What is the purpose of Bots?

Davor

I have been saying a lot of posts about Bots lately. It seems they are a bad thing. Thing is, I don't understand why. First of all, why have a robot play your game? I thought the idea of playing is to have fun. So what is the purpose of a Bot and why have them? Just would like to understand why lots of people are upset with them and why Zenimax does nothing about them.

Blacksmoke

Some use it to level characters or farm materials
And leveled accounts can be sold

Merkabeh

1. Create Bots
2. Farm Mats
3. Refine Mats
4. Sell gold improve mats
5. Sell in game gold for real money online.
6. Optionally, sell accounts, for real money, with max level characters from farming leather. (not sure if this is real issue in ESO, but I know other MMOs would sell accounts).

People and ZOS don't care for them because RMT is the devil! I believe ZOS does take action on bots, but the bot farming community puts new ones up as fast, or faster than ZOS can take them down.

In the end, RMT is the problem, and as long as players keep buying MMO objects from 3rd party sites, RMTers will figure out ways to gather those in game objects as effectively as possible.

Just a theory...

BlackSparrow

Not everyone plays MMOs for the pure fun of it. Have you ever heard the term "gold selling" or "gold trading"? It's related.

Gold selling/trading is a banned practice in most MMOs where someone makes a bunch of gold on a character, then arranges to sell that gold to other players for real money. It's a huge no-no in just about any multiplayer game, because it ruins the economy and usually involves the use of bots.

Bots can automate tasks that some players find very repetitive and can be left to run 24 hours a day. Things like farming certain items en masse or farming rare drops, for example. Bots allow gold traders to set up a bot to do this, leave them to run 24/7, and then sell their loot at low prices (again, borking up the economy) to still get massive profit for literally no effort. Then, they sell the gold they made for real money in deals arranged outside the game. It's super shady, drags down the in-game economy, and is one of the big reason why bots aggravate so many players.

So yeah. Bots are bad. Report them when you see them.

EDIT: And in ZOS' defense, they do do things about bots... it's just hard to tell. Reporting them sends data to ZOS, who collect that data to not only ban individual bots, but to figure out how the bots are working and ways to counteract it. Every few months, there will be a huge bot purge when they enact something to stop the current bots from functioning. Then, the botters find a way around those measures and slowly start trickling back in until ZOS enacts the next counter-measure. It's basically an arms race.

Easily_Lost

One way to stop them is not to buy items / accounts out side of the game for real life money. My opinion, is anybody that does is stupid to do so.

Davor

Thank you everyone for the comments. I understand now. So people would buy the accounts or gold. So they are taking short cuts then. I never knew you could do this. I guess playing Fallout and TES games single player only and this is my real first MMO, I just didn't know about them.

Again thank you for explaining it.