Is anything being done to combat bots?

[NightmareJoe]

Please solve this Bot Problem. Playing on german server and they are everywhere. Soulstone Plains full of them, they are carrying the injured with teleport hacks within seconds.

Why don t we get some GMs, so they could ban those guys, after they saw them with their own eyes. Why there is a function where you can report bots etc but nothing happens? As a paying customer i am very dissapointed. I hope you will fix this soon.

[GlassGuitar]

Tonight I go into arena and after about five or six 1 v 1, I decide to get my tag team dailies done and farm some beans. Usually I prefer tag because the bean payout for wins is higher. After about a dozen matches, I have yet to see a matchup without two afk bots on EACH team. No exaggeration here, EVERY SINGLE TEAM I faced had two afk bots (at least, one had all three) and every team I got was myself and two afk bots. Finally I get a real team with three actual people. We win and just as the splash screen announcing the result is popping up, game crashes. This is getting to be BEYOND disappointing NCSOFT ...

 

Suggestion: Allow players to leave team AFTER the match loads. This way when we see we have nothing but bots on our team, we can leave and que again. Eventually the bots will find they cannot profit since they never get to "play."

Suggestion: Once we "report bot" block that player from EVER being auto teamed with the player that reported them. Eventually they will have no teams available once every legit player has blocked them.

 

That's all. Thank you for your time.

 

[Milana]

The problem with bots is the people behind them always find ways to come back with new bots. And sometimes in bigger numbers. Here's hoping NCsoft finds a permanent solution to these pests.

[NaoiAi]

http://imgur.com/a/oboAi

 

On Jiwan the Chinese clan that utilizes bots and dual boxers was finally caught with massive exploiting 15 minutes before the server went down.

1. I am ware what they are doing is not an exploit. In fact they timed the kill on the boss rather well.
2. The exploit is the fact that they used huge packs of dual boxed summoners to tank and pull everything.
3. They have numerous bots in Crimson and CO. The one whispering me to not attack has been botting for weeks taking meteors. (LATE XL)
4. I respect what the leadership of the clan did but the fact that you can plainly see the degree of dualboxing going on is it for me.

This is an ongoing issue. Many of these summoners were botted to cap, and all the ones in my faction that give out details are still actively botted. Reports dont matter.

 

What does this mean? People from outside of NA are botting the game to get 1k prestige per person = 200 soulstones per person that they likely sell. Not all players in this clan are exploiters and I dont care if they are playing outside of region. The fact they are using dozens of dual-boxing bots to accomplish things like this is simply not acceptable.

 

I asked them to give soulstones but I was going to post this whether they did or didnt. Theres no point playing this game anymore or giving devs money.

[Dominator]

Every 5-15s see many Bots with Speed Hack on Grand harvest Square, i report, other people report he to but, is impossible to put someone GM on game who ban and patrol this zone ???

 

[MadRabbit]

i think a good fix for this would be adding a 4 vowels in a row ban, a 4 consonants in a row ban and some sort of captcha before starting arena or equipping your faction uniform also every 25 runs or so on dungeons a puzzle would be enough i guess and as a compentation having box drop at a random chance on those puzzles

[Sylvaen]

I could totally see a very simple solution to PVE bots.

 

Imagine this, in Plog Sanctum, for example. 

After you've killed several Ploggles and are waiting for respawn, one of them respawns as "Cowardly Ploggle". Here's what it will be: it will have about 100M HP, it will not attack (and if it does, then only for 1HP), and it will shout "Please don't plog me!". Instead of fighting you, it just starts slowly running away and cowering on occasion.

 

A regular player will ignore the ploggle. A bot will not. In fact, bots will gang the mob and follow it wherever it goes. 

An additional AI can be scripted for the Cowardly Ploggle that can do additional stuff. It can time the attacking bots, and if they consistently attack for 30 seconds or more, it'll teleport them to "jail" (there used to be a jail area in Lineage2 where teleports were disabled and the character was pretty much stuck there) until a GM can sort them out. Or it can explode after those 30 seconds, dealing 100k undodgeable, unblockable damage to everything within 10 meters. Or the explosion can freeze the characters caught in it for indefinite duration, until a GM can sort them out..  etc, etc.

[DBug]

There's so many easy solutions to deal with bots ranging from improvements to the naming system, detection of automated control systems (ie. macros), actually banning bots when they get reported, banning the NCSoft accounts making the bots so they can't use it to make more, using the NCSoft account to track the IP of the bot's creator and using that to keep them from making bots, or having a report threshold that automatically bans bots after a certain undisclosed number is reached.

 

These are just the ones I can name off my head. There are literally hundreds of potent examples of anti-bot technology.

 

 

 

 

 

PS: Game Guard (or Lag Guard huehuehue) is not one of them.

[Hatsunya]

20 hours ago, Fennalie said:

 

Skip to bout 1:55 look at the speed hacker then look at the speed of the crimson lyn carrying an injured soldier, if that's not evidence enough then idk what is. Yes I made a ticket to support and ye I still see this bot around a week later. Yes my ticket got a response almost immediately so ..... what's the deal here? And ye on a medium populated server like Yunwa at PRIME TIME these hackers run around kill an entire group of people and walk away with at least 600 prestige. Basically we're farming prestige for hackers good job guys we're making the gold sellers rich!

And? You made video yes its proof but IT STILL NEEDS TO BE CONFIRMED BY NCSOFT BY THEMSELVES. Hard to believe that? Even then you're not only one who is making reports about hackers / botters. Lets say it takes 15minutes to gather up everything about one hacker / botter. Now multiply that with 1000 which is 15 000 minutes or 250 hours now add up every other ticket and other works they have to do besides bannin botters and hackers.  So how many we have in CS doing this ? I've no clue but i highly doubt that theres no one doing it all day long.

 

You guys seems to think that bannin player would takes 10 seconds which is absurd. Also like i've explained in several times they do not ban them one by one. They gather up lots of them and put banwaves which been happening once in month or so which is quite normal if we compare to other mmorpg games.

20 hours ago, LadyViera said:

Good job white knighting ncsoft. Keep it up.

 

The bot situation is out of control but lets keep defending ncsoft

Yup and lets keep being ignorant and ignoring things that they've been doing and not be happy about anything.

 

Through my eyes i knew even before this game to west that NCsoft has very little chances of doing anything against hackers / botters and still im enjoying the game. I've completely diffrent problems regarding what NCsoft does and suprsingly none of them is actually related to bots or hacks just because i've played so many mmorpgs and other games where i've seen how other companies deal with bots / hackers so i've already grown away from littlekiddo who throws tantrum without knowing anything

[Ljosalfr]

You have to check and work on this .... Always 4-5 speed hacker run all over Soulstone Plains even inside faction camp , killing ppl for point , like a week already.

[MGT]

This has happened since MW faction dailies and before by farmers, no reason NCSoft will actually do anything to combat this as it has gone WAY beyond their control and will take many hours by MANY people to ban the hundreds doing this. (honestly sit your butt in a KNOWN area and just observe the Medic quest and the Botany quest in SSP and all you see is bots + players all day speed hacking this. Not to mention the Prestige farmers who do this with bombs/guns from boxes and hand in 300 easy PP for the SS pouch.

[VirtueXOA]

They where absent on my server last night (I mean, all of them, no bot at all in SSP, on every channels) , like 4Hour after the MAJ , i've got hope they got banned from NCsoft .

If they are still absent tonight i'll do a thanks post, cause it prove that finnaly NCsoft move ( a bit). 

 

Maybe the bot were just farming somewhere else but i doubt that ^^

 

I do really hope they will ban them on your server too :)

[TheCreaper]

welp in my server there is one infamous bot who steals all the injured soldier + meteor in 5 second by teleporting to there base to other side of the base. We cant  even attack him since he just appears and disappears long distance, and that bot does that continuously in all channel. Several people have reported that bot with screen shot and video but he is still in game alive and kicking and farming. So if they cant ban one bot not sure how they are gonna ban speed hack players. Also i just met that bot today they started to attack player with those bomb in ssp gg riperino bots gonna rule this game one day xD

[VirtueXOA]

33 minutes ago, TheCreaper said:

welp in my server there is one infamous bot who steals all the injured soldier + meteor in 5 second by teleporting to there base to other side of the base. We cant  even attack him since he just appears and disappears long distance, and that bot does that continuously in all channel. Several people have reported that bot with screen shot and video but he is still in game alive and kicking and farming. So if they cant ban one bot not sure how they are gonna ban speed hack players. Also i just met that bot today they started to attack player with those bomb in ssp gg riperino bots gonna rule this game one day xD

On my server it was exactly the same , maybe the bot were just of last night but ehy were not here , i hope its a banwave starting :)

[Karif]

nope.. and i just canceled my premium subscription because this is ridiculous..

[OuchThatHurt]

nope i go to SSP and for 2-3 weeks the same bots that have been reported by myself and others are still there. pleaseone, pleasetwo,pleasethree, all the way to 10 and all the do all day/night is grab rocks and injured and break weapon crates making it next to impossible to get them.

 

The bots that used to be all over mistywoods on my server have now moved on to SSP too as they have gone from lvl 45-50 now some are even farming the field boss that drops critical northern soul shield. 

 

NCsofts reply is always we are blah blah blah but can;t go into details ect ect *cricket* you give us money to do nothing 

[TheRockmanEXE]

No they're too busy banning people from the forums for saying naughty words and thinking about how they can nickle and dime us in this game before the players get fed up with it. 

[Thandius]

I see the same bots in SSP every day, that I know many people have reported numerous times.

 

These bots are so obvious it takes less than 30 seconds to ascertain without a doubt their bot status.

 

Their accounts should be banned in even less.

 

Basically any toon that gets 100+ report should receive a provisionary ban by an automatic system.

 

But that takes up work time and, evidence suggests, NCsoft arren't willing to put in the manpower for that. I guess they see no monatary value in it. In the end, all you, as the customer, can do is not to peruse their product anymore.

 

They'll probably blame loss of players on something else though. That's the way statistics work - you can read almost anything into them.

[whitelight04]

Same story on Gunma.  In many places during mid day and late evenings there are more bots than actual players.  In ssp there is a constant group of them walking up and down the sides patrolling for bodies or meteors to pick up, most of which using speed hacks as well.  Most are either summoners or destroyers, and they have been there quite a while, i report them every day but nothing seems to actually get done.  What I want to know is, realistically, does NCSoft plan to do anything to curb this behavior?  

 

I am already locked in to a 1 year subscription, cause i liked the games combat so much I figured I would not get bored easily, but when I have to WAIT IN LINE behind piles of bots to actually do things?  That is not just boring, its frustrating as hell.  This game has been released overseas multiple times, the bot problem has been prevalent on several versions, yet I do not understand why it is so difficult to deal with this problem?  

 

It is obvious that automated solutions are not working, but with how brazen the botters are you could cut down on an immense number of them by just assigning like 1 or 2 people PER SERVER to actually actively ban them.  

 

Barring that, in addition to banning the ones that get reported, you could easily just put some kinda "checkpoint" in the game that requires and ACTUAL HUMAN in order to proceed in the leveling process.  The botting is currently an attrition based system, where piles of 6 or more go from one point to another progressing through the main quest.  Just requiring individual humans who are running the bots to go through an extra step or two in order to progress a single bot will go a long way at slowing down the process.  

 

Honestly, I have never felt so ignored or neglected as a customer of a game company as I have with this game.  I don't think my expenditure entitles me to anything, but it would be NICE if an actual effort was made to solve this problem... and that is certainly not what is happening now.  

 

 

[Riepah]

I find it thoroughly saddening that such a gem of a game as BnS is being treated with so much negligence on NCSoft's part. They let this game rot entirely, without putting the tiniest bit of thought or care into trying to keep it nice. Bots run rampant, hackers and cheaters are all over the place - in all my years of MMO experience I have never seen things quite as bad as BnS. And NCSoft doesn't care. They're just trying to make the most money off of it before it dies, instead of attempting to make sure it stays lively for a long time to come - they could earn much, much more money that way. It's mind boggling.

[Zetsuei]

It's very simple, no they're not banning bots/hackers, bots are a source of income, NCsoft only care about money hence they will never ban bots, they will slim down 1 or 2 here and there to pretend they're doing something but they will never remove bots with premium etc. 

 

Speed Hackers have been an issue since the launch of SSP. I still see the same people I report on my server there, and I only log in for daily dash lol. This was dated since the 31st, and those same players still exist, doing the same thing.

 

[Sennen]

automated bots?  Yes.  takes a few days.

 

hacking players? No.  Its been two weeks and not a single one of the well known speedhackers on my server has been removed. More of them just keep coming knowing nothing is actually done about them.

 

 

 

Quote

It is obvious that automated solutions are not working, but with how brazen the botters are you could cut down on an immense number of them by just assigning like 1 or 2 people PER SERVER to actually actively ban them.  

 

I think at this point even a single person responding to a r-click 'report hacker' in person would be enough but even that is not going to happen.

[WarWarWar]

p2w events is destroying the game more than those low life hackers and bots..

i blame NcSoft.

[Miner]

I made a post reporting the same guy today, ncsoft is a joke
http://imgur.com/a/T6xJN

[Yomachi]

I get bots are hard to fix, but I thought speed hackers would've been easily identifiable by their security system. A lot of MMOs I've seen easily DCs players when their xy-position has too much discrepancies between the client and server, but I don't see any of that sort of thing here.