Ideas for stopping bots in Dungeons

SnowmanDK

Lets get some ideas on the table.
Zenimax might take one of them up

Here is my idea:
Most of the dungeon/cave bosses the bots are farming also gives an achievement when it's killed for the first time.
Prevent drops after achievement is gained, that will kill them off, and in general stop people from farming them.

Corvidia

Or limit the quantity of unique items the boss drops to no more than X quantity in your bag at a time -- make X = 3 (or so) and the problem would disappear as well.

kmorganlfcb16_ESO

Every so often, maybe one in five or six, instead of the normal dungeon boss appearing a Deadric Lord appears, and annoyed by the meddlings of adventurers of Tamriel one shots everyone within a certain radius and then disappears. This would add a few benefits such as adding to the excitement of dungeon runs as well as creating a little time sink for Zos to profit by. Even when you run back from the spawn a player could never be certain as to which part of the cylcle the boss is on, so the anticipation would be perpetual, and it would definitely make it more risky for the botters, I believe.

deathly809_ESO

How about have a timer for each player there that increments and once that timer reaches a certain limit it teleports them out of the dungeon and says "Congratulations!!! You have killed everything here!"

HandofBane

Here's an idea to impede botters, that should have minimal effect on legit players - make weapons take item damage similar to armor, with reduced damage output the more damage is applied to the item. Most botters are wearing junk gear, aside from whatever weapon they have equipped, and spamming the same skill over and over once the target spawns. Reducing their damage output so they have to port the whole mass of bots out for repairs constantly either frees up the spawn completely, or slows down the death of the target to where other players get the chance to get their hits in.

Kythia

Hire a bunch of GMs as active bot hunting squad.

Game mechanics are just a challenge to bot designers. Beating a human GM is more difficult. They learn and adapt.

Will be interesting to see if Agent Kenzie gets some company or if Zenimax is just in for the quick buck with their MMORPG.

Draekros

There are portable repair kits so the bots would just use them every so often.

HandofBane

Draekros wrote: »

There are portable repair kits so the bots would just use them every so often.

Yes, but that also costs gold, which slows down the farming quite a bit when they either run out or have to sell off and then go buy more, impeding their profit/time. Not an amazing idea, but one more thing that could help if they won't get off their asses and hire more people to deal with it directly.

redsteelb16_ESO

Have the bosses phased (instanced) to the player, and when dead will not show again to the player. Put the instance on a 1hr timer before the player can see the boss again. Also give the regular NPC more hp and dps, and create multiple instances per 20 players.

djwolfnrb19_ESO

All the methods suggested so far interfere with player enjoyment. Here's what I don't understand. The games that have removed gold spammers and cheats entirely keep the character data and that character's logs on the server. I know that all my character data and logs are not on my PC; if they were players would be giving themselves 100K Health, Magicka and Stamina. So either the staff at ZOS lack the software application to readily read and sort these logs or they lack the manpower to do it but the fact that "Roderick the White" has finished "X" quest, has "Y" achievements, has read the following Lorebooks, has killed the following named and has the following items and gold in his bank and on his characters should be readily available to ZOS on a database.

Any sudden increase in gold to an account should be flagged by this database as deserving attention. They look up that the 10K gold my sister gave me, check both accounts and let it through. They see that "qqccutye" is "giving away" 500,000 per day from a stream of accounts and peg him as a gold seller. They check his transactions and ban every single account that accepted sums of gold from the Gold seller and issue warnings across the screen:

"If you buy gold you will be caught and your account will be terminated immediately."

Word will spread like wildfire. Don't buy gold. The Game picks it up and you'll get booted.

You don't kill rats or cockroaches with a hammer. This "one at a time" culling will never keep up with the infestation. You attack their food source or their breeding cycle and if ZOS does not have such a database that will flag gold sellers and their transactions then all of their customer service issues are going to be labor-intensive with "conversations" with every petitioner to determine if they are telling the truth when they claim their "Epic Sword of God Power" simply disappeared from their bank. The cheap option becomes more expensive over time.

SnowmanDK

djwolfnrb19_ESO wrote: »

All the methods suggested so far interfere with player enjoyment...

I can't understand how marking the bosses as already killed as interfering with player enjoyment. The other advantage would be that people can't farm them for gold them selves, which would make everyone more even gold wise.
I have seen players (non-bots) clean their inventory and go in and then farm the boss until it was full, then go sell and do it over again.

djwolfnrb19_ESO wrote: »

Any sudden increase in gold to an account should be flagged by this database as deserving attention. They look up that the 10K gold my sister gave me, check both accounts and let it through. They see that "qqccutye" is "giving away" 500,000 per day from a stream of accounts and peg him as a gold seller...

I see your point here. Problem is that the shouting bots is not the same accounts as the sellers them selves. So those "ad-bots" will keep shouting.
Also, from what I have been told (unconfirmed) then a lot of the bots are actually running from stolen accounts. Those accounts supposedly was lured from people who paid for powerleveling so they kind of asked for it, but still.

djwolfnrb19_ESO

Snowman, I filled my pack up in Ondil three times from all the mobs before the bot farmers came and it was very handy; my trades guys broke it all down for tempers and trade levels but it was very different. Players moved around, they out-leveled the place, they did just enough damage to get part of the kill, there wasn't this automated dead in less than a second thing where no one else got a look in and you could chat with them. I certainly wouldn't see anyone miss out. Why would I?

The second issue is that the ad-bots aren't the problem and if you are going to rip out a tree you have to go for the root. If players know that buying gold will get them banned then all the clever hacking by professional botters is not going to restore their market. Ban a few gold buyers; publicize their banning and make sure every player knows that buying gold is a ticket out of the game and the entire problem will simply go away.

Anoteros

SIMPLE SOLUTION WHICH I'VE POSTED NUMEROUS TIMES.

1. Instance dungeons.
2. Option to scale based on solo or group play (doubt they'd have the ingenuity at ZOS to even attempt this)
3. Limit to how many dungeons can be cleared in an hour/30 minutes
4. ???
5. 5. PROFIT


THE END.

Vorkk8383

This is evil but these guys AFK and let a program kill for them. If we had a spell that could push players around, I'd love to push them just far away enough so they couldn't hit the mob. That would anger then and angering them makes me smile.

Thorntongue

Kythia wrote: »

Hire a bunch of GMs as active bot hunting squad.

Game mechanics are just a challenge to bot designers. Beating a human GM is more difficult. They learn and adapt.

Will be interesting to see if Agent Kenzie gets some company or if Zenimax is just in for the quick buck with their MMORPG.

Agent Kenzie is just a bot. This Agent Kenzie bot is just a copy/paste/chop_half_of_our_report_off program to make us think the company is actually doing something to combat the bots. In actuality the company likes the extra revenue from game sales and monthly account fees.

Thorntongue

patrick.loiselleb16_ESO wrote: »

This is evil but these guys AFK and let a program kill for them. If we had a spell that could push players around, I'd love to push them just far away enough so they couldn't hit the mob. That would anger then and angering them makes me smile.

How about a spell to port them into the PvP areas.

Ichikai

Simplest solution to this particular problem.

- Tie in the XP gain with the achievement. Boss itself gives 0 XP.
- Make the drop unique (cant have more than one, sorry dual wielders )
- Not quite relevant to the bots but just QOL. Boss has 100% droprate of w/e it is they drop, it sucks *as a real player* to have to farm a boss just to find out the item it drops is of no use to you. (really esohead get that data up! i sent you lots )

In the end though, it's only a partial solution, they'll find a different spot. Like the other day I found a bunch of them hiding out in the ship's cabin at matron's clutch (stonefalls) just to kill the mob that respawns fairly quickly. Bunch of bots to powerlevel a single guy that paid for it.

For those thinking they haven't made it to veteran rank yet... I just found a bunch of bots powerleveling a guy named Gill (rank 1) in Coldharbour's Grotto of Depravity dungeon at the boss.

Get to the root of the problem, for they will adapt to half assed changes.

Anoteros

round and round we go.

SIMPLE SOLUTION WHICH I'VE POSTED NUMEROUS TIMES.

1. Instance dungeons.
2. Option to scale based on solo or group play (doubt they'd have the ingenuity at ZOS to even attempt this)
3. Limit to how many dungeons can be cleared in an hour/30 minutes. Bosses will not respawn unless dungeon is reset.
4. ???
5. 5. PROFIT


THE END.

Phinix1

I posted this elsewhere but that thread has faded to obscurity...

Here are some suggestions how ZOS could deal with this both in the short term, alleviating the annoyance factor for its less abusive and disruptive customers, and also moving towards a more effective long term solution.

Short term solutions:

If a player has been within a certain radius (attack distance) of a boss for more than 10 minutes, implement the following protocols:

1) Do not allow new players entering the zone to be placed in the same "phase" with qualifying "campers."

This will prevent normal players from ever encountering this annoyance, be they bots or "legitimate" campers, since they will never be phased in with players that have already been camping a boss area for ten minutes before they got there.

2) Automatically "re-phase" campers into their own condensed zone or "lobby zone" after 20-30 minutes.

Once a player has been detected within a certain radius of a boss for more than the specified time, check if they have moved at all in that time and if this movement was random or a generated pattern. If they haven't moved in that time and not in a random way, automatically re-phase them and reload their zone.

Have the automatic re-phase default to placing campers in a phase with other campers that had already been detected and phased, up to the phase maximum. This will result in all bot campers inevitably ending up all in the same phase where they will be in direct competition with each other.

3) Treat EXCESSIVE abuse of these criteria (not leaving a radius of the boss and not moving in any legitimate way after more than 30 minutes) the same as a person that is disconnected for inactivity, and disconnect them.

Combine these suggestions with the diminishing returns on loot drops from the same mobs I previously suggested in another thread, as well as possibly HAVING BOSSES SPAWN IN RANDOMIZED LOCATIONS within an area, to eliminate screen OCR bots, and I think they could really put the nail in this problem.

SnowmanDK

I am currently running in Eastmarch, and even here the dungeons are full of bots.
That made me think. I bet those bots never did ONE quest. All they do is level by killing those dungeon bosses.
How about using that against them?
I don't believe any legit players have leveled all the way to veteran rank without doing quests.

SnowmanDK

My crafter is now in The Rift... Same thing with bots in dungeons. And I still think they leveled on those dungeon bosses only.