Why ZOS Can't rely on plyers to report bots.

rfpalmerb16_ESO · May 2014

ZOS had decided that a cornerstone of its war on bots was to rely on the player base to report bots. This makes some sense in that ZOS was relying on a sort of 'crowd-sourced' policing to find, what can be, hard to locate cheaters. We all know the harm that bots do, from lowering our enjoyment of the game, making it nearly impossible for players to find hard-to-get resources to destroying the economy of the game. However, ZOS strategy of using players to report bots has been dealt a major blow.
Today I was trying to find alchemy resources, so I went to Eastmarch in the EP -- a place that is usually quite heavy in resources -- but I had trouble finding any. Then I happened to be standing on a bit of columbine about to harvest it when one of those typical bot player names appeared on my screen, apparently from the ground under my feat and "poof" the resources were gone.

So I started looking around and walking, head down, and began to discover what was going on. The bots are using the clipping and speed hack to stay below ground level and harvest the resources from below. That way no one sees them and stuff just disappears. ZOS needs to think outside the box when figuring out how to deal with the bot issues because as it stands right now, they are being outwitted, out-smarted and outdone by the botters.

Prettiboi · May 2014

On botting forums, many botters are complaining about being banned left and right, ways to circumvent/avoid players and their reports, etc.

So it seems whatever ZoS is doing, is working.

You just can't stop the bots from botting. They will just buy new accounts and bot again. In fact, this is exactly what many of them would say in their "I got banned" threads.

The only thing stopping botters from botting is the players to stop buying gold from them. Simple as that. ZoS can only do so much, the rest is economics. As long as the profit of botting (from people buying gold) exceeds the cost of buying accounts, the botting will continue until the game dies.

This is the truth for all MMOs.