Have the bots won?

KitLightning

@Loco_Mofo‌ far from so, they are merely recharging their batteries...

norcaljosh

No

They are honestly not bad at all. I get about one in-game mail message a day and see neither hide nor tail from them otherwise!

jazon1972_ESO

No

last time i was able to play i was noticing the major decrease in bots yes there are still some out there even saw a party of vet bots last time i was able to log in..but compared to eso started there has been marked improvement imo.

redwoodtreesprite

Yes

Sigh, I am convinced now that what the gold sellers are doing when they bombard an area with so many bots is this:

Deliberate removing of most resources for real players. In hopes that that will drive lots of players to their "business."

It makes no sense for there to be so many harvesting bots in each small area of a land mass otherwise. It is a deliberate, calculated effort to remove as many resources as possible. Locusts indeed...

JackBarr

No

I haven't seen a bot in a little while now. It was really bad in the first weeks, especially in the low level dungeons but it got waaay better. Occasionally I see one of those toon leveling train (4-5 bots) in a random area but it's rare.

The only frequent bot-related thing I witness is those email spams.

PopTartFarts

Yes

They dealt with the dungeon bots so I am hopeful that they will find a way to deal with the resource node farming bots. But as of right now it seems like the bots are winning.

Blackwidow

Yes

Yes, we have!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04854XqcfCY

Jim_McMasterub17_ESO

Yes

PopTartFarts wrote: »

They dealt with the dungeon bots so I am hopeful that they will find a way to deal with the resource node farming bots. But as of right now it seems like the bots are winning.

Whu?

david271749

Yes

Reports of flying bots indicate the answer is still yes.

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/104024/i-see-flying-people

GreySix

Yes

kimboh wrote: »

ShADoW0s wrote: »

Phantax wrote: »

Iseke wrote: »

There are no bots at all in the veteran content, so nope they don't win.

Really? I think you need to rethink that comment. There are bots in VR zones and I'm not the only one whose seen/reported them !

Where have you seen this? There is no way a bot made it that far, it will require that bot to finish all the single instance quests, which it cant.

I have seen and reported Vr1 bots in coldharbour but not in vet zones...yet.

Yes, bots can gain veteran levels, as this fellow bragged in a popular botter forum:

Whew thank god I did a 24 hour grind session here last weekend. Went from the very start of v4 to v10 in literally a day. Fortunately I was heals/off dps so I just macro'd it up and checked back every so often.

... and yes, even Craglorn is being exploited by these jackholes:

Update: Running a grind group there now just show up! Getting about 800k xp/per hour. Will probably be here all night at this rate

Aballister

No

They may have won the battle, but the war is far from over

Ezrith

Yes

I still see tons of bots everywhere, it's hard to report them all, there is no targeting with a quick right-click report feature. They speed hack and trying to write down their names as they zip pass you is a hassle. I think they won. I'm sure the employees in charge of taking them down are working hard but the bots come back faster then they are banned! And we were scared the Auction House would attract them, guess what, they don't care, they have other ways. Of course, the ones to blame here are THE PLAYERS buying from them.

david271749

Yes

@GreySix‌

Can I get a link?

ToneFish

I was not too concerned about bots before but as I was questing in Stonefalls yesterday I encountered a small army of speed hacking bots that where flying around freely, passing through rocks and gathering resources at an incredible speed. With many of them doing that at the same time there was not much resources left to gather for normal players.

I did not realize to what extent it was possible to manipulate the ESO client. Even though there have been speed hacks that have worked to a certain degree in other MMO's I've never seen anything quite like this. The possibilities to cheat in ESO seem endless and there does not seem to be any mechanism in place to catch these activities with the exception of reports from other players.

Bots have certainly won the battle but I am hoping that they will not win the war.
It is clear it is a serious issue however, not only the bots themselves but the fact that the client is easily manipulated. What affect does it have on PvP when used more discretely?

GreySix

Yes

david271749 wrote: »

@GreySix‌

Can I get a link?

PM sent

GreySix

Yes

ToneFish wrote: »

What affect does it have on PvP when used more discretely?

Not an outright "bot" piece, but rather a hack used by botters, there have been reports of characters travelling from beneath keeps to grab scrolls. I don't PvP, so others may be able to reveal more in regard to those reports.

Alphashado

Yes

I don't believe for a second that Biting Jabs was nerfed because it was OP. There are other skills way more OP than Biting Jabs.

We all know it was nerfed because it was easy for bots to use it.

When paying customers suffer ability nerfs as a tool used against bots, then the bots have officially won.

davidetombab16_ESO

I don t care anything, this pve system is so boring that I can understand why there are so many bots, fix indecent combat , fix animation cancel combat, fix class balance, fix bug, fix lag, who cares about bot? who cares about gold seller? Fix the game, this is important.

slbrgt

Spotted this multibot at work in Glenumbra:

[Moderator Note: Edited per our rules on Naming & Shaming]

Edit: Well sorry about that, 'naming & shaming' was not intended. Never imagined that linking to a video that shows bots at work could be interpreted as such..

notepad

Yes

I voted Yes earlier and I still think that is the case (at least they are winning for now--hopefully the tides can be turned).

After the Craglorn patch, the number of bots dropped off dramatically. Then it turns out there was a memory leak. I don't know if the bots just took a long time downloading the patch, if the memory leak would crash their game when they would leave it open and unattended while botting (and they were not around to restart their botting program), or just their botting tools needed to be updated for the new version. But, they came back.

I really do like this game, but the bots are interfering with my play too much so I've cancelled. I'll keep an eye on the game and hopefully the bot problem will be greatly reduced so I can come back. But the bots so far are too numerous, not like other games where you can ignore them or they only briefly interfere.

I like that this game is very atmospheric, and there is a lot of attention to environmental detail (go under a bridge and sounds change, hear a frog chirping and the positional sound will tie into a frog model, etc). I love the questing, I like exploring. I like that this game is a bit different than the typical WoW-ish model (in the early 2000s, there were more differing styles of MMOs out there, nowadays there is less variety).

So no, you can't have my stuff because hopefully I'll be able to come back. Just for now, it gets old when I only have 45 minutes to play after work, I want to gather some mats or fight in a mine, and the areas are taken up by locust-like bots continuously emptying the terrain.

Plague_Scale

Yes

Played for three hours or so over the weekend and I finally finished glenumbra. I can't say what the next zone will be like, but I couldn't go 10 min without seeing a chest/node/resource disappear to a 900mph wall clipping hack.
It's disheartening. Have the bots won? Who knows. They have however created so much player dissatisfaction that ZOS losses regardless.
Not sure I'll even keep my sub.
ZOS already knows this is a cancer of their game. I sure hope they find a permanent solution quickly.

Iceman_mat

Bots actual location

glenumbra

Bots are obviously everywhere.

-Cheers

Salmonleap

Yes

slbrgt wrote: »

Spotted this multibot at work in Glenumbra:

[Moderator Note: Edited per our rules on Naming & Shaming]

Edit: Well sorry about that, 'naming & shaming' was not intended. Never imagined that linking to a video that shows bots at work could be interpreted as such..

Too much room for abuse I suppose, but I wish we could name, shame, gank, and generally make life miserable for the bots, botmeisters, the f-ing gold sellers, and the idiot gold buying cheaters.

I'll give ZOS some time to sort this out, but the flying bots and disappearing resource nodes are really killing my enjoyment of ESO. I've got other games to play if ZOS can't figure out how to keep the bots from interfering with my game-time.

slbrgt

About bot names. As for the multibot that crossed my path, it consisted of a group of around 10 identical low level templar characters. Moving rapidly as a group and killing every mob, going around and around as scripted. All of them with unpronounsible names made up of some 10 random letters. In the 48 second video a couple of those names flash up for a fraction of a second.
Even having such names exposed will not help to get rid of the bots though imo. Kick them from the game, and next moment there is probably a new bunch logging in.

zeuseason

No

Bots are rampant in the starter city zones (skipping tutorial and beginner islands), but much more rare in the later zones of the game, especially VR zones where bots don't take the time to go.

n0l

slbrgt wrote: »

About bot names. As for the multibot that crossed my path, it consisted of a group of around 10 identical low level templar characters. Moving rapidly as a group and killing every mob, going around and around as scripted. All of them with unpronounsible names made up of some 10 random letters. In the 48 second video a couple of those names flash up for a fraction of a second.
Even having such names exposed will not help to get rid of the bots though imo. Kick them from the game, and next moment there is probably a new bunch logging in.

I've been seeing the same all through reapers march. its really annoying have all the spider silk disappear right in front of my eyes.

UberTester

Yes

More bots than players.

Swordguy

Yes

Zenimax love bots because they pay for the game and subscribe hack peoples accounts and lay waste to a juvenile economy.

ShedsHisTail

No

For what it's worth, I haven't seen a single bot since 1.1.2 went live.

Who wants to bet that Error 301 is somehow tied to bot-mitigation.

david271749

Yes

ShedsHisTail wrote: »

For what it's worth, I haven't seen a single bot since 1.1.2 went live.

Who wants to bet that Error 301 is somehow tied to bot-mitigation.

I've see plenty in Reaper's March.