blink eye over the bots will burn this game very very fast!!!