ESO my ideas on handling the bot issue

Mefit · May 2014

1. End any account creation outside the region of the Mega Server .

2. Any Character outside of the Map way below intended levels is opened for PvP .

3. Characters still wearing Prison gear is flagged for PvP outside of Factions Start City.

4. Character Reported for a large amount of Reports for Hacking/Exploit , flagged for PvP .

5. Permanently Ban Goldbuyers
(b) If not ban , make a wall of shame and put Buyers/botters/hackers/exploiters on it with reason for their appearance on it .
(c) Take away all goods levels and anything acquired by the account.

I dislike Goldsellers but lets not forget that the spam and bots are 99% from Goldseller/RMT Companies and the reason they are here is Profits . The resources they put into hacking/Botting/Spamming cost money no matter how little . The game cost money !
By Banning the Buyers who are caught doing trades or receiving mail from a RMT account that has been caught , it will not end the population of Bots/RMT but it will put a major dent into it .

At this point with the underground Bots and the ones on top who glide by in the air or the 4-8+ manned Bot groups spamming about killing everything , the game itself will become unplayable and all the bugs and other issues will no longer matter .

I am a crafter and I am doing well with my own armors/weapons/pots , but when I made a alt and tried to get some Jute , I found myself having to camp a location in hopes of beating the bot that was only visible by his name that was underground spamming all the local jute in the area .

When I was in ColdHarbour , it felt like the name should be called BotHarbour being so many multiboxers and bots just speeding on by killing everything in site .

One of the Open bosses at the end of a quest was being spammed by a legion of bots and I was lucky after 5 attempts get a shot in .

I love this game , its beautiful , its community is a little poisonous but I can deal with a zone chat out of hand, sometimes I enjoy the read . But.............. cannot play a MMORPG if the bots control everything from mats to mobs .

At one point you guys are gonna have to eat into your profits and realize that bad players and bad players .
There is no point in them playing this game if they have to buy gold or get a program to play it for them .
Almost like they need intervention .

babylon · May 2014

Mefit wrote: »

1. End any account creation outside the region of the Mega Server .

Yeah why not, let's make the Oceanic community aware our presence is officially unwelcome.

Saerydoth · May 2014

babylon wrote: »

Mefit wrote: »

1. End any account creation outside the region of the Mega Server .

Yeah why not, let's make the Oceanic community aware our presence is officially unwelcome.

It wouldn't work anyway. The accounts are created and used with proxies that mask their location, and they are purchased with stolen credit cards.

Sorry to say this, but IP blocking does not work at all, and hasn't worked for quite some time.

Sakiri · May 2014

Live monitoring of chat and zones.

Im telling you.

Wont be cheap, which is why most games dont do it, but Im telling you that will work.

Slash8915 · May 2014

Sorry, OP. But this is a useless thread. You think you're the only person to create a thread thinking they have the ultimate solutions to dealing with the bots? I see new ones every time I come onto these forums.

Also, no offense... But I'm sure ZOS would rather pay someone who's job it is to deal with these sort of things, than take the advice from some random player.

starkerealm · May 2014

Mefit wrote: »

3. Characters still wearing Prison gear is flagged for PvP outside of Factions Start City.

Yeah, screw those new players who don't have alts to provide them with gear and didn't grind in the prison looking for chests. We don't need their scum!

EDIT, I do like how, in the thread title, it looks like ESO is a verb... draw your own conclusions on what it means.

Slash8915 · May 2014

Gotta agree with the guy above me. Reading over your "solutions", you have some of the worst I've ever seen. Thank God your ideas don't matter.

starkerealm · May 2014

Mefit wrote: »

2. Any Character outside of the Map way below intended levels is opened for PvP .

Because no errors could ever propel you out of the map boundaries.

Mefit wrote: »

4. Character Reported for a large amount of Reports for Hacking/Exploit , flagged for PvP .

Ah... courting the valuable Goonswarm demographic. I see no way a large organized group could use this to selectively murder players and loot their corpses...

...wait... you don't think the bots would figure out how to flag players for PvP with this, do you? That would be singularly diabolical.

Mefit wrote: »

5. Permanently Ban Goldbuyers
(b) If not ban , make a wall of shame and put Buyers/botters/hackers/exploiters on it with reason for their appearance on it .

Because, as we all know, bots are such emotionally delicate and fragile creatures, say something unkind and they'll spend six hours trying to run away into a wall, crying.

Mefit wrote: »

(c) Take away all goods levels and anything acquired by the account.

But, don't revert the completed quests, because if this happens on a character accidentally you want to make absolutely it's completely unplayable, but you don't want to just lock the character or, you know, ban the account, because that would be wasteful.

Also, this in no way resembles a bug that can already, because giving forum users the ability to point at those suffering from it and saying, "well ya shuddn't have baught gold, naow shouldya?" will make everything better.

aleister · May 2014

Gold-farming/spamming bots are a back-end billing/account management problem.

felixgamingx1 · May 2014

Not all bots are made in China this game shouldn't have been built on pretty much the same engine as skyrim. The ppl responsible for these hacks have been playing TES for a long time.

Sakiri · May 2014

felixgamingx1 wrote: »

Not all bots are made in China this game shouldn't have been built on pretty much the same engine as skyrim. The ppl responsible for these hacks have been playing TES for a long time.

If you thunk theyre the same engine... lol.

Atreidus · May 2014

Lost of bits are from the U.S. to.

ausmack2014 · May 2014

1. End any account creation outside the region of the Mega Server .

I'm an Australian player, so you can understand I don't find this idea very palatable.

2. Any Character outside of the Map way below intended levels is opened for PvP .

Easier solution than this - don't allow them into a zone way below the level.

5. Permanently Ban Goldbuyers

This is assuming gold buyers are easily identified. Most of them don't go on chat and announce they just bought 20,000 gold. And I suspect the developers etc have enough trouble just keeping up with the problems that are easily identified. But I agree permabans are a good idea, as long as they can be identified and there is a review system in place to stop genuine players - eg, ones loaned or given gold by friends or family, etc.

starkerealm · May 2014

ausmack2014 wrote: »

This is assuming gold buyers are easily identified. Most of them don't go on chat and announce they just bought 20,000 gold. And I suspect the developers etc have enough trouble just keeping up with the problems that are easily identified. But I agree permabans are a good idea, as long as they can be identified and there is a review system in place to stop genuine players - eg, ones loaned or given gold by friends or family, etc.

It's also worth remembering that this isn't a hypothetical. Back in early access or right after launch, ZoS did hand down a wave of bans over blind gold transactions... ZoS was pretty sure they were goldsellers, but then, a bunch of players popped up on the forums complaining about how they'd given their wife or brother or whatever money for a horse and gotten banned for it. Last I checked, ZoS did back down off most of those bans, too.

SteveCampsOut · May 2014

Mefit wrote: »

3. Characters still wearing Prison gear is flagged for PvP outside of Factions Start City.

Great! So you want ME flagged as bot for creating an Alt and using the Guild Roster feature of "Travel to Player" to travel outside the beginner area so I can ride my horse around the higher levels to map out the Way Shrines which is exactly what I did last night! Is it cheating? Not as long as the game engine supports it! Does it make ME a bot? Heck no! It makes me Smart!

Lilth · May 2014

Mefit wrote: »

1. End any account creation outside the region of the Mega Server .

2. Any Character outside of the Map way below intended levels is opened for PvP .

3. Characters still wearing Prison gear is flagged for PvP outside of Factions Start City.

4. Character Reported for a large amount of Reports for Hacking/Exploit , flagged for PvP .

At one point you guys are gonna have to eat into your profits and realize that bad players and bad players .
There is no point in them playing this game if they have to buy gold or get a program to play it for them .
Almost like they need intervention .

I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is a work around for some open world pvp action in the pve zones?

kidding...
Anyway, they won't work for the reasons other people have posted.

At this point it is going to take some serious work to get rid of half the amount of bots in this game. It's pretty frustrating that it was allowed to get as bad as it has.
When I was leveling I noticed less and less the higher level I got and now in vet levels I haven't seen any. Some people have said they see some but it's not so bad that it blocks progress.

Strontium-Dog · May 2014

As ive stated before many times.

Instead of ZOS and GMs banning accounts, make them FFA pvp . Just flag the account.
Then make those accounts lootable. Sure Mr Bot continue youre botting but everyone is going to farm you, in the woods, in dungeons in the bank vaults .

zaria · May 2014

starkerealm wrote: »

ausmack2014 wrote: »

This is assuming gold buyers are easily identified. Most of them don't go on chat and announce they just bought 20,000 gold. And I suspect the developers etc have enough trouble just keeping up with the problems that are easily identified. But I agree permabans are a good idea, as long as they can be identified and there is a review system in place to stop genuine players - eg, ones loaned or given gold by friends or family, etc.

It's also worth remembering that this isn't a hypothetical. Back in early access or right after launch, ZoS did hand down a wave of bans over blind gold transactions... ZoS was pretty sure they were goldsellers, but then, a bunch of players popped up on the forums complaining about how they'd given their wife or brother or whatever money for a horse and gotten banned for it. Last I checked, ZoS did back down off most of those bans, too.

True, giving gold to RL friends who start the game is perfectly ok.

However it should be pretty easy to track all the transactions, someone who gives away a million gold in a week is an gold seller.
Note give away, he can also be an trader buying and trading and easy have a million in turnover but the trader will show an totally different transaction profile.

This will also make the bots who sell the stuff the farming bots collect pretty visible.
Bots don't give stuff to other than the player higher up in the gold seller pyramid, so finding one bot and follow the transactions you would be able to take down not the entire network.

And its very hard to launder gold in ESO in the scale the gold sellers need.

dumbo · May 2014

It's really not rocket science, just look for accounts rapidly creating/deleting large numbers of characters.

zaria · May 2014

dumbo wrote: »

It's really not rocket science, just look for accounts rapidly creating/deleting large numbers of characters.

This, think of it as a spam mail filter however one who track behavior rather than text in mails.
Using an filter like this you can add new behavior to the lists.

garfsbastian · May 2014

just report this site, made a little research and prolly this is the bot that they are running most of the times..we can clearly see in the foruns what they are up too

http://www.mmoviper.com/forum.html

Bam! clean them all!