A possible solution to get rid of the botters

[Smo]

I know there's enough threads complaining about the bots, How about discussing solutions though?
I'm just copy/pasting this from another thread, as I thought it deserved its own.

Thoughts and discussion are welcome, if you see any flaws in my idea please point them out!

 

the problem is, the botters are connecting through VPN's, so a region block on china where most of them come from, would do nothing.

they can ban as many bots as they want, but there's a nonstop flow of them to replace the ones being banned.

they wont ban people for using VPN's, as it's a necessity for many players due to the poor internet infrastructure of NA and large geographical distances.

 

 

I have an idea that would maybe kill two birds with one stone though.

NCSoft adopted a VPN service for the chinese BNS when the ping was a big issue there for many of the BNS CN players, due to the same sort of issues that NA is having, with large distances and poor infrastructure. The VPN service for bns CN works quite well for lowering the ping there too. I used it myself when I played on the chinese servers to go from 350+ ping down to 200.

 

If NCWest got their own VPN service for BNS NA and EU, they could then put a region block on china as well as IP blocking out other VPN services from connecting, and having those same region+IP blocks added to their official VPN service to keep the botters from using VPN's to connect to the official VPN service. This would lock out the majority of the botters.
 

A lot of people currently in NA don't have optimal ping for the game, and they won't use a VPN because they are afraid of being falsely flagged from it, or they don't want to have to pay for the service. Having an official VPN service for BNS would solve those issues.

It would solve the latency issues for a great deal of players, as well as giving NCSoft a reliable method to successfuly block out the regions where all of the botters are connecting from.

 

Maybe one could argue that NCSoft won't do it because of the costs, and that they would lose profits without all the bots around buying premium.

But think of all the extra players who would be playing, many buying costumes and other things for their characters that the bots never would have.

I think there's a lot more to gain by removing the bots and making the game more enjoyable for the actual playerbase.

[Celestine]

The community has given a lot of great ideas. Easy ideas to implement. Cheap ideas. Community members offered to help for free, banning bots. The community even now is helping by reporting every bot. And what feedback do we get? Nothing.

 

At this point, the community starts to resign. We can have all the best, cheapest and easiest ideas, but they are all worthless as NCsoft doesn't even look at us. And they don't look at us, because as long as premium rank 9 is sold, there is no bot problem. Oh yeah, perhaps mention it on Twitch to calm down the plebs. But internally, NCsoft apparently doesn't see a bot problem. As sad as it is, but bringing in Warlock and Mushin 8F had a higher priority than bots. And so it goes on.

[Lurkios]

3 hours ago, Smo said:

The problem is, the botters are connecting through VPN's, so a region block on china where most of them come from, would do nothing.

they can ban as many bots as they want, but there's a nonstop flow of them to replace the ones being banned.

they wont ban people for using VPN's, as it's a necessity for many players due to the poor internet infrastructure of NA and large geographical distances.

 

Several other MMOs I've played (TERA, FFXIV:ARR) implemented region bans and it MASSIVELY deterred botters/gold spammers. It made for a much improved game environment and a more more enjoyable a game.

 

1 hour ago, Celestine said:

But internally, NCsoft apparently doesn't see a bot problem. As sad as it is, but bringing in Warlock and Mushin 8F had a higher priority than bots. And so it goes on.

 

That's a pretty unfair/ignorant statement. Warlock and 8F were already done. Hell, Warlock drops were already in the loot tables - it was a bit of downtime for a patch. Adding new functions/checks/patches into the game is a whole different story and it's handled by a whole different team. It's not one or the other.

 

If you want to fault them for something fault them for their insistence on using GameGuard, which as region bans are proven to work has proven itself time and time again not to accomplish a damn thing aside from pissing off legitimate customers.

[Celestine]

17 minutes ago, Lurkios said:

That's a pretty unfair/ignorant statement. Warlock and 8F were already done. Hell, Warlock drops were already in the loot tables - it was a bit of downtime for a patch.

This is actually something I know. The game is developed in South Korea and the content is fix. But the EU/NA update patches are not the same as the korean patches, otherwise we would have the same content as the KR version. The update of course contains the same content, but is packed in a different way. The regional publisher (I think this one is called NCwest) then decides how much manpower, time and money he's gonna invest into the next update package (localization, loottable, etc.) to bring it to market.

 

I'm working myself in the industrial sector. And if we really have a serious problem, the management is ordering everyone of us down to the last mouse to work only on the high priority project at hand. I'm not gonna talk here about how problems are being solved or how project management is done. But I'm the one who understands "management language". And NCsoft stated that bots are their "priority". And in "management language" this means: "Get lost, I'm not interested". Because priorities range from 1 to 3 and 3 isn't even being touched.

 

A company fighting bots would have said "Top/Highest priority", would set milestones (inform us), even under disclosure conditions. I also have customers and/or stakeholders I inform about my projects under disclosure conditions. Due to my work characteristics, I dont lay open details, but I am still able to inform about my progress. And the only progress right now is new content (which is quite nice), but not directed to bots.