I saw a bot train that was about 15-20 chars long on Mushin.
Quite honestly this happens because the game is soft P2W and they nudge everyone to buy gold in-house. You will start to feel the squeeze when you need Soulstones and Moonwater Trans Stones in later progression and it is a helluva power creep. Each new patch, there's going to be higher reqs. 400-450+ AP groups.
Problem is, the gold sellers can provide the same "convenience" for a quarter of the price.
The game is F2P, soft P2W, and NCSoft encourages the environment by trying to get in on the action and neglecting their borders in the process.
I quit when I saw that the game had a pay wall. (soulstones and Moonwater Trans Stones)
Huh? You can't buy items like that in the cash shop. If you're suggesting that people are buying gold to buy these items, well those people must be rich because gold sells at a premium and you need a lot of it to fully upgrade items.
Not to mention, no idea why anyone would. You don't need great gear to do all the content and PVP is equalized (no gear allowed).
You farm gold at endgame to buy those items. In most MMOs, you farm new items.
It's the same thing. Farming at endgame to keep you busy.
Then how do you explain the difference in visible RMT activity between say Blizzard on the one hand and NCsoft on the other? In WoW you don't get whispered every 5 minutes with an RMT add, you don't see toons shouting their RMT adds 24/7 at the same spot in towns. There is some RMT in WoW, they can't block it all out but at least they're trying and it shows. NCsoft doesn't even try. How do you explain that? The F2P argument doesn't stand. If you ever played Lineage 2 in the early days you'd know that subscriptions have absolutely zero dissuasive effects on RMTers. They don't care if there's a sub or not, to them it's peanuts compared to the profit they make.
NcSoft runs a lot of MMOs. Blizzard just has to worry about policing WoW. Not to mention they make tons more with WoW for resources to combat it.
Also, gold doesn't get you much in WoW. You need to go out yourself to get the best items.
Gold gets you everything in BnS. Goldsellers are only going to operate in games where their product has a lot of value.
Finally, I dunno maybe NcSoft is just lazy, or sees the bottomline differently.
Plenty of explanations, all of them far more likely than NcSoft is working with goldsellers.
Goldsellers have never killed a single MMO, but they seem to be indirectly killing the traditional MMORPG design as we know it.
I think people totally underestimate the negative impact an RMT infestation has on games and it's legit player base. In some games (like this one apparently, I haven't played it) you're literally assaulted as soon as you enter the game world by aggressive RMT advertisement.
The first thing that goes through my mind in this situation is: somebody (the publisher) isn't doing his job, he isn't being professional and therefore doesn't inspire much confidence at all. If he does nothing against RMT spam, it's very likely he'll also do nothing against bots, cheaters, hackers etc. So confidence in the service provider's ability and trustworthiness is deeply shaken. The second thing I think is: gee I came here to relax a bit in a virtual world far from reality. The last thing I want is to be reminded every other second about money, my finances, the bills I still haven't payed etc. So the single biggest reason I'm playing these games (escapism but that's just me) is being directly ruined by the constant allusions to real life money. I don't expect everyone goes through this exact same mental process but I'm sure some do , at least the first part. And if you lose confidence in the people running the game within the first 30 mins of play, I doubt you'll be sticking around very long giving them your money.
You claim gold sellers have never killed an MMO. Perhaps not literally but they certainly have crippled and scarred many and considerably limited their growth and success.
Ironic thread given the amount of complaining going on in BDO about their decision to disallow trading between players. Gold sellers, gold spam, and bots are on the verge of ruining BnS if they haven't already. If trading were allowed in BDO, they would be having the same problems that BnS is having. People complaining about the lack of ability to trade in BDO are being selfish and shortsighted. The dire situation in BnS regarding this topic is ample proof that BDO devs knew what they were doing when the disallowed trading between players in BDO. The trade-off is worth it a million times over. Anyone arguing otherwise is hopelessly clueless and only interested in their own selfish needs as opposed to the overall viability and future success of the game.
if only bots weren infesting dungeons too.... u go to any dungeon and u will have 2-3 bots that stand there doing nothing , u cant kick ...and u have 2 options , continue and finish the dungeon , the bots gain coins (since B&S has a bid coin system for loot , the one that bid the most is the one that gets the item ) , so bots infest all the dungeosn and get coins from players.
or leave and waste time , requeue and face another 3-4 bots......
B&S has the worst anti bot system ever... u need gold for everything , and thats include "looting" items on dungeons... is no wonder that RMT companies are invading the game.
Bidding coins for loot is the most idiotic idea in a long time.
I understand that if a gold-selling account gets banned, a new one is instantly set up by script. But can't gold sellers be banned by IP address? It's not so easy to set these up.
I'm noticing that all or most gold spammers have very similar names incorporating the URL of the spammer's site and "SELL" and "GOLD", So it would be very easy to mass delete all these. Over to you, NCSoft.
Is there a command to block or ignore a player by name if you can't see their location? I can't find it.
I'm noticing that all or most gold spammers have very similar names incorporating the URL of the spammer's site and "SELL" and "GOLD", So it would be very easy to mass delete all these. Over to you, NCSoft.
Is there a command to block or ignore a player by name if you can't see their location? I can't find it.
You can right click their names and select report spammer. They are automatically blocked and placed in a spammer category of block list that don't take away your main block list space.
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
I've been working on a custom purpose-specific firewall I call K*Wall, that intercepts and blocks goldseller spam for games, using regular expressions and a lot of Unicode conversion trickery. Basically it's a firewall that adds regex filtering to game chat, and does so at the network level. (Well, network transport level.) The primary game I've been building this against? Blade and Soul. In fact, the first pack-in config file for it is for BnS.
The way it works is actually pretty simple: incoming chat packets are captured and duplicated, and chat packet contents then get some preprocessing: everything is converted to lowercase, Unicode lookalike characters and multi-char sequences are converted to their lowest-level equivalents, the Unicode Consortium's anti-spoofing "confusables" correction is applied, and finally, punctuation and whitespace are selectively stripped. ("Selectively" meaning that we don't take out $ or = or other characters goldsellers like to use, but regular players almost never use.) The remainder gets passed through up to 16 regex filters, and if there are enough matches, the packet is logged and dropped into the bit bucket. If not, the original form of the packet is passed on to the game as if nothing happened. Multiple threads handle all of this concurrently to minimize latency.
Since it is a network firewall, it is by definition NOT a "third-party tool" or cheat program. It hooks to Windows' networking (specifically to the Windows Filter Platform in Vista and later), and doesn't touch the game itself. GameGuardian doesn't even know it's there. (GameGuardian was a pain in my backside as it blocks development tools, which makes debugging with BnS running a lot tougher.)
Teaser intro video (with BnS in the demo):
Full source is up on Github. Precompiled (ready-to-run) binaries are also there.
Unfortunately, I can't do anything about the botting...
Comments
Not to mention, no idea why anyone would. You don't need great gear to do all the content and PVP is equalized (no gear allowed).
You farm gold at endgame to buy those items. In most MMOs, you farm new items.
It's the same thing. Farming at endgame to keep you busy.
NcSoft runs a lot of MMOs. Blizzard just has to worry about policing WoW. Not to mention they make tons more with WoW for resources to combat it.
Also, gold doesn't get you much in WoW. You need to go out yourself to get the best items.
Gold gets you everything in BnS. Goldsellers are only going to operate in games where their product has a lot of value.
Finally, I dunno maybe NcSoft is just lazy, or sees the bottomline differently.
Plenty of explanations, all of them far more likely than NcSoft is working with goldsellers.
In some games (like this one apparently, I haven't played it) you're literally assaulted as soon as you enter the game world by aggressive RMT advertisement.
The first thing that goes through my mind in this situation is: somebody (the publisher) isn't doing his job, he isn't being professional and therefore doesn't inspire much confidence at all. If he does nothing against RMT spam, it's very likely he'll also do nothing against bots, cheaters, hackers etc. So confidence in the service provider's ability and trustworthiness is deeply shaken.
The second thing I think is: gee I came here to relax a bit in a virtual world far from reality. The last thing I want is to be reminded every other second about money, my finances, the bills I still haven't payed etc. So the single biggest reason I'm playing these games (escapism but that's just me) is being directly ruined by the constant allusions to real life money.
I don't expect everyone goes through this exact same mental process but I'm sure some do , at least the first part.
And if you lose confidence in the people running the game within the first 30 mins of play, I doubt you'll be sticking around very long giving them your money.
You claim gold sellers have never killed an MMO. Perhaps not literally but they certainly have crippled and scarred many and considerably limited their growth and success.
Ironic thread given the amount of complaining going on in BDO about their decision to disallow trading between players. Gold sellers, gold spam, and bots are on the verge of ruining BnS if they haven't already. If trading were allowed in BDO, they would be having the same problems that BnS is having. People complaining about the lack of ability to trade in BDO are being selfish and shortsighted. The dire situation in BnS regarding this topic is ample proof that BDO devs knew what they were doing when the disallowed trading between players in BDO. The trade-off is worth it a million times over. Anyone arguing otherwise is hopelessly clueless and only interested in their own selfish needs as opposed to the overall viability and future success of the game.
or leave and waste time , requeue and face another 3-4 bots......
B&S has the worst anti bot system ever... u need gold for everything , and thats include "looting" items on dungeons... is no wonder that RMT companies are invading the game.
I understand that if a gold-selling account gets banned, a new one is instantly set up by script. But can't gold sellers be banned by IP address? It's not so easy to set these up.
Is there a command to block or ignore a player by name if you can't see their location? I can't find it.
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
The way it works is actually pretty simple: incoming chat packets are captured and duplicated, and chat packet contents then get some preprocessing: everything is converted to lowercase, Unicode lookalike characters and multi-char sequences are converted to their lowest-level equivalents, the Unicode Consortium's anti-spoofing "confusables" correction is applied, and finally, punctuation and whitespace are selectively stripped. ("Selectively" meaning that we don't take out $ or = or other characters goldsellers like to use, but regular players almost never use.) The remainder gets passed through up to 16 regex filters, and if there are enough matches, the packet is logged and dropped into the bit bucket. If not, the original form of the packet is passed on to the game as if nothing happened. Multiple threads handle all of this concurrently to minimize latency.
Since it is a network firewall, it is by definition NOT a "third-party tool" or cheat program. It hooks to Windows' networking (specifically to the Windows Filter Platform in Vista and later), and doesn't touch the game itself. GameGuardian doesn't even know it's there. (GameGuardian was a pain in my backside as it blocks development tools, which makes debugging with BnS running a lot tougher.)
Teaser intro video (with BnS in the demo):
Full source is up on Github. Precompiled (ready-to-run) binaries are also there.
Unfortunately, I can't do anything about the botting...