Bots that Talk back

OldSmeller

I have been making the rounds reporting bots when I see them but something interest happened today.
The bots began to communicate and attempt to justify their existence.
https://www.youtube.com/user/fnogman333/playlists

In the video I document a strange strain of bot that has gained sentience and the ability to smack talk.

[edited to remove naming]

Tapio75

Yeah, i have been reporting these quite a bit as well. It seems the character deletion timer is not working anymore for these.

ZOS needs to take more action to prevent people from using automated characters which really is botting.

phairdon

Haha at the strange strain of bots.

Nifty2g

bro....

Rohamad_Ali

Is it boting if they are not Afk ? I always thought boting was automated Afk play .

IronCrystal

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

Is it boting if they are not Afk ? I always thought boting was automated Afk play .

It is botting as long as they have something automating their actions.

Vipstaakki

You cannot kill these bots anymore either. They have learned to respawn, get to the same position where they were and resume after you bait mobs to them that kill them.

LordGavus

If a bot could pass the Turing test, are they still a bot or could they be considered a player?

The machines are rising up.

Rohamad_Ali

IronCrystal wrote: »

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

Is it boting if they are not Afk ? I always thought boting was automated Afk play .

It is botting as long as they have something automating their actions.

Is there a way to tell if they are using something to automate or just holding down the heavy attack button with their finger ? I always send a whisper and if I get no reply and see them attacking , then I submit a report . If they are responsive then I don't know for sure how to tell they are automating when standing still . If they are all running together in a follow program then I can tell as only one will respond while the others are Afk and using a program to follow the one live player . But standing still at a dolman is difficult for me to distinguish the difference .

Turbotailz

There are bots I don't mind and there are bots that are meant to be reported. The bots I don't mind are the ones who don't affect my gameplay especially since this game credits you for whatever enemy you tag. The ones I don't like are the ones who affect my gameplay if they're in dungeons or pvp just wasting a active player slot. Now I haven't seen any bots in dungeons and I don't do pvp so there's nothing for me to report them on as of right now.

BRogueNZ

at least they seem to stay in one spot (as above) would be more annoying if they were everywhere

IronCrystal

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

IronCrystal wrote: »

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

Is it boting if they are not Afk ? I always thought boting was automated Afk play .

It is botting as long as they have something automating their actions.

Is there a way to tell if they are using something to automate or just holding down the heavy attack button with their finger ? I always send a whisper and if I get no reply and see them attacking , then I submit a report . If they are responsive then I don't know for sure how to tell they are automating when standing still . If they are all running together in a follow program then I can tell as only one will respond while the others are Afk and using a program to follow the one live player . But standing still at a dolman is difficult for me to distinguish the difference .

It is not fully possible for us to tell for sure. Take your best guess. Besides, we only tell ZOS the ones we think are bots. We aren't condemning them to bans once we hit report.

I'm sure ZOS has more details on the players than we do.

JamieAubrey

They're learning

Tapio75

Turbotailz wrote: »

There are bots I don't mind and there are bots that are meant to be reported. The bots I don't mind are the ones who don't affect my gameplay especially since this game credits you for whatever enemy you tag. The ones I don't like are the ones who affect my gameplay if they're in dungeons or pvp just wasting a active player slot. Now I haven't seen any bots in dungeons and I don't do pvp so there's nothing for me to report them on as of right now.

It should not matter if it disturbs your playstyle or not, botting is not allowed and thus, is an action that should always be reported so that ZOS can investigate.

There is no justification for using any sort of bot, if someone is too busy playing the game, he/she should be logged on to afk bot. Also many bots are used by gold sellers who farm stuff to sell to get gold, then that gold is sold to a player through third party provider which is not allowed. Gold sellers are bad for the game economy and thus, bad for everyone, even for those who dont actually see the bots.

Even if someone is sitting at his/her computer, chatting ingame and at the same time, using some sort of character automation, thats also not allowed.

bulbousb16_ESO

Turbotailz wrote: »

There are bots I don't mind and there are bots that are meant to be reported. The bots I don't mind are the ones who don't affect my gameplay.

So, if it doesn't directly affect your gameplay, it doesn't affect you, right?

ADarklore

Tapio75 wrote: »

Turbotailz wrote: »

There are bots I don't mind and there are bots that are meant to be reported. The bots I don't mind are the ones who don't affect my gameplay especially since this game credits you for whatever enemy you tag. The ones I don't like are the ones who affect my gameplay if they're in dungeons or pvp just wasting a active player slot. Now I haven't seen any bots in dungeons and I don't do pvp so there's nothing for me to report them on as of right now.

It should not matter if it disturbs your playstyle or not, botting is not allowed and thus, is an action that should always be reported so that ZOS can investigate.

There is no justification for using any sort of bot, if someone is too busy playing the game, he/she should be logged on to afk bot. Also many bots are used by gold sellers who farm stuff to sell to get gold, then that gold is sold to a player through third party provider which is not allowed. Gold sellers are bad for the game economy and thus, bad for everyone, even for those who dont actually see the bots.

Even if someone is sitting at his/her computer, chatting ingame and at the same time, using some sort of character automation, thats also not allowed.

The problem is, ZOS can EASILY tell who is buying the gold and ban them, but they don't. All they would have to do is look for, usually low level items, that are sold for extremely outrageous gold amounts; nobody legit would buy a low level item for 35000 gold, other than a gold seller/buyer transaction. If ZOS were truly serious about getting rid of botting, they could easily search for these types of transactions and start banning both seller AND buyer, but they don't. WHY? Because they don't want to lose sources of future revenue, because they know even people that buy gold, will be playing the game in order to use that gold, and probably subscribe or use the Crown Store.

Jemcrystal

I'm telln ya:

LARGE ROAMER WITH LONG RANGE
keep you from standing in one place soaking up pnts with ease

qsnoopyjr

I dont see any bots.

Those people were right in telling you off by "report yourself"

Just because there isnt much to do in the game to make good money, doesnt mean anyone doing it is considered a bot.
I'm going to use that line next time people run around and call me a bot. "report yourself"

Huge disgrace being called a bot

Elsonso

Uh. Bots do not reply sarcastically in chat to commentary happening in chat.

Cadbury

The robot revolution has begun.

Tabbycat

Maybe OP is seeing robots where there aren't any?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_yNMgDsQ-k

Banana

Judgement days coming

zaria

ADarklore wrote: »

Tapio75 wrote: »

Turbotailz wrote: »

There are bots I don't mind and there are bots that are meant to be reported. The bots I don't mind are the ones who don't affect my gameplay especially since this game credits you for whatever enemy you tag. The ones I don't like are the ones who affect my gameplay if they're in dungeons or pvp just wasting a active player slot. Now I haven't seen any bots in dungeons and I don't do pvp so there's nothing for me to report them on as of right now.

It should not matter if it disturbs your playstyle or not, botting is not allowed and thus, is an action that should always be reported so that ZOS can investigate.

There is no justification for using any sort of bot, if someone is too busy playing the game, he/she should be logged on to afk bot. Also many bots are used by gold sellers who farm stuff to sell to get gold, then that gold is sold to a player through third party provider which is not allowed. Gold sellers are bad for the game economy and thus, bad for everyone, even for those who dont actually see the bots.

Even if someone is sitting at his/her computer, chatting ingame and at the same time, using some sort of character automation, thats also not allowed.

The problem is, ZOS can EASILY tell who is buying the gold and ban them, but they don't. All they would have to do is look for, usually low level items, that are sold for extremely outrageous gold amounts; nobody legit would buy a low level item for 35000 gold, other than a gold seller/buyer transaction. If ZOS were truly serious about getting rid of botting, they could easily search for these types of transactions and start banning both seller AND buyer, but they don't. WHY? Because they don't want to lose sources of future revenue, because they know even people that buy gold, will be playing the game in order to use that gold, and probably subscribe or use the Crown Store.

How do you automate that? Why don't simply give a lot of gold. This is also legal, say I borrow money and pay back later.

Now if doing an campaign against gold sellers you could follow the trail from the farming bots and upward in the system.
In this case overprices items in stores would be very interesting as as you say its an way to launder gold.

Ahzek

Turbotailz wrote: »

There are bots I don't mind and there are bots that are meant to be reported. The bots I don't mind are the ones who don't affect my gameplay especially since this game credits you for whatever enemy you tag. The ones I don't like are the ones who affect my gameplay if they're in dungeons or pvp just wasting a active player slot. Now I haven't seen any bots in dungeons and I don't do pvp so there's nothing for me to report them on as of right now.

This is a very short sighted point of view. In the end all bots will eventually affect you.
For example when bots are used to grind mobs for raw materials, which then get refined into tempers, the market will eventually get oversaturated with those tempers, with plenty of people having way too many. At that point ZOS might then see the temper overflow and maybe think of ways to get it back in line, maybe even by increasing the amount of tempers required to upgrade something.
Then the new player comes in, reaches max level, sees he needs a ton of mats to upgrade his gear and checks how easy it is to get these mats.
Since the mat drop rates are not balanced around the temper requirements of legitmate play that new player will quickly learn that to upgrade his gear he needs to put in unreasonable time, something he is pretty likely not to want to do, so he might just leave the game. This will happen to many new players and there you are, playing the game all by yourself with an army of bots.

Obviously is is an overly dramatic example and it usually doesnt go that far, but in the end all bots affect you and be kt only by changing prices in the playerdriven economy.

Tapio75

Bots do reply these days, usually something sarcastic, insulting or otherwise, they might even be friendly.

You see the trend today is, that one person operates a bot colony of couple of characters, he/she can then monitor each chat channel of each bot he/she is running and then reply from those bots to give impression of someone really playing a game.

Some stuff is borderline botting that anyone of us can do without regarding it as a botting. You see if you do a macro in the razer synapse for example, that holds the heavy attack button doiwn with single mouse press, thats automated character allready, this is not something you should do. I suspect many do this while watching television and are totally unaware they are running a bot. Other problem with this kind of macro bot, is that its hard to know whether the player is at the computer, holding left mouse button down physically or is it software doing it. Usually good way to see this is to watch the player for few minutes to see if characters moves at all in any direction.

Good way to know a bot is also to watch a player and count the intervals of some abilities the character seems to use at random intervals. One of the popular ones is hurricane 15 secs interval, lotus fan, volley, and add another abilities in the ,mix to make it look like random ability spamming.

Using these things to stay online is also botting :P

Auros

Tapio75

@Auros

And this contrubutes to improving ga.. How?

At least thanks for the bump :P

Auros

@Tapio75 this is to make everyone smile.

Tapio75

@Auros


Mr Aliens always works on this ^^

Tapio75

Iluvanir Dolmen is (Again) full of players that act like bots.

4 characters have heavy attack glued down with fire staff, spamming one spot on the ground non stop, no matter theres dolmen active or not, some spamming abilities in timed repetitive manor, some spamming volley..

This happens right now and im too frustrated to game moderation to even report them. They were there couple of days ago, exactly in the same place but with different characters.

Something has to be done about these, if theres a person behind a coomputer, i dont think this kind of play is legitimate since there clearly is some repeat macro going on, even if there is a person sitting at computer, this should be rooted out

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