How did LotRO kill the bots?

DewiMorgan

During the beta, to get an idea of what other MMOs were like, I played LotRO. It's an MMO made almost entirely of grind, which quickly went F2P. In comparison to ESO, it feels really, really "oldschool MMO" - all the quests are variations on the form "Kill X mobs of type Y" or "Talk to character Z".

Playing it made me really appreciate my beta-weekends of ESO, and I've not bothered to play it again since ESO released.

But there's one thing that LotRO apparently did right: there are no bots.

Did anyone play LotRO when the bots came? Do you have any idea what tactics they used to combat them? Because, from what I've read, they are so far the only MMORPG to successfully quash them.

How?

Amsel_McKay

EQ did not have bots for a long long time....

LotRO did have them

SirAndy

DewiMorgan wrote: »

How?

By *not* making the 1st grade mistake of letting the local game client make any decisions ...

Better Client/Server code = no bots
;-)

DewiMorgan

EQ didn't, and then it did - no surprise, bots have been an increasing problem everywhere.

LotRO did - and now it doesn't. What happened?

Amsel_McKay

LotRO died... and people dont buy gold... simple.

DewiMorgan

SirAndy wrote: »

By *not* making the 1st grade mistake of letting the local game client make any decisions ...

Better Client/Server code = no bots
;-)

I don't see how trusting the client causes bots. Certainly, it makes life a little easier (bots can ignore collision and terrain if those things are not serverside), but they don't prevent coding a macro'd bot to run from node to node harvesting.

DewiMorgan

Amsel_McKay wrote: »

LotRO died... and people dont buy gold... simple.

LotRO still exists and is selling its own gold (and just about anything else) in the store - but why are bots not undercutting them?

Amsel_McKay

Once bots farm so much gold they have no need to bot anymore if no one is buying it.. and LotRO is a dead game and who would buy gold in a game so old?

SirAndy

DewiMorgan wrote: »

I don't see how trusting the client causes bots.

Have you ever worked on any Client/Server applications or games?
Your line of thinking is exactly what got ZOS into this mess in the first place.

If you trust the client, you present the hackers with a HUGE wide open barn door!

Once they figure out how to inject false data into the client/server communication, you would see things like flying bots, teleporting bots, wall and ground clipping bots, speed hacking bots, invisible bots, instant resource nodes respawn bots, ...

Oh wait, we have all those in ESO!

isengrimb16_ESO

I logged into old battle.net two or three years ago with my Diablo 2 discs. It was still running, at that time - might still be, for all I know. But there were nothing but bots, even in the lowbie starting zone. I kind of followed some around, and that's the only way I got to the end of the story, because I always burnt out in single-player by the time I hit Diablo, but anyway ...

I got messages for websites still selling gear. Who the hell buys Diablo 2 gear? I bet D1 stuff is still around, too.

Phantorang

DewiMorgan wrote: »

Amsel_McKay wrote: »

LotRO died... and people dont buy gold... simple.

LotRO still exists and is selling its own gold (and just about anything else) in the store - but why are bots not undercutting them?

Because its the other way around, Lotro are undercutting the bots. Why buy something and risk banning and at the same time risk being screwd over by some scammer, when you can buy legal and at the same time actually support the game you like to play, instead of some greedy dude living as a paracite off of others.

Sihnfahl

DewiMorgan wrote: »

but why are bots not undercutting them?

Because the bot writers know that if they try to undercut, the devs can just push the store prices even lower.

It costs the devs nothing; the store is nothing but profit. For the bot writers... it would bite into their income.

Tarwin

It ran it's course

I had my account hacked in lotro and was really embarassing logging in after 6 months of not playing, there I am standing at a mailbox in my tightie whities

robacooperb16_ESO

Having played LOTRO under subscription and then F2P:
* Aggressive reporting by players, RP servers purged them pretty quick from what I heard.
* Aggressive "patrolling" by GMs who went after the bots, sellers, and buyers.
* All client side decisions with server checks.

When LOTRO went F2P there was a swarming of bots/sellers that hit the servers along with the pop jump - but the pre-F2P players hit back hard and really reported them and the GMs and Devs followed up quickly (so much so you could watch them pop out of existence in Bree as the bans hit).

ESO has a problem in that the client/server model is different, the megaserver makes it hard for GMs to isolate bots/sellers by server/phase like LOTRO ones could, and I think the community and player base is very different -LOTRO players (particularly the RPers) went out of their way to track and report the bots to an extent I haven't seen here in ESO.

Demli

LotRO went F2P and sells everything in the Turbine store. There is no need to buy things from third party since everything can be purchased direct from Turbine, but F2P sucked the life out of that game. Bots are actually a good sign that the game ESO is doing well, they will be thwarted in time, but until then keep reporting.

DewiMorgan

SirAndy wrote: »

Have you ever worked on any Client/Server applications or games?

As an MMO programmer myself, I am reasonably well-versed in these topics, yes.

However, I think you're confusing the terms "bot" and "exploit". Exploits come from trusting the client; bots come from allowing clients to exist in the first place.

Once you have a client, even a completely untrusted one, you can macro it, and you can make a bot with those macros.

Trusting the client only permits the bots to use trust-exploits; it doesn't prevent the bots in the first place.

GreySix

SirAndy wrote: »

DewiMorgan wrote: »

How?

By *not* making the 1st grade mistake of letting the local game client make any decisions ...

Better Client/Server code = no bots
;-)

This.

Westcoast14_ESO

High player populations and Subscription titles are the main profit drivers for RMT. LoTRO has neither. It's not like Botters and RMT work for free. There has to be substantial player demand for their services.

It's the same element that makes the density of BMW dealerships higher in Western Europe than it is in Burundi.

Innocente

* Teleport Hackers
* Speed Hackers
* Z-Plane Hackers
* Bot Hackers

All of these types of cheats are available because there is to much logic being handled by the ESO game client. In normal MMOs, the server handles a much larger portion of motion and positioning logic, but in order to have the 'Action Based' combat systems, that logic is placed by ZOS into the client.

Having the movement and position logic in the client may make for better performance, but it opens the whole system to hacking and exploitation. As we have all so painfully experienced. Since this is all a fundamental part of the client/server architecture that ZOS uses, it is not going to change. And the cheaters are not going to be going away.

This is a fundamental error in coding and security. It is the reason why action multiplayer games use layered anti-cheat systems to stop this sort of thing. I fear that as time goes on, the PC side of the game will slowly die. Don't know if the Console systems are vulnerable to this sort of hacking.

Really kind of to bad. ZOS has punished players in an attempt to 'discourage' the cheaters. It has not worked. Well, the 'punish the players' part has.

redwoodtreesprite

Having played LOTRO from almost the beginning, I feel I can say some insightful things here:

There used to be bots that ran through high level zones gathering the resources. Turbine changed the mobs so even passive ones would aggro from a huge distance and attack characters way too low level for the zone.

Used to be heavy chat spam selling gold. Turbine moved fast to stop that, and later changed it so every character had to go through the whole opener. Stopping the level 2s and 3s from being almost spontaneously created.

For a while, we got tell spam and mail spam from gold sellers. Within a short time that was stopped as well. Don't know what Turbine did, but it worked.

Gear is cheap to buy from the vendors, as is storage. We all get per character storage as well. And while some want to pay lots for high level recipes and first age weapons and special craft mats, it isn't necessary. No real money sinks in LOTRO.

GMs seem to move very fast on abusive spam and players trying to grief others as well, at least when the griefing involves trying to block others from an NPC.

No charge or armor decay when stuck. And GMs are usually fast to respond when you do get stuck.

---

I am not saying the gold sellers are not there, but they are not in your face, and there are no noticable bots. You can usually tell if someone is buying gold when they post something like an egg for 500 gold, which is a lot of currency in LOTRO. And I am sure that there are professional farmers for first age symbols and such that sell those on the AH and do their gold selling business transactions
using the AH and their websites. But again, they are not "in your face".

---

One last thing. Turbine is very much like this company in many other negative ways. Which is why the game population is fading away. I only play during festivals and to do a weekly hobbit present thing on occasion for my lifer account. They are not a very nice company. But they do deal with gold sellers and bots very well.

daneyulebub17_ESO

Lotro is far from dead. Though it took a major hit, quality wise IMO, when it went F2P. Still a beautiful game with tons of content.

A few reasons bots never took hold:

- Less emphasis on mob grinding over quests/skirmishes for XP. Never had insta-respawn bosses. Lots of BoA or Bind to Account stuff too.

- Botting is more difficult to implement. They only added LUA support when they went F2P, and keep a pretty tight reign on what's allowed. Speculation, but they may encrypt the data stream from the client. It certainly seems less easy to insert your own code between the client and server in any case.

- More speculation: player base is more mature, less likely to tolerate it or buy gold. (This was likely more true before F2P though. God I hate F2P.)

- Less potential market for it now that they have an in-game store and all the stuff you can legitimately buy with their purchasable "turbine" points. Mounts, buff scrolls, pretty much anything.

- AND---Multiple servers always make it harder, as any gold the bots get is only good for the server they got it on. Effectively making it much, much harder to find a market. Lotro has like 20 or more servers. To reach every player, you'd have to have bots running on all 20.

SirAndy

DewiMorgan wrote: »

However, I think you're confusing the terms "bot" and "exploit". Exploits come from trusting the client; bots come from allowing clients to exist in the first place.

Nope. The current two main botting applications for ESO do exactly what i outlined.

They are 3rd party apps (not AddOns or macros) and they inject false data into the client/server communication which allows them to do all the things listed in my post.
That is exactly how they currently work.
;-)

DewiMorgan

Thank you, @robacooperb16_ESO - that's the kind of in-depth answer I was hoping for!

I have seen - and continue to see - people reporting the bots here furiously. I've reported possibly a thousand myself, and others have similar figures, and were constantly filling their ignore lists before the updat to fix that.

I disagree that the level of trust in the client's collision is a major point in the encouragement of botting, and I suspect that nobody citing it as a cause could name any trust issue in ESO that could be removed that would prevent botting.

So the main difference, then, is in GM response speed. If, in LotRO, you could report bots and see them pop, and in ESO you can report them and see them just carry on their merry way, that's a huge difference. Massive. And seeing instant action taken would significantly encourage reporting, too.

So maybe there wasn't - as I'd hoped - some cool snazzy tech that fixed the problem; just lots of attention from real people.

SirAndy

DewiMorgan wrote: »

I disagree that the level of trust in the client's collision is a major point in the encouragement of botting, and I suspect that nobody citing it as a cause could name any trust issue in ESO that could be removed that would prevent botting.

If collision was the only thing that ESO was trusting the client with, i would tend to agree with you.

However, that is not the case. There are many more things the client can send to the server completely unchecked(!) and that is what the botting apps are exploiting.

If you spent 1/2 an hour on Google, you'll see exactly what i'm referring to ...
;-)

Natjur

Bots go where there is money. As soon as a game is less popular, or a newer better game is out, most move.

If no one is buying the gold anymore, they move to the next game.
LotRO never FIXED the bots, they just moved to a new game where they can make more money per hour.

Why are there bots in ESO, High gold cost items like motifs, horses and crafting upgrade items.

If motifs and crafting upgrade items where no trade, that alone would kill 90% of the bots as no one would be needing gold to buy those items. But I think that would annoy more people then fixing the bot issue.

GeeYouWhy

LotRO did not go F2P quickly, it was 3 years into it's life span. This was a huge success and the game is still heavily played today and profitable with deep story elements. My only issue is that it's tab targeting and after playing ESO I'm having a hard time going back to that mechanic.

AZSharksFan

EQ had hacks since day 1.. a fun ride of a story if you lived the ShowEQ to MySEQ days.. It was an interesting battle between reading instream data, reverse encrypting the stream, and eventually onto memory manipulations..

Bots however took time to develop.. Initial waves were merely button-pushing types that hit programmed keys/macros. While I can't speak for other more recent MMOs, I'm perversely impressed with just how far they've come.. Complex scripts that work in conjunction with map topology, collision detection, and UI mapping tools. Still hate bots but have to admire the ever escalating "war".

What I'm mildly curious to know is how far my client can see.. There have been a few times I've been ganked out in the middle of nowhere and hidden.. Makes me think a larger portion of the map is loaded into my client memory and it's client-side that determine what I can/can't see..

danno8

Having played LotRO since 2008 I can tell you why there are no goldsellers.

1.The game is not at all popular and there are much riper targets for goldsellers.

2. Gold in LotRO is so easy to get and there is very little to spend it on. Playing very casually with no grouping at all, by the time I reached the end of the latest expansion (Helms Deep) I had acquired several hundred gold, and found there was very little to spend it on.

3. The best gear is generally BoA, the second best gear is cheap and easily obtainable.

In short, why would a goldseller waste their time?

steveb16_ESO46

The instancing of quests, the bind on acquire of worthwhile objects, good stuff gated behind dungeon locks and complex group mechanics and the absence of gold sinks made it a difficult and unattractive option for bots in the first place.


Sure, you can buy gold but it's not really that useful. There never was a bot problem like ESO has.

The trouble is ESO is the opposite. You need huge amounts of gold and the game is all but purpose-built for botters.

DewiMorgan

More insightful answers: Thank you, @daneyulebub17_ESO, @redwoodtreesprite, @danno816_ESO, @steveb16_ESO46, others I missed

The point by @isengrimb16_ESO about battle.net is telling - those who are saying "There are no bots on LotRO because it's not worth it any more" are fire-and-forget on a F2P server: they cost basically nothing to run.

The point by @AZSharksFan that EQ had exploits but no bots is another telling point supporting that exploits and bots are only loosely linked: while bots will make use of exploits if they can, removing all exploits would not be sufficient to remove all bots.

But there's more to the picture than just GM actions - though they are clearly a big piece of the puzzle. Gold that only works on one server sounds like a biggie, but wouldn't, I agree, work with the ESO architecture of only two megaservers (three if you include PTS).

So there's a complex soup of things that may have made a difference, then:
- High aggro against low-level players;
- Slower character creation.
- Multiple servers;
- Slower respawn of grindables;
- Harder client to write bots for;
- Ingame store;
- More Bind-on-acquire / bind-to-account items;
- Gold just not as useful/poor gold sinks;
- Gating the good stuff;
- GM actions.

Some of these wouldn't work well in a TES world. Others aren't bad ideas at all. To be honest, I've been surprised *not* to see quest trophies being sold, since they are only bind-on-use. That "dress as a skeleton" one in particular, I'd expect to see farmed and sold like crazy, since it seems so popular.

esoone

They put up waysigns to eso.