How to kill the bots.

[SuperSwineEU]

So, you wanna get rid of bots and f2p players by putting a paywall behind major stuff.

 

Did I understand it correctly ?

[Marqin]

Also, keep in mind that some of those spammers are not bots, but normal people ( I once saw documentary movie about Chinese prisons where prisoners are forced to farm gold in MMO ).

[khynnea]

4 hours ago, Ember439 said:

This is happening on Poh right now

 

 

The scary thing is I have an exact screenshot from Old Man Cho from about 12 hrs ago that is a duplicate of this screenshot, different gobblydigook names but the same 5 male gon destroyers and 1 female gon destroyer.

 

They were all jumping at timed intervals to avoid an afk timer too.

[AegonTargarya]

7 hours ago, Marqin said:

 

There is a company B* that have game W* that costs 14$ and is pay2play. Just few months ago they banned 100.000 PvP bots ( with most of bot software made by one company ).

This solution won't help.

 

 

First, botters would just make one purchase and that's all.

Second, you say two friends to be able to speak/mail will have to become premium? Meh, too expensive for most f2p players. I strongly oppose this solution!

Also, I'm not saying this system would stop all bots, but it would cut down the majority of them. If you add that extra layer of protection on top of many others. The end result would basically make the business model that is ''boting'' a hell to manage. If a credit card that paid for a bot eventually gets banned, every other attempt made using this credit card will be refused the account creation. If a paypall account that paid for a bot gets banned, the same would apply. So basically the person managing the bots would then require to find a solution to mass create paypall accounts before he can create his botting characters... to then acquire the minimum level already implemented before he can start spamming (this is only if he doesn't get banned before he gets to that point... since bots are easy to identify and could get banned before they can start their spam). They will also need to pay upfront. They better hope they sell enough gold to make their enterprise worth the expense, because I don't know for how long those enterprise can run when the profits drop.

 

Anyway, killing bot is simply killing a business model. People don't simply bot out for fun (or at least the majority of the people using bots). Increase the risk of loss for those using bots and many will fold. As for enterprise B, they banned 100 000 bot users for 6 months only and were mostly banning those who were too lazy to farm their own gold/gear after playing the same game for 10+ years. Their ban hammer were not towards gold sellers spamming in global chat or via whispers (those get their accounts terminated at a much quicker pace). It was also successful enough to see a drastic decrease in the use of bots on the game W, even if gold sellers were already much much lower on game W than on BnS.

 

As for the people who believe that 5$ paywall is too much all I can say is : could you please do it for the community? Otherwise, maybe NcWest could put a system where you provide your social number like in Korea for those who don't want to have a purchase history on BnS.

 

By the way, no offense taken. It is simply ideas thrown out there and I must thank you for reading and commenting. It just shows you also care about this problem :D

 

Sincerely a fellow Canadian.

[MeiShiori]

15 minutes ago, AegonTargarya said:

Also, I'm not saying this system would stop all bots, but it would cut down the majority of them. If you add that extra layer of protection on top of many others. The end result would basically make the business model that is ''boting'' a hell to manage. If a credit card that paid for a bot eventually gets banned, every other attempt made using this credit card will be refused the account creation. If a paypall account that paid for a bot gets banned, the same would apply. So basically the person managing the bots would then require to find a solution to mass create paypall accounts before he can create his botting characters... to then acquire the minimum level already implemented before he can start spamming (this is only if he doesn't get banned before he gets to that point... since bots are easy to identify and could get banned before they can start their spam). They will also need to pay upfront. They better hope they sell enough gold to make their enterprise worth the expense, because I don't know for how long those enterprise can run when the profits drop.

 

Anyway, killing bot is simply killing a business model. People don't simply bot out for fun (or at least the majority of the people using bots). Increase the risk of loss for those using bots and many will fold. As for enterprise B, they banned 100 000 bot users for 6 months only and were mostly banning those who were too lazy to farm their own gold/gear after playing the same game for 10+ years. Their ban hammer were not towards gold sellers spamming in global chat or via whispers (those get their accounts terminated at a much quicker pace). It was also successful enough to see a drastic decrease in the use of bots on the game W, even if gold sellers were already much much lower on game W than on BnS.

 

As for the people who believe that 5$ paywall is too much all I can say is : could you please do it for the community? Otherwise, maybe NcWest could put a system where you provide your social number like in Korea for those who don't want to have a purchase history on BnS.

 

By the way, no offense taken. It is simply ideas thrown out there and I must thank you for reading and commenting. It just shows you also care about this problem :D

 

Sincerely a fellow Canadian.

 

Only problem with your idea for them to require SS#'s is that it would literally kill the game. No person living in the NA would give out there SS for a video game. Sorry just wouldn't happen, and if they did, they are surely a child who doesn't know any better.

 

On a side note, if they don't get very aggressive with the bots and gold sellers, that will also kill the game in short order.

 

Still waiting on an uncap for the block list or something that works better. Cant do a Cross-server dungeon without my eyes bleeding.

[Southbeatz]

Earlier I was going to take a break from my level 45 to work on alts more and created a new one. In the early zones, chat would literally be moving so fast with spam that chat tabs would reach 300 in mere seconds, like 6-7 seconds probably. On the higher level areas, it's not bad, just a handful of them to block but on lower level areas it's seemingly impossible to make use of chat. The only real way that these bots could be brought under control would be for NCSoft to implement a system that notifies them each time someone sends or receives over 10 gold via mail. I would assume it's not very common for people to send 10g or more to alts or other people. When this happens, if the sender is a bot then both accounts should be banned because the people buying from gold sellers are more so to blame for this problem than the gold sellers because if no one bought the gold then the gold sellers would have no reason to be in the game.

[indieforu]

Nothing will stop the bots. No matter how much content you put behind a pay wall they will keep coming.

 

The only way to stop them is for NCSoft to stop making content and patch the bots.

[Dns]

( sry for my bad engl, i hope you guys will understand what i mean )

 

First to say, i hate bots... i hate them so much, they brake chats / games / curreny ect... 

So, if they dont stop them soon it can break the currency, inflation ect... i dont have to explain in detail what that means for the game, and inflations are often a problem in mmos even without bots. ( too offtopic ) 

 

So here are some of my ideas to stop them permanently:

 

1)

If more then 50 players report / block someone this person gets immediately chat ban until some mod / admin ect.. looks into it, if its a person ( guess trolled person / or just a spammer ) then he unlocks it and that person wont ever become chat ban again, even if reported / blocked by 50 players. ( and probably that peson should thnk about his / her actions that got her / him that ban in the first place)  But if its a bot then account permbann.  ( I know its a shity method and they need to put workers behind bla bla but im not done yet, its just my first idea )

 

2)

Get the sellers from the roots, and with that i mean, all thoose farming bots, they send the gold to one char, (right?).

So dont bann right away a bot, wait and see where his income goes, then bann them all.
It will hurt much more to lose 1k gold instead of 10 - 20. (made up numbers)

And second it will scare people of buying gold, if they knew that they could get perm banned. 

Even if bots dont pile their gold, it still would scare people because of perm bann. ( i guess at least )

 

3)

Only one game client possible to run on PC.
( i know, wont help much or wont do anything at all but the harder you make it for them the better )

 

4) 

Idk if something like this is possible, but maybe record the bots routes, i mean they use all the same commands ect... so bann everything that moves in thoose lines.

( yeah, stupid... i know ^^ )

 

5)

A counter for dungeons, they farm dungeons a lot, they kill alot of mobs, put a counter, im sure no player will kill 10000 mobs in 48 hours straight.

 

6)

I saw this in another mmorpg and there it worked fine, they were Players who had rights to give people chatbann and report to admins directly to ban bots.
Sure thoose players could overuse their power, so there is always a risk for that. But they could loose their postiton if enough people complain about  their methods 

( Actually, as i write this one down, i realize its not that good... ...sure it worked fine in another mmo, but the community there was really small so... )

 

7)

Auto chatbann for spamm, something like, post the sam message 3 times you get your 1st warning, spam it 4th time, 2nd warning, 5th time and boom, ban for 24 h.

That should only apply for faction, region chats ect... so party, clan you can spam as much as you want.  ^^
( i know, wont work either, they just have to put something random at the end )

 

For now thats all i can come up, sure i will write more if anything comes to mind.

 

Last words:

I know, most of thoose wont work at all but i still wrote them down because 1st) the harder it is for bots / farming the less will be there and 2nd) maybe some ideas could work with optimization, idk.. ...i just hope bots wont be around much longer but i guess that will not happen soon... ><

 

 

 

[Marqin]

21 minutes ago, Dns said:

So here are some of my ideas to stop them permanently:

 

1) Could be abused by both sides, but that's quite ok solution.

2) Bots will just start sending gold to random people, so GMs won't know who had bought gold and who's scammed by bots.

3) It's already ON from what I know. It also can be circumvenced with virtual machines or sandboxing.

4) That's good idea. Also, You can notice that most of bots just stand in group in one place ( but beware of crowed places, to not ban people ), so dispatching there GM should work.

5) There are some hardcore players, but there are not a lot of them, so they could just file a ticket to support to unlock dungeons again.

6) They could just make simple game-chat interface application with BAN button and give it to forum mods :D

7) Good, good. That should be ON by default.

 

Also. They could just autoban from chat people with too many consonants in their nicks :D

[Kelbimbopwnz]

16 hours ago, AegonTargarya said:

Solution #1

-Make the game buy to play. 5$ to play the game. A drastic solution but it would kill all the bots.

 

Solution #2

-Make faction chat, Region chat, Dragonspire LFG chat and whispers only available to those who have a purchase history. Also block the option to send friend request/mail to the F2P players (they could still accept a friend request, they just could not send one themselves). Once again it would kill the bots while still allowing F2P players to play the game (minus global chat).

 

Maybe those solution seems drastic. But trust me, the business model of bots user is basically gonna keep being a thing as long as they make profits... Make botting a tactic that is not profitable and bots users will fall one by one.

 

Sincerly, a simple Canadian man ^^

I've seen like 20-30 destroyers with (premium icon) running in one perfect line and spin-killing one mob at the time

[Marqin]

2 minutes ago, Kelbimbopwnz said:

I've seen like 20-30 destroyers with (premium icon) running in one perfect line and spin-killing one mob at the time

 

Maybe it's multiboxer? "Don't judge" :P

[Kelbimbopwnz]

Just now, Marqin said:

 

Maybe it's multiboxer? "Don't judge" :P

Unless he has 100 arms or some sort of clicker that act's on all characters

[AegonTargarya]

2 hours ago, Kelbimbopwnz said:

I've seen like 20-30 destroyers with (premium icon) running in one perfect line and spin-killing one mob at the time

Problem to me seems that NcWest only ban one character at a time... I've blocked the same account on multiple characters before I finally decided to play with only clan/party/say/instance... So they pretty much keep the same account forever, they just recreate new characters...

 

As for  what DnS said, I did summarize it and all I can say is that I would love to see each and every of your solution brought to fruition! The only one that I see as not impacting bots in a significant way is the mob counter in dungeon since bots users will simply stop their bots before the treshold :S Nonetheless it could still be a thing!

3 hours ago, Dns said:

1)

Mass report = ban

 

2/4)

Get the sellers from the roots.

 

3)

Only one game client possible to run on PC.

 

5)

A mob counter for dungeons where after reaching X mob you get your account locked.

 

6)

Moderators

 

7)

Anti spam chat ban

As I said earlier, everything that can make bots users live a nightmare while doing what they do should be implemented ^^

 

As for in-game moderators. I think this is still the most viable solution. NcWest won't even need to pay mods or anything like that since I'm sure a lot of people are ready to do it for free for the sole purpose of getting rid of those bots!

 

United we stand, divided we fall G(^_^G)

[Envied]

What about an ingame Captcha? I know it wouldn't solve the problem 100% but it would drastically lower the amount of those online at one time, and they should be able to gather information based off those who keep getting kicked offline.

[Dns]

@ Aegon : thx for simplifying / summarize my post, its now easy to read, i know some pple dont like long posts. ^^

@Marqin : About point 2) yes you are right, then maybe instead of banning the pple who recieved the money just ban the bot and delete the money. But then they can do that from the beginning and there is no point in waiting. ><
Too bad, i thought thats a good way to stop / annoy them, guess that wont work at all, could backfire to easy.

[fonty]

The solution is easy, no chat to level 45. If the bots up to 45 levels then be banned and that hurts.

There will be no solution until level 45 put chat

[MuadDib]

20 hours ago, AegonTargarya said:

 

Solution #1

-Make the game buy to play. 5$ to play the game. A drastic solution but it would kill all the bots.

 

 

1. Doesn't work. Look at FF14 ARR, been P2P since day one and still bans over 6K accounts on a weekly basis today, 2+ yrs later.

2. A more drastic option: Follow the example of Skyforge. There is zero P2P trading. You remove the possibility of player making profit, you remove RMT.

3. A less drastic action that may work, but requires development and will increase delay/play time, is have a banking style clearance house for all transactions of new/untrusted players. This means all mail/buy/sell transactions get authorized by a in game approval system, and with an automatically 3 day delay. Each approved transaction will earn you +1 on the trustworthy rating. Trusted  players (your suggestions of multi-NCoin transactions, traded with (25/50/100/200?) other trusted players, will have a delay of 4-8 hrs where market trade value determines the speed of delivery.

[Syckpie]

GM should just make all those bots wear attackable pvp armor and everyone can come and use them as a punching bag,at least some fun out of it. They look boring and hideous standing idle like that,they should be crawling in downed mode :3

[MuadDib]

6 minutes ago, Syckpie said:

GM should just make all those bots wear attackable pvp armor and everyone can come and use them as a punching bag,at least some fun out of it.

Until you hit a L50 w/o checking first, while leveling up your L15. ;p

In TW, most, if not all, farming bots are level capped.

[KuromeMurasame]

Your solution is extremely retarded because if you pay attention EVERY BOT HAS PREMIUM so they have no issue in paying a 5 dollars fee or having a purchase history just to bot you would literally only be shafting the incoming f2p players that don't have money to spend which would eventually drive some of the population away.

[and_rea]

On ‎31‎/‎01‎/‎2016 at 8:17 PM, Bezerko said:

I agree with #1.  Well, at least that was my thought until I noticed that most of the bots I've seen have a premium star by their name.  So they paid money

Nope. They were people that bought from rmt or running keyloggers injected by the rmt's web sites, and got their account compromised.

[EterniTySouL07]

Quite a while back, I played on a private server of an Anime MMORPG called Aura Kingdom.

They had a "captcha" system in place (this may cause trouble for dyslexics though...) that would appear randomly (as in you aren't able to correctly time when it happens) within 30 minutes after starting the game or completing your last captcha (usually it pops up after you have just killed or gathered something). You have about 1 minute to complete the captcha. Completing it rewards you with a 5% exp boost. You only get 3 tries. Failing to complete the captcha would kick/ban/restrict you from the game for a time.

 

Many people have moved from the official Aeria Games server to the private one because they were sick of the bots (and overpriced cash shop, if I might add).

Not a single bot/spammer has been seen since playing it.

 

Note that my memory of what happens may be slightly off, as I have quit playing it a while ago.