How did LotRO kill the bots?

KhajitFurTrader

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.

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.

So there I was, thinking that everyone most some in the industry would take Raph Koster's Laws of Online World Design to heart, always. This in particular:

Never trust the client.
Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the enemy. Never ever ever forget this.

But then again, there's also this:

Macroing, botting, and automation
No matter what you do, someone is going to automate the process of playing your world.

You know the old saying? Neither a bo Build a system that's foolproof, and only fools will want to use it. :P

Crassius

Ban the buyers. Hit them hard. Make it known everywhere on every media that you buy from a gold seller - You're out. Forever. No second chances. No moaning will save you. One strike. Adios amigo. Tickets closed without reading. Forum access instantly denied. Erased from history.


But then there will be no actual humans playing at all... Forget I said anything. My bad.

DewiMorgan

KhajitFurTrader wrote: »

So there I was, thinking that everyone most some in the industry would take Raph Koster's Laws of Online World Design to heart, always.

Personally, I do; I've read and loved his Designing Virtual Worlds, and - like most in the industry - I think NTtC is a really important mantra... to prevent exploits.

In the post-MUDding world, there are performance tradeoffs that need to be made, though, and it's perfectly OK to trust the client about, say, what armor it displays you in, or whether you collide with an NPC or a bench, or the precise altitude of the terrain, or just how fast you moved from point A to point B (though that needs capping against speedhacks, you also need to handle some slack for catchup after latency: it feels like ESO may be a little too latency-tolerant, here)... or whether it was you who pressed the "mine ore" button, or a macro.

But you can't trust the client to tell the server what armor you are wearing, or whether a mob appears or not, or whether it aggros (I think maybe ESO trusts on this one?), or whether you hit the mob when you tried, or how much damage you did, or what their original HP was, or what was in the chest you just opened... trusting these things makes for far more serious exploits.

But while it is useful against exploits, NTtC is completely irrelevant (or at best, only very loosely linked) to the question at hand, though, which is how to prevent botting.

Far more relevant is your second quote: automation is unavoidable, even with an untrusted client and encrypted datastream, no matter what you do, and in some ways, even to be encouraged. but some games have by and large managed to eradicate the problem to the point of it being invisible.

There are social games, where gold has no meaning; there are games with almost no players, where there's simply no point; and there's LotRO.

LotRO did something right, somewhere, and it wasn't in making their client non-automable, nor was it in failing to trust their client: they'll have made the same security/performance tradeoffs that any 3D MMO world must, WRT collision and altitude and velocity and such. Their magic sauce must lie elsewhere, and that "elsewhere" is probably in the other architectural design and administrative procedures that people have talked about here.

Many can't work in ESO. But some are stealable. Ramping high-level mobs' aggro against low-level characters would mean that just running a bot in Coldharbor rags through higher level areas would no longer be possible... assuming they don't trust the client about aggro, at least.

temjiu

Every game I have played to date that has had very little bots has these common elements (that ESO does NOT have).

- The gear people want is bound to them and accessible only if you go out and get it yourself. any gear other then that is found by everyone, all the time.

- The other items you would want outside of that are either personally farmable, or can be found in the in game store. people pay the company, not the goldsellers. they can take the items they get and either use them, or put them up on the AH to make in game money off of. company makes more money, can keep game open longer. players make more in game money, or get what they want without having to pay a goldseller. botters lose.

- no Add-ons...i.e. closed UI. we can dicker about how the bots get in all day, but ultimately the games I see with very little bots have closed UI's. no add-ons.

-EDIT: almost forgot one. big one. QoL elements in the game are either cheap, or locked behind something other then money. examples: horses that are cheap but you have to be X level to use them. respecs that are cheap, but have extremely long CD's (such as 3 days or longer). in general, the idea is to eliminate reasons people would want to have that money easy and fast. if your horse only costs 4k gold, but you can't get it till your lvl 25, then it doesn't matter how much gold you have...most players will have 4k by that time.

Moral of the story is this. If you take away the market for botters, you will take away the reason they tend to bot. This isn't a guarantee that they will all disappear...some bots are actually players trying to find ways around the system to get what they want faster...but even so, after playing at least 3-4 MMO's in my recent future (last 4 years), some big, some small, some in-between, the ones that have very few bots have these common elements.

I've said this before in other threads. no matter what technical approaches you take to reduce botters...be it client/server changes, game mechanic changes, Gm's haunting servers, even the closed UI concept, If there is a market Botters will FIND A WAY. smaller companies simply don't have the budget to tackle things that way. you need to kill the reason the botters want to be in the game in the first place.

Ojustaboo

DewiMorgan wrote: »

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?

well seeing as one of the main bot selling sites has a whole section on Lotro bots and glancing at their forum, has pages of posts about their lotro bots dating from 2007 and the latest post being 28th May 2014, I don't think they got rid of the bots at all.

Maybe the way Lotro works means they can remain undetected or invisible to normal players, or maybe the sw simply does a good job at mimicking a real player hence you dont notice them?

Some of the topic titles for Lotro this year include

Warden Gambits
Where to bot level 7 to 60
Bestclasx to bot with
Suggested grinding spots
new toon intro script
node farming
Training Dummy
skirmish bot
etc etc etc etc etc

Yes the bots are in our faces and affecting most of our game play with ESO, this less than two month old game, but if you think they got rid of the bots in Lotro, you are wrong, they are still thriving 7 years later.

temjiu

Ojustaboo wrote: »

Yes the bots are in our faces and affecting most of our game play with ESO, this less than two month old game, but if you think they got rid of the bots in Lotro, you are wrong, they are still thriving 7 years later.

You bring up some interesting points. I guess the real question is not "are botters there", but "how much to the botters impact individual players from a personal perspective?"

Because in spite of the botter "activity" you mentioned above, I remember my 4 years with LotRO as being relatively bot free. They never really impacted my personal play...i never saw them in my favorite leveling areas, they never cause sever server lag (that was reported), they never popped up in my favorite dungeons...really it felt very bot free.

and in all the other games I've played with what I consider little to no bots most likely still have something akin to bot activity...but again, I never (or rarely) saw it and never considered it impacting in those games.

The bots in this game on the other hand are severe, definitely impacting, and I noticed them ALLOT.

Ojustaboo

temjiu wrote: »

Ojustaboo wrote: »

Yes the bots are in our faces and affecting most of our game play with ESO, this less than two month old game, but if you think they got rid of the bots in Lotro, you are wrong, they are still thriving 7 years later.

You bring up some interesting points. I guess the real question is not "are botters there", but "how much to the botters impact individual players from a personal perspective?"

Because in spite of the botter "activity" you mentioned above, I remember my 4 years with LotRO as being relatively bot free. They never really impacted my personal play...i never saw them in my favorite leveling areas, they never cause sever server lag (that was reported), they never popped up in my favorite dungeons...really it felt very bot free.

and in all the other games I've played with what I consider little to no bots most likely still have something akin to bot activity...but again, I never (or rarely) saw it and never considered it impacting in those games.

The bots in this game on the other hand are severe, definitely impacting, and I noticed them ALLOT.

I agree with you 100%, I've got a lifetime account with lotro and I don't recall ever noticing one bot. I gave up on lotro in Jan this year.

I wasn't aware there was all these bots about, there was a link to one of the eso bot sites posted on here (since deleted) and that was the first time I knew such site's existed, I knew there were bots, just didnt know people were selling them.

Visiting that site, I was shocked at how many games they had bots for, Lotro being just one of many along with such games as SWTOR, GW2, TERA.

Yes something needs to be done urgently in ESO due to the way bots affect us, but sadly they seem to be around for most if not all other mmos too.

Regoras

Only popular games get bots. Explains why it wasn't a problem in LoTRO.

Fuzzylumpkins

No demand no supply. It went free. You answered your own question. Why would botter/gold sellers spend any time or effort in a game as it fails to launch? If the game is not successful, you get where this goes yah? Simple economy.

tlainya_ESO

It's also very easy to report spammers and such in LotRO, you right click the name and a menu comes up, one click and the spammer was reported and added to the ignore list, not the lengthy drop down system that ESO uses.

Silverglass66

DewiMorgan wrote: »

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.

Well, after 2 expansions and 3 1/2 years it went F2P.

DewiMorgan wrote: »

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?

It did have its bots and its gold sellers, however Turbine were pretty quick to crack down on their ability to message people which meant that it was much less intrusive, I remember a few in game mails selling gold but they dried up pretty quickly. However the sellers are still around you just don't encounter them in-game.

So its more a case of LOTRO keeping them from being visible rather than getting rid of them. Having GMs online for long periods of time must help the process though.

As a caveat I would have to say that I have not played in the original areas for a long time now (as all my characters are high level), so they may be more visible there.

LoTRO also has much more Bind on Pickup items which can't be traded like ESO's motifs for example. In addition gold is much easier to come by so there is a lower incentive to try and sell items or gold in LoTRO.

dcincali

Tera Online has the same combat system and altered a few ingame mechanics to prevent bots. You cant send whispers unless someone is on your friends list, you can talk in area chat till lvl 5, world chat at lvl 18 i think it is or trade chat, and you have to use a mailbox location to send mail. It also has open world PVP so you can just kill them. Tera= almost bot free.. Koreans do it better..

Synfaer

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.

I played Lotro for a few years and it was a great MMO. It was even good for about a year after it went F2P but it began to become a bit too commercialized for my tastes and my interest drifted to other entertainment.
To correct the OP, Lotro was released in 2007 and went F2P in 2010, hardly quickly, and in the early days it wasn't a grind.

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.

This and the locks/time investment on crafting the worthwhile gear.
Also the game had a more social outlook than other MMO's I have played, less hard core players around.

cabbageub17_ESO

I also played LOTRO off and on For the 1st 5 years and I remember seeing bot activity maybe twice.

zaria

SirAndy wrote: »

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!

Yes, benefit of doing stuff client side is reduced lag, downside is that it enables teleport and wallhacks.
Solution to this is to add checkpoints where you check if players position makes sense, you also check against previous position to make teleport hack hard.
If position is impossible you either reset player position or crash the game, if this happens often disable the account because of hacking.
if you activates anything in the game this check is run, also add checks for keep walls and similar.

Bots not so much, Runescape had extreme bot problems, its run in java on a web page so its pretty much the dumbest client you can get.
Bots can still inject data to the stream and read it.

DewiMorgan

Really good points here - I like and agree with the point about the bots being there but just not affecting people. So instead of arguing for ways to discourage bots (a Zenimax gold store!), we should perhaps be arguing for better mechanics to make them just not affect us.

Also love @dcincali 's idea of leaving a few levels before people can affect other people. Seems like a good, obvious mechanic that is definitely stealable for ESO... though I worry that, with very slow /help response, /zone is the only realistic way for new players to get any support in ESO.

[Incidentally, some are complaining that I said it quickly went F2P. Well, 3 years to F2P seems precipitous to me: I think only Rift was faster (released 2011, F2P by 2013).
WoW (2004) went partly-F2P in 2011 after 7 years. Lineage 2 (2003) went F2P in 2011 after 8 years. EQ (1999) went F2P in 2012 after 13 years.
Most other P2Ps I can find in a quick Google seem to have remained P2P as far as I can tell, even the old ones: Asheron's Call (1999), FFXI (1999), Aces High (2000), DaoC (2001), EVE (2003), Dofus (2004)... well, either remained P2P or just went belly up.]

Iceman_mat

Amsel_McKay wrote: »

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

Stop using logic, people on the forums hate it.


-cheers

zaria

ESO has one factor who make it a goldsellers paradise:
The giant goldsinks for bank and inventory space also horses.
having 100.000 gold at level 1 in wow would not help you much, having 100k gold in ESO is nice but you want more.

In short if bots was imposible you would probably get the old fashion manual gold farming as the demand for gold is huge.

ahstin2001nub18_ESO

i played lotro from closed beta- they had bot issues that i noticed about 15-30 days into live. none of them were spamming bots. the spamming bots were quickly reported and quickly removed on firefoot. the F2P store may aid in keeping them out, but i will tell you hard fact that they DID do something about the bots (all types). i would be willing to bet that they either tightened up their programming or simply addressed the coding that allowed the issues that allowed bots to be .... robots. as stated above, LoTRO doesnt allow the same types of mods as WoW or ESO allowed. macroing in LoTRO is actually "illegal."

as far as EQ not having bots pre-some-point-in-time is both false and true. there were gold (plat) farmers in the early days- they were called ebay'ers. it took an actual person, actively playing the game, then post items/gold on ebay for sale for real money. this was largely player regulated with regard to players "ebaying". if it sounded like a crook, acted like a crook, it was treated like a crook. there was a list on morell-thule of community banned players for quite sometime, that was fairly often updated. if you made a bad name for yourself you would find out because people would even go so far as call you out in whatever chat you were looking for group in. the end result was rerolling months of work just to get half way through the level-grind.

Swampster

Another thing Codemasters and Turbine did in the early years of LOTRO was they broad brush banned IP's from China, Russia, other Asian Countries from accessing the Western servers, while not infallable by a long shot it's another hurdle to clear for those operating from these regions!

DewiMorgan

Youch, that'd hurt the real players from China, though, and I've seen a few here on the forums. Sure, you can proxy, but then you get latency issues... as the EU players are already getting.

So, it might well have an effect, but I hope it doesn't come to that

Singular

DewiMorgan wrote: »

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?

By being boring, f2p, full of microtransactions and a low player base.

DDO also has no bots, no spam. It's also f2p, full of microtransactions, a lot of p2w, and a low player base.

So...yes, ESO could become bot free by simply getting rid of its player base. Then the bots wouldn't care b/c there wouldn't be any money to be made here.

The reason bots are here is b/c this game is full of players - new market, big world, big game.

Singular

redwoodtreesprite wrote: »

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.

Like the heavy handed nerfs? And the lack of dev communication? And the forced play styles?

I kind of see that.

hiyde

robacooperb16_ESO wrote: »

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.

Pre-F2P days in LOTRO, (some) gold farmers played real toons, leveled them up and farmed top level zones for the rare crafting ingredient (beryl shards) that dropped off of a small number of named signature/elite mobs that respawned 1 hour after kill.

I used to spend my time hunting them down and reporting them every time I saw them. It was actually kind of fun. (Plus, following them led me to learn where all the shard-dropping mobs were )

Whenever I reported one, within 30 mins or so, the account was gone. Without fail. Some of the gold farmers actually begged me to stop / offered bribes. Others use to call me out in OOC chat, making threats. Apparently I got very famous on chinese goldfarmer message boards for a while.

But I'm off track. My point is that gold farmer reports were acted on QUICKLY and with very good accuracy. They looked at the account transactions before banning. They also 'followed' the money to take out other related accounts.

Jeremy_gelber_ESO

im confused about the eq not having bots theory. sure macroquest made it easy for full automation. but even before that there were plenty of /follow healbots.

LadyHen

Lotro did have bots until Riders of Rohan came out. That killed the game some. Then the latest expansion Helms Deep really killed it.

Castielle

Lotro is dead. No people, no bots. Simple. How Turbine managed to fail at Middle Earth is mind boggling...

Cas

ahstin2001nub18_ESO

Jeremy_gelber_ESO wrote: »

im confused about the eq not having bots theory. sure macroquest made it easy for full automation. but even before that there were plenty of /follow healbots.

two boxing and botting are not always the same. i used to two-box and i would have two keyboards and play both characters. in the early days, those that could program bots (if it was possible i dont know) were making more money else where than the gaming community would offer for bot programs. times have changed where its not as uncommon to be computer proficient, so its essentially an easy side project for new programmers to make money.

and its not a theory. EQ wasnt a fisher-price game where its geared for age 3+. you had to have a group. there were plenty of multi-boxers, and there was the urban legend of a few. one said that there was a guy that made enough accounts to solo the thurgadin (sp?) ring war quest and multi-boxed it. there were others that talked about how people had the full 6 group make up all their own.

jmartindaleb14_ESO

IMO, the best way to fix the botting issue is to make a mine spot for everyone. Like WoW. Once you use it, it disappears for you till it respawns, but its there for someone else too till they hit it. It removes the big demand, and doesn't tick off the legit players having a bot take a spot.
It doesn't get rid of the bots, but it won't effect normal players while they are waiting for the bots to go away.