So is something going to be done about these bots and hacks?

[Altonat]

I've been away and only just got back for the 50 patch, so I'm not really in the know about any of this. IS NCsoft going to do something about the bots and hacks going around? I'd like to know so I can decide if I want to keep playing.

[Avalyn]

I came from Aion which was also by NCSOFT and the game pretty much died off in large part due to the almost non-existent punishment of hackers. In Aion the problem was that you could report hackers, but no one would ever get banned so gradually more and more people started hacking until it just killed the game off.

 

The problem I see in this game is that it only has 2 options for reporting: report bot and report spammer and they're both in-game only. There's no specific report hacker option in-game so people usually resort to "report bot" which doesn't really tell NCSOFT what you actually want them to be looking for. All you do is click 1 button and flag the player and since gameguard is kind of failing you need some kind of human input and evidence instead to detect the hacks, which isn't really possible to provide currently. Mostly it's the spam bots that are getting banned but I occasionally see the same PvP bots in arena days apart. 

 

Maybe it'll get better? GM's kind of have their hands full with destroyer bots alone right now before they can even begin to focus on the smaller number of flyhackers and invincible summoners etc. I would say that once they have an effective countermeasure for bots (either killing their profit or some kind of high accuracy flagging system) then they would be able to turn their attention to the other problems, but they definitely aren't as hands-off as they were with Aion near the end.

[Quashar]

23 hours ago, Avalyn said:

Y

I came from Aion which was also by NCSOFT and the game pretty much died off in large part due to the almost non-existent punishment of hackers. In Aion the problem was that you could report hackers, but no one would ever get banned so gradually more and more people started hacking until it just killed the game off.

 

The problem I see in this game is that it only has 2 options for reporting: report bot and report spammer and they're both in-game only. There's no specific report hacker option in-game so people usually resort to "report bot" which doesn't really tell NCSOFT what you actually want them to be looking for. All you do is click 1 button and flag the player and since gameguard is kind of failing you need some kind of human input and evidence instead to detect the hacks, which isn't really possible to provide currently. Mostly it's the spam bots that are getting banned but I occasionally see the same PvP bots in arena days apart. 

 

Maybe it'll get better? GM's kind of have their hands full with destroyer bots alone right now before they can even begin to focus on the smaller number of flyhackers and invincible summoners etc. I would say that once they have an effective countermeasure for bots (either killing their profit or some kind of high accuracy flagging system) then they would be able to turn their attention to the other problems, but they definitely aren't as hands-off as they were with Aion near the end.

You were playing on Eu or NA?

In EU bot where never a problem until gameforge took over the servers and game became F2P.
Any game that is pay to play so far was more or less able to deal with the bot problems since every account banned was a financial loss to the company running the bots so at a certain point the ammount of gold they sell is no longer able to pay for new bots.

F2P games are totally different and no AAA f2p game was so far able to figure out a way to fight bots efficiently, and honestly i don't belive any ever will. Either people must stop buying gold from 3rd party (never going to happen) or we'll have to get back to P2P.

And no , some freaky ways forum-goers think they invented like banning ip adresses are not going to work for obvious reasons (at least to me , and I'm a *cricket*ing biologist not IT tech.).

[Destinykraze]

2 hours ago, Quashar said:

You were playing on Eu or NA?

In EU bot where never a problem until gameforge took over the servers and game became F2P.
Any game that is pay to play so far was more or less able to deal with the bot problems since every account banned was a financial loss to the company running the bots so at a certain point the ammount of gold they sell is no longer able to pay for new bots.

F2P games are totally different and no AAA f2p game was so far able to figure out a way to fight bots efficiently, and honestly i don't belive any ever will. Either people must stop buying gold from 3rd party (never going to happen) or we'll have to get back to P2P.

And no , some freaky ways forum-goers think they invented like banning ip adresses are not going to work for obvious reasons (at least to me , and I'm a *cricket*ing biologist not IT tech.).

You can check out dragon nest. they don't have this issue for a f2p game. They have ftg system to prevent overgrinding(no loots) and the dungeon difficulty is way too high for bots to thrive.