Suggestions Against Bots

[Kichi]

yeah. If capcha happens the only thing is left for me is Delete...

[fruitie]

Captcha is ineffective and is basically just an annoyance.

[qpoljanan]

Captcha and image verification is completely useless against dedicated botting programs and is just a major annoyance to legit players (the email verification is already annoying as is since I use wifi, meaning every time I have to disconnect I have to verify it again).

[Aila]

People, who marked as bot, receive captcha (simple math would be enough), and have 30 sec and 3 tries to answer it correctly, otherwise DC with 1hr cooldown.

Simple and effective.

[KaLnoX]

Captcha wont work. Bots will bypass capatcha entirely, they dont even have to enter it. Those that cant because the captcha is custom will rely on human farms and no matter how complicated a captcha is, a human will always be able to solve it. If not then you defeat the purpose of captcha.

[OneYouHate]

10 hours ago, YuriScarlet said:

 you're probably one of the members in elitepvpers trying to play innocent just to let botting easier for everyone.

 

Don't know what elitepvper is and don't care,  if you do good for you. Seriously why are you advertising for them though?

 

[YuriScarlet]

12 minutes ago, OneYouHate said:

 

Don't know what elitepvper is and don't care,  if you do good for you. Seriously why are you advertising for them though?

 

 

because I'm not advertising to use their program, I'm just showing that any one of you are playing Devil's advocate. Someone posted on twitter to the brand manager of the whole situation in that site, all of them igniting people so NCSOFT will have no choice but to unban them. This wouldn't be an annoyance specially for any higher tiered security. This aint as much of an annoyance than people who are cheating the game and making others suffer more for their actions.

[OneYouHate]

@YuriScarlet well that makes twice now that you have given them free advertisement. Devil's advocate right! 

 

Please understand what you are doing even though your saying you're not doing it. 

Every time our host has  to *insert a new piece of code* into an existing piece of code there is always going to be a less than desirable effect, and it will only effect the player base. The cheaters will just evolve with a *new piece of code* in their tools as well and before long it will not even be an issue for them, but You and I  will be stuck with captcha or what ever gets implemented until we either quit from the annoyance of it or the decrease in legit play base population, simple because other titles don't have a captcha system that pops up in the middle of a Arena Match, contested world boss fight etc. 

  How mad or upset would you be if BW dies, captcha system hits you, you fail it and lose your box?

[YuriScarlet]

11 minutes ago, OneYouHate said:

@YuriScarlet well that makes twice now that you have given them free advertisement. Devil's advocate right! 

 

Please understand what you are doing even though your saying you're not doing it. 

Every time our host has  to *insert a new piece of code* into an existing piece of code there is always going to be a less than desirable effect, and it will only effect the player base. The cheaters will just evolve with a *new piece of code* in their tools as well and before long it will not even be an issue for them, but You and I  will be stuck with captcha or what ever gets implemented until we either quit from the annoyance of it or the decrease in legit play base population, simple because other titles don't have a captcha system that pops up in the middle of a Arena Match, contested world boss fight etc. 

  How mad or upset would you be if BW dies, captcha system hits you, you fail it and lose your box?

you keep saying insert a new code as if there is any program that has it. they will evolve, if they can advance but it will take them a while. I don't even think it exist. You know it doesnt exist. any sort of captcha program would be wise for them to put. Even if its through certain repeatable dungeon limit or wheel of fate bosses limit. As for the arena, it all started becauase of soulstones. make that item untradeable. Now don't go ape shit, otherwise follow what black desert online did and disable trading. They can make it easier to track down sellers if they ever find other ways to sell maybe even that looting system.

 

Also: you keep mentioning free advertisement as if its giving them any merit. as far as I know, you're just trying to ignore my post so you can input your own thoughts into it. If you're a legit player, you wouldn't even use any of their program as it is with a RISK. You cant use that tactic to try and threaten me. 

[OneYouHate]

1 minute ago, YuriScarlet said:

you keep saying insert a new code as if there is any program that has it. they will evolve, if they can advance but it will take them a while. I don't even think it exist. You know it doesnt exist. any sort of captcha program would be wise for them to put. Even if its through certain repeatable dungeon limit or wheel of fate bosses limit. As for the arena, it all started becauase of soulstones. make that item untradeable. Now don't go ape shit, otherwise follow what black desert online did and disable trading. They can make it easier to track down sellers if they ever find other ways to sell maybe even that looting system.

 

Rofl BDO is filed with gold sellers. items are traded then sold to NPC for in game currency. LIke i said they will just evolve and leave US stuck with a annoyance to deal with,. 

[YuriScarlet]

Just now, OneYouHate said:

 

Rofl BDO is filed with gold sellers. items are traded then sold to NPC for in game currency. LIke i said they will just evolve and leave US stuck with a annoyance to deal with,. 

see this is why It's hard to input my argument because you don't think through it. Black desert online shouldn't have any issue with the botting problem in the future if they're taking the proper procedure in dealing with them like NCSOFT (if they are right with them actively getting rid of botters but are just easily making new accounts.) Black desert online eliminated trading  so they can narrow down sellers much easier, than having it spread through other means. The more bots they can ban, the more income they can get. Most of them botters are getting free 3 guess passes. Most of them bots are player driven, but if they are actively tracking this bots down, it is only the company that are earning more than the seller. If they can do something similar, but they wont achieve it unless they find a way to disable the most fundamental system for every players but still making them satisfied overall. 

 

Overall: I just wish this game was B2P, otherwise just disable trading and make soulstone untradeable and even implement a captcha program. anyone oppose is just encouraging botting.

[OneYouHate]

The only way to eliminate gold sellers is to remove gold from the game.  BDO is infected  just as bad as any other popular MMO out. 

 Lets not allow our player base the option of doing this or that ever isn't a solution to gold sellers or buyers. 

 

You're suggestion of making Soulstones untradeable: I have 2 characters I leveled up to just help fund my main with supplies. 

 

Captcha is not viable either: you said so your self it will only slow them down. The other games that have tried this, have failed miserably with it. 

 

BDO is buy to play and plagued with the very same thing Free to Play and Play to Win games deal with.

 

 

[wootwoots]

Yes give us captcha to do every 3sec, like that no one could play :D

1 hour ago, OneYouHate said:

BDO is infected  just as bad as any other popular MMO out. 

 

 

 

So far BDO only have somes annoying spammer. Like, you block 5-6 of them when going online, and you are good for the day. ( + the no trade between player, the marketplace price managed by any algorithm turn gold seller life quite hard, the only thing thoses guys promote is selling discounted cash shop money / cash shop item, so most likely a scam to steal account. )

Compare to BnS, its  f#ing nothing.

 

BnS is like 3 bots for 1 player xD + spammer. This is total insanity.

[CorrupteD]

the post has been updated with a new suggestion from Greeny191

[CorrupteD]

19 hours ago, fruitie said:

Captcha is ineffective and is basically just an annoyance.

annoyance is getting bots in your party or arena 6 times in a row making you loose the tag match or go back to the lobby, so if loosing 3 seconds or less putting in a code will help me prevent that im more than happy to do so

[Vynnx]

I've thought of two solutions so far

 

1) Captcha, but the captcha is an animated gif that shows 1 symbol at a time and hides the others.. and it has to appear in different areas each time. If botters were to crack it, they would need to build a whole new captcha solver that doesn't exist yet...

 

2) Player powered prove your human questions. Every player creates a question and 5 multiple choice answers to their question. The question will be based off a photo of your character without gear. So I'll create a question, "What color is my characters hair? "  Possible answers are "Fish" "Blue" "Pink" "School" "Glasses. If you choose Pink, you are correct and whatever we're doing can happen.. stupidly easily for a person to solve for dam near impossible to script a solver for that! on day 1 NCsoft would have tens of thousands of questions and answers built into a database. If someone decides to create a stupid and unsolveable question.. well guess what, that douche won't be participating in arena, auction house, or whatever they incorporate it with. Killing off bots and *cricket*in one go!

[Dracconus]

Let's spare the formalities here.  The bots in this game are, for lack of a better term: problematic.  They're a very large annoyance, and quite frankly I'm freaking sick of them.
The developers of this community and possibly some of the community already know from my username, or just previous interaction with me in this, or other games -  that I did very publicly develop bots for other games, both on, and offline in the past, and have been noted to operate in the fields of network intrusion, Game Server Intrusion Prevention, Cellular Networking Infrastructure, Android programming, MMO, and Console emulation, as well as several other various fields regarding programming, and computer engineering.

That being said, I'd like to offer a few suggestions based on tactics that companies have used against me and my "products" in the past, as well as tricks, and things I've learned, and taught myself, and learned from comrades over the years to do things.  I'm even going to mention a few suggestions based off of conversations I've had with some of these individuals when I was looking for other methods I just "couldn't think of" to help out with this ever-increasing problem.

I already had a discussion with an IRL couple today in-game regarding a possibly game breaking bug they ran across, that could be exploited by hackers to cause some SERIOUS disruption to this game on levels that would be equally as comparable as ddos'ing is to a professional; and had them report it, as well as include a copy of their msinfo, and a time reference and dxdiagnostics to show all information regarding their system to prove that it was discovered by accident.

Although it was completely discovered by accident, the method of disposing of certain elements (that will remain unnamed for security's sake) that this game uses, combined with the issue that the player found themselves in, COULD (If found, and manipulated) cause a VERY easy and very manipulative bot to become active in this game, and that - as a reformed developer - scared the hell out of me, hence me having them report it, and even giving them a little info as to why I wanted them to immediately do so without giving any real information as to how or why the issue could be caused.  Now I will go on to say that I tried to absolutely no avail to recreate it, as going through the chat logs would obviously indicate to you - but I didn't do anything outside of typical player legal limitations, so there wasn't any real "thorough" testing done here.

SO..because of that situation, and the fact that I'm tired of running into bots every five steps.  I am going to be composing a small list of things that can be done to prevent a LARGE number of bots, and hacks that could be useful in this game.

Mind you, these bot developers that are part of various websites are probably people that I have worked with, or know from previous projects and interactions or based associations, so I'm really hoping, for the sake of this game...that the developers take heed to this.

A.  Bots:
  Bots are, at best a minor annoyance.  Contrary to what people believe they're not as much of an impact on a market for a game that's as tightly structured as this one as they can't FARM the higher end game items - they're only farming the items you'd use to make them, so really, if anything, players should be happy they're driving mat prices down...for now.  But herein lies the problem.  Bots can systematically become more advanced, and as the programmer becomes more familiar with the engine, and abilities that are available to them through their injection method, they can cause the bot to expand its functionality, and start crafting the items that players right now are making a good profit on thanks to them farming the mats.
This in turn would completely flush the player economy down the drain, and cause the gold sellers that are using these bots (most of the time) to be the only ones really making any profit from the marketplace.
SO...
1.  Randomize the opcodes.  -  I'm not going to sit here, and bump heads, but there is absolutely NO way that the opcodes are randomized and have been cracked as fast as they were, so do it.  There's not that much code necessary to do this, and it's a VERY helpful method to deterring bots.
2.  Image Based Recognition.  - Half of the bots that are out there are using image based recognition thanks to AutoIT - This can easily be combated by creating randomized color pixels within certain elements of the UI that are being used to manipulate the bot to be able to use the marketplace, accept quests, etc.
3.  Window name title  - 90% of AutoIT's functionality is allowed through an automatic detection of game window titles.  Removing the title, or even having it randomly rename itself would easily combat this.  Sure, a programmer could easily change the bot to wait for active window; but that wouldn't result in complete automation, and would require more interaction than some of these botters want to do.  Especially if the game should crash - which brings me to my next point.
4.  Check for Running Programs - Cheat Engine, MyHackingSuite, and other similar programs that are used to scan memory addresses, and search values for them even though they can be completely customized, and randomized still use the same method for creating those names, and leave signature traces that can easily be scanned.  As a caompany, I cannot honestly believe that you have security staff working for you that don't know this.
5.  Check for processes that are hooked.  - A LARGE percentage of bots have to inject into the game somehow.  I know for certain there are two that will remain unnamed that do this and they're the ones that concern me the most because through utilization of the SDK that unreal has conveniently packed for you, they're able to disable gameguard, bypass it completely, and slip right on into this game.  Which brings me to the next point regarding bot prevention...
6.  Check to make sure that Gameguard is actually RUNNING.  Have the client do a heartbeat.  If gameguard isn't running every five seconds, the client crashes.  I'm praying that this has been implemented, but as I actually ENJOY playing this game, and have no intention of doing it any harm, I've not tested this theory for fear of being banned.
7.  Implement a timing procedure - As much as it MIGHT inconvenience the handful of players that are thinking of doing it on patch release dates...Have the client automatically close after "X" amount of time and require a wait before reopening.  Yes, I, as a hardcore player that invests FAR too much time into this game will HATE to receive a warning in chat letting me know I've reached my "consecutive 12 hour play session" ending, and will have to wait 30 minutes before I can play again; but I promise you that it can in some ways help.  Here's why:
8.  use the aforementioned system to see how religiously an account logs in - Using this we can VERY easily determine who's botting even if players can't report them because of the absolutely HORRIBLE targeting system that this game has.  (I'm not sure about you guys, but I can't count how many times I tried to party invite someone before they killed something, and the game ninja'd me of the chance.)
9.  Take advantage of the Achievements - What?  I know, this sounds daft as hell, but hear me out.  Those achievements...they have to have things happen to be won - Create absurd achievements, like "ran "X" dungeon 50 times" or things like that, then look at whether the timestamps on those saved achievement progress stamps are consecutive.  Who do you know that would run a dungeon 50 times in a row?  Not many people.  YES!  There are some out there, but in the event that a ban occurs due to something like this I'm fairly certain the staff here are competent enough to determine whether they're a real player (because we would complain about time lost, and items) or a bot (that would just complain that they have to make a new account, and start over.)
10.  The marketplace - You stated that the entire reason the limitation existed on the marketplace was to deter botting...Hate to say it, but how well did that work out for you?  It took them what?  Two months, before they just stopped caring and said "Meh, we no haz gameguard, we make virtual machine and multibox."
11.  Virtual Machines - I'm sorry, Even I, as a developer don't run virtual machines while gaming unless they're running linux, and while there's not really a way to determine what OS the VM is running, there is a way to know whether or not one is running, but I'm not going to sit here, and keep doing you guys' job for free when you're getting paid for it, and failing...look it up.
12.  Private Messaging, and Party Invites - Please disable message notifications from blocked users...it's annoying to hear the chirp from a botter (a checkbox in the settings, and simple configuration line added to the encrypted xml (which the dll is still in the client to read) would easily fix this along with a few lines of code.  I'm sick and tired of bots PM'ing me and me hearing a notification after I've already blocked them.
13.  Friend Invites - Please disable ALL forms of communication once a user is blocked, and instead of having it block that character, make it block the account they're on.  I get at least 25 invites a day even after declining an invitation from a bot I've already blocked.
14.  Party Invites - Please remove the ability to invite me to a party if I have a profile blocked.


B.
Hacks:
A lot of the suggestions above would deter hacking as well, but there are a few that weren't mentioned that will DIRECTLY affect hacks
1.  AS MUCH AS IT WILL *cricket* OFF ANYONE WITH SWEETFX, ENB, TEXMOD, UMOD, IN-GAME CHAT OVERLAY, TEMP MONITORING PROGRAMS, ETC. - Prevent Directx Overlays if you simply can't think of anything else, because the radar system from 

2.  XOR XOR XOR - I cannot stress this enough...XOR!!!!!!
3. Internal screenshots - Another popular Korean Game Developer did this EXACT method to combat my hacks, so I will share it with you in the hope that you realize it worked.  Taking encoded screenshots upon certain "triggered events" such as walking through a dungeon are DAMN handy!  They allow you to have irrefutable proof that a level 14 Destroyer just walked into the Plague Hollow, or Blackram, or East Fleet wearing gear that is ENTIRELY too low to be anywhere near effective at.  No legitimate player is going to wander around in the underwear losing out on that precious HP - I've met a FEW that didn't know they HAD to wear them for soulstones, and HP boost; but not many, especially at level 40.
4.  Scan the client directory.  It's legal for a corporation - so long as they state it within their End User Licence Agreement, and Terms of Service - to scan ANY file that is within any folder related to the companies "product" as it is YOUR property as a corporation, it's just simply being "hosted" elsewhere to allow access to your IP.  Scanning the client structure has always been a frowned upon method of preventing some issues, but it's effective nonetheless, and makes injection just that much harder.
5.  Change base values for stats, and item numbers, and such from the other locale versions - Having all of this information the same across a global community is a good reason that it's such a massive problem.  You don't have localized hackers working on destroying your game - you have everyone working on the same base product which just makes content creation that much easier for them.

C.
Dungeon AFk bots
1.  This is simple as hell to fix - Have a movement detector trigger once you enter the instance.  If you don't move 'x' meters per minute in the dungeon you're afk and get kicked from the party.  To those that would say "well then they could just move around" yeah, but at least then you could do this:
2.  GIVE US THE ABILITY TO VOTE TO KICK SOMEONE PERIOD.  I don't care if they're afk, annoying, pulling a proverbial "Leroy Jenkins" or cooking chicken noodle soup.  If I want to vote to kick someone from my party, there is probably a reason, and I'd much rather be looked upon as a prick for kicking someone for taking care of their dying grandmother than have a bot bidding on my loot that it didn't even help me fight for, or milking the exp while it sat at the damn entrance the entire time.


I really hope that a substantial amount of consideration is put into this - It wasn't a lot of work to type up, or come up with, but I really do care about the stability, and playability of this game, and as it stands right now I don't see it lasting very much longer before people just move on to other games that have recently surfaced for relatively cheap prices that do offer competitive gameplay.

[Dracconus]

I love the way some a$$hat moved my entire thread to this one when mine wasn't just regarding bots, but hacks, an already established game breaking exploit, and other issues such as game enhancements.

GG "MODERATORS" really proving your worth.

Now instead of someone actually SEEING INFORMATION FROM A PREVIOUS BOT DEVELOPER they're going to skim past it because of some unknown eventual amount of pages that will be more than likely filled with BS arguments about hypothetical tactics when I gave examples of what companies can, and actually DO.
Thanks.  It's always nice to know that you care as much as we do.

[Domriana]

5 minutes ago, Dracconus said:

I love the way some a$$hat moved my entire thread to this one when mine wasn't just regarding bots, but hacks, an already established game breaking exploit, and other issues such as game enhancements.

GG "MODERATORS" really proving your worth.

Now instead of someone actually SEEING INFORMATION FROM A PREVIOUS BOT DEVELOPER they're going to skim past it because of some unknown eventual amount of pages that will be more than likely filled with BS arguments about hypothetical tactics when I gave examples of what companies can, and actually DO.
Thanks.  It's always nice to know that you care as much as we do.

NC doesn't seem to want suggestions or fixes from the outside. No matter how qualified. Both informative posts and trolls are pushed into a corner to be compartmentalized and eventually forgotten about.

 

Right now it seems their only direction is money. If it costs them more than a Subway 6" Club Meal Deal, you can pretty much expect to not see it addressed in a Proactive manner. Unless of course the cost is VASTLY outweighed by the Profitability.

[Dracconus]

That's not entirely true.  

They took the code, and advice that I've given them before to implement the new system that alleviated a lot of the spam.  They just didn't do what I told them to as far as how the system HANDLED the spam.  Which...eh, whatever; to each their own.

I'm well aware it's about money, that's why I'm telling them, me personally, I won't spend a dime on this game until they fix some of these issues, and who knows...I might get bored with it...That didn't bode well for Vindictus, Pangya, WoW, S4 league, or several other games though :S

I could have easily given more information than I did, and exposed just how NOT protected this game is at all, but I tried to be amicable.  That only lasts for so long.

[Furrel]

 #1 at lobby screen - dont auto launch in 5- do a 15 count or 25 count- so leader can quickly click to kick bots.

Give us a report bot option in game rather then having to /reportbot "name"

Use the rage of the players to BnS's advantage - Empower Some players w/ guide / GM like  powers to flag and kick bots from the game- in return  guides get free premium and BnS gains the upper hand in the fight vs the BoTs that is clearly kicking there butts. Ya Ya guide powers can be abused- if found abusing the system - ban the guide also , with proper incentives these powers wouldn't be abused imo. Once Flagged BnS team can follow up with action

[Dracconus]

29 minutes ago, Furrel said:

 #1 at lobby screen - dont auto launch in 5- do a 15 count or 25 count- so leader can quickly click to kick bots.

Give us a report bot option in game rather then having to /reportbot "name"

Use the rage of the players to BnS's advantage - Empower Some players w/ guide / GM like  powers to flag and kick bots from the game- in return  guides get free premium and BnS gains the upper hand in the fight vs the BoTs that is clearly kicking there butts. Ya Ya guide powers can be abused- if found abusing the system - ban the guide also , with proper incentives these powers wouldn't be abused imo. Once Flagged BnS team can follow up with action

This:   is what I was referring to when I said "suggestions from people that don't know what they're talking about."

There's already an option in game.  Hell, it's even SHOWN to you in one of the loading screens >.<
"Empower some players with GM powers"
Those are called GM's, and NO REGULAR PLAYER SHOULD EVER HAVE THE ABILITY TO KICK SOMEONE ELSE FROM GAMEPLAY because what's to stop some emotional teenager on his/her rag of the week from just rage kicking all the crimson just to farm his dailies?
 

[CorrupteD]

Let's spare the formalities here. 
A.  Bots:

1.  Randomize the opcodes.  -  I'm not going to sit here, and bump heads, but there is absolutely NO way that the opcodes are randomized and have been cracked as fast as they were, so do it.  There's not that much code necessary to do this, and it's a VERY helpful method to deterring bots.
2.  Image Based Recognition.  - Half of the bots that are out there are using image based recognition thanks to AutoIT - This can easily be combated by creating randomized color pixels within certain elements of the UI that are being used to manipulate the bot to be able to use the marketplace, accept quests, etc.
3.  Window name title  - 90% of AutoIT's functionality is allowed through an automatic detection of game window titles.  Removing the title, or even having it randomly rename itself would easily combat this.  Sure, a programmer could easily change the bot to wait for active window; but that wouldn't result in complete automation, and would require more interaction than some of these botters want to do.  Especially if the game should crash - which brings me to my next point.
4.  Check for Running Programs - Cheat Engine, MyHackingSuite, and other similar programs that are used to scan memory addresses, and search values for them even though they can be completely customized, and randomized still use the same method for creating those names, and leave signature traces that can easily be scanned.  As a caompany, I cannot honestly believe that you have security staff working for you that don't know this.
5.  Check for processes that are hooked.  - A LARGE percentage of bots have to inject into the game somehow.  I know for certain there are two that will remain unnamed that do this and they're the ones that concern me the most because through utilization of the SDK that unreal has conveniently packed for you, they're able to disable gameguard, bypass it completely, and slip right on into this game.  Which brings me to the next point regarding bot prevention...
6.  Check to make sure that Gameguard is actually RUNNING.  Have the client do a heartbeat.  If gameguard isn't running every five seconds, the client crashes.  I'm praying that this has been implemented, but as I actually ENJOY playing this game, and have no intention of doing it any harm, I've not tested this theory for fear of being banned.
7.  Implement a timing procedure - As much as it MIGHT inconvenience the handful of players that are thinking of doing it on patch release dates...Have the client automatically close after "X" amount of time and require a wait before reopening.  Yes, I, as a hardcore player that invests FAR too much time into this game will HATE to receive a warning in chat letting me know I've reached my "consecutive 12 hour play session" ending, and will have to wait 30 minutes before I can play again; but I promise you that it can in some ways help.  Here's why:
8.  use the aforementioned system to see how religiously an account logs in - Using this we can VERY easily determine who's botting even if players can't report them because of the absolutely HORRIBLE targeting system that this game has.  (I'm not sure about you guys, but I can't count how many times I tried to party invite someone before they killed something, and the game ninja'd me of the chance.)
9.  Take advantage of the Achievements - What?  I know, this sounds daft as hell, but hear me out.  Those achievements...they have to have things happen to be won - Create absurd achievements, like "ran "X" dungeon 50 times" or things like that, then look at whether the timestamps on those saved achievement progress stamps are consecutive.  Who do you know that would run a dungeon 50 times in a row?  Not many people.  YES!  There are some out there, but in the event that a ban occurs due to something like this I'm fairly certain the staff here are competent enough to determine whether they're a real player (because we would complain about time lost, and items) or a bot (that would just complain that they have to make a new account, and start over.)
10.  The marketplace - You stated that the entire reason the limitation existed on the marketplace was to deter botting...Hate to say it, but how well did that work out for you?  It took them what?  Two months, before they just stopped caring and said "Meh, we no haz gameguard, we make virtual machine and multibox."
11.  Virtual Machines - I'm sorry, Even I, as a developer don't run virtual machines while gaming unless they're running linux, and while there's not really a way to determine what OS the VM is running, there is a way to know whether or not one is running, but I'm not going to sit here, and keep doing you guys' job for free when you're getting paid for it, and failing...look it up.
12.  Private Messaging, and Party Invites - Please disable message notifications from blocked users...it's annoying to hear the chirp from a botter (a checkbox in the settings, and simple configuration line added to the encrypted xml (which the dll is still in the client to read) would easily fix this along with a few lines of code.  I'm sick and tired of bots PM'ing me and me hearing a notification after I've already blocked them.
13.  Friend Invites - Please disable ALL forms of communication once a user is blocked, and instead of having it block that character, make it block the account they're on.  I get at least 25 invites a day even after declining an invitation from a bot I've already blocked.
14.  Party Invites - Please remove the ability to invite me to a party if I have a profile blocked.

Dungeon AFk bots
1.  This is simple as hell to fix - Have a movement detector trigger once you enter the instance.  If you don't move 'x' meters per minute in the dungeon you're afk and get kicked from the party.  To those that would say "well then they could just move around" yeah, but at least then you could do this:
2.  GIVE US THE ABILITY TO VOTE TO KICK SOMEONE PERIOD.  I don't care if they're afk, annoying, pulling a proverbial "Leroy Jenkins" or cooking chicken noodle soup.  If I want to vote to kick someone from my party, there is probably a reason, and I'd much rather be looked upon as a prick for kicking someone for taking care of their dying grandmother than have a bot bidding on my loot that it didn't even help me fight for, or milking the exp while it sat at the damn entrance the entire time.

 

Dracconus made a lot of good points to avoid and stop bots from annoying people i stand behinds all of your points from 1 to 14

 

on the afk on dungeon problem i wrote about that in other post i made before and we got to the point that it is necesary an afk timer on dungeons and when the timer reach x amount of time the other players will have the votekick option available against the one afk, but we have to take into account that not everyone has the same computer setup, internet connection and on the NA servers we have people playing from all around the world so there has to be some testing in order to prevent kicks against legit players

 

i wont comment on your hack suggestions cause it is a bit more technical and i dont have the proper knowledge  to address it

[Domriana]

24 minutes ago, Dracconus said:

That's not entirely true.  

They took the code, and advice that I've given them before to implement the new system that alleviated a lot of the spam.  They just didn't do what I told them to as far as how the system HANDLED the spam.  Which...eh, whatever; to each their own.

I'm well aware it's about money, that's why I'm telling them, me personally, I won't spend a dime on this game until they fix some of these issues, and who knows...I might get bored with it...That didn't bode well for Vindictus, Pangya, WoW, S4 league, or several other games though :S

I could have easily given more information than I did, and exposed just how NOT protected this game is at all, but I tried to be amicable.  That only lasts for so long.

 

Early on, yes, you are very spot on. They were open to all kinds of feedback even going so far as to have threads devoted to this kind of thing that were populated with CM/GM interactions.

 

Over the last month(ish) I have noticed an aggressive disassociation of CM/GM interaction where it comes to feedback be it well thought out and positive or just more rage-posting. It doesn't seem to matter the context.

 

It is my belief (although I cant prove this obviously) that a mandate was struck at some point essentially declaring to the CM/GM crew that "This is our course. We are sticking to it as long as the Whales keep dumping cash into the game." thus the marketing dept and bean counters tying their hands. I realize that it's a bit hyperbolic, but looking at the trends, the same disassociation has occurred in many other games that choose heavy handed monetization schedules.

[Vynnx]

Well there you have it.. someone with real experience just offloaded a wealth of knowledge, whats sad is that a lot of it I feel was quite simple and I thought they were actually already implemented lmao. Well.. lately I've been thinking NCSoft had 5 years to fix the bots and hacking issues over seas and jack was accomplished... So what faith do I have that they'll actually make an attempt in NA?