I love this game but this game is nothing but plagued with bots.

kanechart

So... I hear they do them in waves... But I can easily find / locate them and there is not a ton of servers. With the proper tools one could be hired to easily do this as a day job nuking bots... Clearly you would not just go based on their patterns but IP's etc, how they trade what not... But this game is just plagued with bots and I mean more then WoW... Yes you find bots but their rare but population vs none population it's really bad.

 

kanechart

Originally posted by DMKano

Popular game = lots of potential people who will buy gold, items and accounts

Thats why you see bots - that means they are making money.

 

Only time when you don't see bots is when players stop buying, that means it's not worth it anymore

I understand why. But if you have a proactive person on pay... They can be knocking 100's of bots a day. At some point it becomes not worth it.. They even level these bots and use such dfsdfgdf names for them..

 

That is the part I don't get. I played even games with 10k population in total and maybe like 80k subs at most and still have the same issues.. I dealt with similar things can't say NDA reasons but if you are bring in a decent pay it would not be hard to hire full time person to make a massive difference. 

mgilbrtsn

Do you report them?  If everyone reported, it might help control the population and reinforce to the company that people are paying attention to the problem and that they need to get it fixed.  

kanechart

Originally posted by mgilbrtsn
Do you report them?  If everyone reported, it might help control the population and reinforce to the company that people are paying attention to the problem and that they need to get it fixed.  

I put a ticket in multiple times and followed it through but never had it dealt with. As far as we know they only do it via waves.. Things like hacked Xbox makes sense they don't want people to know they figured away to detect it and do it in waves. But a MMORPG like this it's easy and will always be easy to detect. Yet they still refuse to ban them unless it's via a wave and not sure how often they are but they seem to be at least a few months in between. 

mgilbrtsn

Originally posted by kanechart

Originally posted by mgilbrtsn
Do you report them?  If everyone reported, it might help control the population and reinforce to the company that people are paying attention to the problem and that they need to get it fixed.  

I put a ticket in multiple times and followed it through but never had it dealt with. As far as we know they only do it via waves.. Things like hacked Xbox makes sense they don't want people to know they figured away to detect it and do it in waves. But a MMORPG like this it's easy and will always be easy to detect. Yet they still refuse to ban them unless it's via a wave and not sure how often they are but they seem to be at least a few months in between. 

A shame.  I've just started playing and having a good time.  Hopefully they don't have too big an impact.

goboygo

Originally posted by DMKano

 

Originally posted by kanechart

Originally posted by DMKano

Popular game = lots of potential people who will buy gold, items and accounts

Thats why you see bots - that means they are making money.

 

Only time when you don't see bots is when players stop buying, that means it's not worth it anymore

I understand why. But if you have a proactive person on pay... They can be knocking 100's of bots a day. At some point it becomes not worth it.. They even level these bots and use such dfsdfgdf names for them..

 

That is the part I don't get. I played even games with 10k population in total and maybe like 80k subs at most and still have the same issues.. I dealt with similar things can't say NDA reasons but if you are bring in a decent pay it would not be hard to hire full time person to make a massive difference. 

 

 

Proactively nuking bots is like playing whack a mole. It's completely iffective as soon as you nuke 1, another one pops up because it's an automated script that makes bots.

A person will always lose to automation, which is why companies run their own automation to auto-ban bots.

No its not completely effective but for every 1 bot that makes it a 100 have gotten autobanned.

Time and time again it has been proven that it's far better to let CS folks help legitimate players than have a team dedicated to fighting scripted bots. CS folks handle bots for a portion of their time - but dedicated teams is a complete waste of people.

 

Every company who has tried dedicated team to fight bots has given up as it simply doesn't work. I've talked to quite a few online game companies and they all do it as automation first and having existing CS deal with the ones that trickle through (mostly compromised accounts from legit players used as bots)

But providing basic tools to help your player base deal with it is not beyond the project scope of a game this large or this profitable.

A way to block or filter private tells (non existent) without shutting down all guild and party invites as well.  You basically have to turn off ALL communication lines with other players or leave them all on.

Making it a one click process to report players for gold solicitation (non existent) Its a number of annoying steps at the moment.  Its like filling out a police report every 5 mins. 

Better anti-abuse logic on free accounts

The OP has a point, this game has been re-released for almost 2 years now in development for a total of what 7 years, and the dev team cant seem to get a handle on it.  There are games with more and less  players that have better controls in place to handle spam.

It's surprising to me as well what a low priority it seems to be for this team.

Syanis

Yah the game is plagued with bots but fortunately the ingame money trade isn't as bad as other games. Others entire open areas may be controlled with bot groups making life hell for a player trying to compete and the bots take the best farm spots. In other games there isn't a need for bots mostly because they will just steal your account info then rob your account blind to sell some ingame money to the next guy. Here at least they are contained out of sight mostly.

 

Now of course we could say to get rid of the bots which I personally would love and realistically its not hard to do. The problem is the big games actually quietly support bots and ingame money sellers because that funds a lot of hardcore players who don't want to farm money. Without those sellers many players get frustrated with having to farm their own money and play the market when all they want to do is login and raid raid raid. Further without bots prices on many things would likely go up oddly enough making it even stricter on those not willing to farm. Thus loss of subs which is a loss of money. However few people actually quit because of ingame money sellers.

topsht

Do you have proof?

 

I've not seen a single bot since I started playing.

Superman0X

Originally posted by DMKano

Popular game = lots of potential people who will buy gold, items and accounts

Thats why you see bots - that means they are making money.

 

Only time when you don't see bots is when players stop buying, that means it's not worth it anymore

You are correct. Gold/Item Sellers are a sign that your game is in demand. When they stop selling, it is an indication that demand has dropped. If you are publishing a game, you want to see third party sites selling your stuff... but you want it to be expensive, as in indication of high demand (from the customers) but low volume (due to efforts to stop this).

Phry

I totally disagree with the OP that SE aren't doing anything about it, i have raised numerous tickets for people spamming etc, and i always get a reply saying that person x can now be removed from blacklist etc. as they have dealt with the problem, we aren't even talking about hours here, so as long as people keep on reporting them, then SE will do something about it.

unfilteredJW

Originally posted by topsht

Do you have proof?

 

I've not seen a single bot since I started playing.

It's definitely based on server pop. I was Gilgamesh and got a ton. When I switched to a lower pop server I stopped seeing them with a crazy frequency.

Ridelynn

---

Originally posted by topsht
Do you have proof? I've not seen a single bot since I started playing.

---

There are some bots out there, I'm not necessarily providing any proof, but I've had to kick people in my FC out because I've caught them botting.

That being said - apart from the crystal market (which seems to be entirely based on bot farming), bots have almost no impact on the game.

The crystal market, which they seem to own... I hate to say it, but is probably for the best. Crystal farming is one of the worst aspects of the game. It's tedious, you need thousands of them, and it's something that can be done starting out at Level 1. Which makes it perfect for bots, and utterly horrible for players to do it in the quantities that are needed for crafting. If the bots didn't exist here, the crystal gathering situation is so horrible that it would have a very profound impact on the crafting market, and probably throw that right out of the realm of affordable. So yeah, crystal farming needs to be looked at, the problem isn't just "bots" - it's also processes that are attractive to botting.

Yeah, S/E needs better tools for handling these. And they need to look at what bots are actually doing, and overhaul those processes to make them more engaging for players to do. But also, I'm kinda glad they don't just go and BanHammer every bot the instant it's reported, I'd rather them do a bit of tracking and investigation - and that's exactly what they do.

zaberfangx

The more bots in a game or farmers, meaning that there are selling gold to people ingame so people are buying them for a gold seller to keep getting a new acct. each time they get banned from the game, as I'm pretty sure SE like any company there are banned them left and right but they keep coming.

Sharess

Lots of bots but it's easy to avoid.

 

Don't want PM's/Whispers? Set yourself to Busy and use LS or FC Chat as primary form of communication

 

Don't like that option? Black list the spammers. 

 

My personal recommendation is to ignore them as they log out pretty quick after blasting out messages and often get deleted, it's a pain to remove people from Black List as well. 

Sigurd57

There are a good amount of bots in the game for sure, but I've never seen them be a negative impact in actual play. 

In fact, they've been helpful to a point.  When the expansion released and everybody was fate grinding Northern Thanalan, thanks to the bots, the FATEs were dropping so fast, we all got to level a little quicker

 

But in all seriousness, yep, there's a botting problem. Part of it is due to how painful it is to level secondary jobs in the game currently, the other part is just pure laziness.  But what I've personally seen, they don't do much to impact legit player's experiences, at least not mine, and I play on a very populated server.