Bot Farming

MLGProPlayer

russelmmendoza wrote: »

Someone has to do it.
Their not destroying nature.
Sure its annoying.
But no actual harm done.
Zos do nothing about.
So why bother.

There is a lot of harm done to the economy.

BWS2K

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

BWS2K wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

BWS2K wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

BWS2K wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

BWS2K wrote: »

InvictusApollo wrote: »

ManwithBeard9 wrote: »

mocap wrote: »

bots are main producers of golden mats. Don't report them. Seriously, not trolling. How many golden mats most of you sold last month? I bet 0.

InvictusApollo wrote: »

Do you want cheap materials?

Is y'all botting?

Yeah. Just because we understand that botters make prices of materials much lower, must mean that we are botters.

This is literally not how economics work. Take away the bots and prices might spike for a couple days but they won't go above what people are willing to pay for them. It's not the real world - everyone has access to the same nodes. When the bots are denying those nodes and flooding the market with them, they can set whatever price they want... yet they set a low price.

Because people won't pay more for them.

Bots do not help the market in any way at all.

This literally makes no sense. Farmers set low prices because there is far more supply than demand. More competition leads to downward pressure on the price.

And how is there far more supply than demand again?

But if you took out all the bots, and there was suddenly only 10% of the current supply of, let's say, Jute on the market... do you think the sellers would spike their prices to match that and still turn a profit? Of course not. No one would pay that because players can just go farm for themselves. The price will never go above what buyers are willing to pay, bots or not. It literally makes complete sense. There's no competition, only convenience.

Yes, prices will go up. That is how economics works.

Farming has a cost associated with it in the form of time investment.

...and botters represent a zero-time investment. The prices will not go very far up because if they skyrocket no one will buy them. That's what I meant by it being basic economics. Reduce market supply in an environment where supply in the field is available to every single customer and you can only increase the market price by so much before the time investment to farm becomes more desirable to the customer than the payment of gold associated with that time investment on behalf of the seller. Thanks to botting, the prices have been set at more or less current rates (whatever they are) for a considerable amount of time - buyers aren't going to care about the reasons for mark-ups, so the expectation will remain.

I'm happy to be wrong about this though. Triple the price of a material that can be farmed and sells well and see if it still sells as well. Then triple the price of something rare and see if it still sells as well. #science

Prices were 3x higher what they are at one point. Tempering Alloys were going for 12k 2 years ago on PC/NA. They sell for 4k now. People bought them at 12k.

Farming is slow. In my full farming gear, without any other players around, I might be able to farm 3 stacks of rubedite ore, 2 stacks of dust, 1 stack of wood, 1 stack of silk, and a few dozen flowers in an hour. If you are doing a lot of crafting, that isn't nearly enough to meet your needs.

And again, that's a perfect scenario using an optimized setup. How many players have a full set of farming gear or know how to efficiently farm? How many players are willing to spend 10+ hours every week farming all the materials they need for crafting? Not many I'd say. This is why there will always be a market for materials. There is a substantial cost associated with farming that you're ignoring.

I agree. There will always be a market for materials - at a price people are willing to pay. That's my point. In the past, people were willing to pay 12k for Alloys. Now they sell for 4k. So post a bunch at 12k right now and see if they sell.

I'm not ignoring the substantial cost, I'm saying it's not an excuse to include or justify botting. If you removed them, people would be forced to decide to either farm or pay. Sellers might make a quick buck initially but the prices won't ever raise significantly because eventually people would just farm it themselves... which they wouldn't want to do... but they won't pay the high prices... so the sellers set prices competitively... and things balance out. You don't need bots to make that process work. That's what I meant by saying it's simple economics - some folks maintain that bots are an important and necessary part of keeping prices low. They aren't.

Prices wouldn't jump over night. If you kill botting, prices would slowly rise over time up to the point that people are willing to pay (equilibrium). If they were willing to pay 12k 2 years ago, they'd be willing to pay 12k now. Nothing has made farming more enjoyable now than 2 years ago. The cost of farming is constant.

*shrugs*

I have been known to make mistakes.

From time to time.

Oh dear...

Holycannoli

Rudyard wrote: »

At least we don't have this any more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrTD_sKzz9Y

or this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUNEW3Tmn2Q

Bots made farming and even questing close to impossible in many areas that first summer.

Yep I remember those bots, and I remember them doing something about it:

mrpaxman

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

mrpaxman wrote: »

mocap wrote: »

bots are main producers of golden mats. Don't report them. Seriously, not trolling. How many golden mats most of you sold last month? I bet 0.

16 would be the worst amount in any 1 DAY i have ever sold for years. Most days its 34+. My stock still grows. There are guilds that are based on crafting where most members do writs daily on every character. If i need more gold mats ill go collect some of my thousands of survey maps. 1 zone will get me about 2 hundred gold mats over about 2 hours speed farming them. Each map is collected before rapids expires. About 20 maps per location currently. Total survey map collection time amount left to collect is around 100 hours for just myself. WTB survey map collection service please ZOS Economy stability is very important in any MMO. Botters have been the single reason that has ended a lot of other games.

Every bot is taking gold from hard working players by killing the prices. When botting was at its worst. Rubedo leather was around 6g each with many traders having 30 listings of 200 made from multiple accounts at the same time. A few times per day as well. Terrible for anyone wanting to sell their mats after working so hard. at 6g most players were vendoring them. Now the prices have recovered a fair amount from being so bad in the past. Same thing goes with all the other mats from botters

Botting being possible in online gaming in this last decade baffles me. How is there no anti-cheat software that we must agree to if we want to play eso like so many other online games have. Software that will detect cheat software "running" at any moment the game is running. The removal of them i will not share specific details publicly. I will only say it is not on day 1. I can say botters do get removed. Do report them. A change was made many years a go where the more reports made against someone puts them higher on the list for investigation resulting in actions happening sooner rather than later. My personal mission of literally over 100 accounts at Vivec's Antlers in Stonefalls was totally successful. Now not only can players grind there. They can also do the quest which requires killing those same creatures. Information was both requested and given to zos regarding the botting accounts there. A change was made the following patch making the creatures there. Turning them from around a 30 second spawn time. To a random spawn time closer to that around the spawn time of other creatures in eso. The fast spawn times seemingly were there so multiple players could complete the quest with out no enemies in sight. Which did work fine until the botters came along

Even ESO during beta. The server were reset due to so many items from botters. Most people will say that it was hard to even see a single node for weeks or months. Constantly seeing characters zipping through the sky to each node location. The anti cheat software used has definitely improved since then. It does need to keep improving.

There will always be people trying to cheat everyone else. Thankfully its less than 1% of people out there

Taunting enemies. Pulling enemies on small amounts of the accounts at a time and shielding or self healing gets them killed. It really is fun

It baffles my mind why they don't buy/develop an anti-cheat system for this game. Maybe it would bring down performance even more?

Only from my own memory. There has been dev comments made in the past about their anti cheat software and they will not disclose information on how it works for legitimate reasons. I remember them also saying it is always improving. The results of it i see evident like how botters got stopped from being able to fly through the air at incredible speeds. Or another being at a much later time in the game when players could climb up in the sky and drop multiple meteors one after another. Both these and much more has been prevented. I just wish it was even better like some of the 3rd party programs that are around. I am unable to see any kind of cheating being accomplished with those anti cheat programs. I just wish the built in anti-cheat thingy-ma-jigs were as effective as those. ie, never once witnessing cheating ever since they were implemented in some other games around. I like how they also cause no issue with people having anti-cheat software for legit reasons like 1 player games. It basically kicks you from game instantly if at any point it detects cheat software running. To play the game. Just turn the cheat software off and it lets you in. For performance. hmm, i guess it very easily could. Or if it is like the 3rd party program i am thinking of. No one at all has noticed any performance loss at all since it was implemented in that multiplayer online game.

Elsonso

Androconium wrote: »

These people pay for a game licence somewhere.

In theory, someone does pay for the licenses. Who paid is the question. I would not go as far as to say that the person running the bots has paid for the license. At least, not in every case.

Just a detail that I did not want to get lost in that statement.

Androconium wrote: »

I'm of the opinion that ZOS wont want to do anything.

I don't think that ZOS is going to do more than what they already are. They seem to be at peace with whatever actions they are taking, and I don't see that changing in favor of fewer bots. Not in scope, not in priority, and not in additional anti-bot technology.

mrpaxman wrote: »

Only from my own memory. There has been dev comments made in the past about their anti cheat software and they will not disclose information on how it works for legitimate reasons. I remember them also saying it is always improving.

Security through obscurity isn't the armor many people think it is, and I have to imagine that it is pretty ineffective where ESO is concerned. People make money off of botting, and whether ZOS tells them what they did or not, they are going to find out when their programs don't work or people start getting detected faster. Where ZOS might have spent weeks, or months, implementing some clever new scheme to thwart bots and cheaters, the people who make money off of this will spend hours adapting to it.

mrpaxman wrote: »

The results of it i see evident like how botters got stopped from being able to fly through the air at incredible speeds.

Speed, underground, and flying. These are minor things, and the people using those abilities were foolish to do it, since it only drew attention to themselves. The core ability of the software to interpret what is happening in the game and respond to it does not appear to have been impacted by anything ZOS has done. All ZOS may have done is enforce limits on what crazy and wild things they can do. That actually aids the cheaters by helping to keep them off the bot radars. Seeing someone flying through the air to a node sort of stands out, but if they run to it like a normal person, not so much.

mrpaxman wrote: »

I just wish it was even better like some of the 3rd party programs that are around. I am unable to see any kind of cheating being accomplished with those anti cheat programs.

This is really the only way that ZOS can get ahead of the cheating game, but it comes with a cost. They have to adapt the technology to ESO, and pay someone for the rights to use the software. If any part of that software is installed on the player's computer, which is pretty much required, there will be a segment of players that dislike it, and won't play the game. Whether they are cheating or not.

I consider most of the anti-cheat software to be little more than spyware, and I really don't trust the companies that write (or use) them to not be collecting information from me and selling it. Making a little coin on the side by selling personal information, even aggregated, is all the rage right now. All the popular companies seem to be doing it, and many of them don't ask first.

Tabbycat

I was in Stros M'kai this weekend with my outfit on and my cosmetic pet out and farming mudrabs for chiten and leather.

I hope no one mistaked me for a bot.

Yeah it's annoying to compete with bots. It's hard enough to find a time to be on when there aren't elebenty other people farming materials for crafting.

Elsonso

Tabbycat wrote: »

I was in Stros M'kai this weekend with my outfit on and my cosmetic pet out and farming mudrabs for chiten and leather.

I hope no one mistaked me for a bot.

Yeah it's annoying to compete with bots. It's hard enough to find a time to be on when there aren't elebenty other people farming materials for crafting.

I used to routinely play in Stros and would report bots there. Most of the time, it was half a dozen players farming, and two or three bots farming. It was easy to tell them apart.

Grimm13

BWS2K wrote: »

It's interesting to think what these injections of gold in the dailies are doing to the economy as well. Someone was just talking to me yesterday about the prices for... kuta? I don't remember... and how they'd spiked 'for some reason.' What happened this week? 100k daily reward. Sellers knew folks had more coin to burn and set their prices higher. Coin equals time and ZOS just gave us free time that we didn't spend farming that we could use to get materials. I, personally, don't think the injections are going to tank anything - the prices have already started to settle, I'm sure... because the extra coin is gone. No bots required.

It is not necessarily that the prices were raised but that the influx of gold allowed more to buy the lower priced materials, then sellers replaced the stock with higher prices that they saw and priced just under those on the Trader still. as more stock is added to Traders, the price walks downward.

You can see this same trend happen several times a year. Most notably before the free eso times and increased players from school downtimes.

BWS2K

Grimm13 wrote: »

BWS2K wrote: »

It's interesting to think what these injections of gold in the dailies are doing to the economy as well. Someone was just talking to me yesterday about the prices for... kuta? I don't remember... and how they'd spiked 'for some reason.' What happened this week? 100k daily reward. Sellers knew folks had more coin to burn and set their prices higher. Coin equals time and ZOS just gave us free time that we didn't spend farming that we could use to get materials. I, personally, don't think the injections are going to tank anything - the prices have already started to settle, I'm sure... because the extra coin is gone. No bots required.

It is not necessarily that the prices were raised but that the influx of gold allowed more to buy the lower priced materials, then sellers replaced the stock with higher prices that they saw and priced just under those on the Trader still. as more stock is added to Traders, the price walks downward.

You can see this same trend happen several times a year. Most notably before the free eso times and increased players from school downtimes.

Fair enough. Potato, potato.

Mr_Walker

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Mr_Walker wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Mr_Walker wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

DocDova wrote: »

It's nothing serious, there is plenty of material for everyone. I don't even actively farm and I have enough of everything.

If these guys are providing cheap and plenty of material in economy, I see no harm.

Bots ruin the economy by creating oversupply. They take profits away from legitimate farmers.

Technically they distort both the supply and demand side of the curve.

On the flip side though, being a guy who just wanders around collecting stuff whilst on my way to whatever quest awaits me, if "legitimate farmers" are the ones who sprint up and undercut me when I'm heading towards some ore, they can get stuffed.

How do they distort demand?

They hoover materials normal "non-bots" would otherwise collect.

I'll pretend you didn't ask that question.

That's not how it works.

Yes it is. Plus boring farmers would see an increase in thier "productivity".

MLGProPlayer

Mr_Walker wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Mr_Walker wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Mr_Walker wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

DocDova wrote: »

It's nothing serious, there is plenty of material for everyone. I don't even actively farm and I have enough of everything.

If these guys are providing cheap and plenty of material in economy, I see no harm.

Bots ruin the economy by creating oversupply. They take profits away from legitimate farmers.

Technically they distort both the supply and demand side of the curve.

On the flip side though, being a guy who just wanders around collecting stuff whilst on my way to whatever quest awaits me, if "legitimate farmers" are the ones who sprint up and undercut me when I'm heading towards some ore, they can get stuffed.

How do they distort demand?

They hoover materials normal "non-bots" would otherwise collect.

I'll pretend you didn't ask that question.

That's not how it works.

Yes it is. Plus boring farmers would see an increase in thier "productivity".

Saying "yes it is" doesn't make it so.

Arunei

@DocDova @InvictusApollo
You guys aren't considering the main reason people run these bots to begin with. You think they're doing it out of the kindness of their hearts to provide low-cost mats to people? No, these people are running bots for hours and hours, raking in hundreds upon thousands of gold with zero effort, and then all that gold they get is sold. It's gold sellers running these scripts.

Oh, and the fact is that they hurt legitimate players who make their money from selling mats because the gold sellers are okay with selling their mats at 5g/mat. Why wouldn't they? They're not putting in any effort whatsoever and are still making money hand over fist, while the legit player is putting in literal hours to farm up stuff to sell, only to find that they get minimal payout for their work.

@russelmmendoza
So someone has to break the TOS to run scripts and get mats that other people would legit gather were bots not there to get them first? That's some...pretty strange logic, there. Also, see above for how bots do actually hurt legit players.

DocDova

I am neither against bots not in support of them. My observations regarding this on ps4 na server are as following

# I saw some bots farming at some places for minor things I.e. 10 bots standing at a place killing mudcrabs or similar creature and getting the loots, I never saw them actively farming from node to node, or I am incapable of spotting them. That's my understanding of this matter.

# I in general don't try to stop something I don't fully understand, as I might be doing more harm than good without knowing provided that activity is not grossly harming people.

# being a gamer doesn't pay most of the times, being an adult gamer would be even harder, where one has to earn a living and also have to play games. I don't want to say something which can make things harder for someone somewhere.

In the end, my knowledge of issue and it's current extend is trivial at best, but I belive zos team know it, probably benefits of this outweigh it's harms. I am a doctor in real life and everything we use to treat patients with comes with its own benefits and harms as well as potential risks. If we will just look at harms, we won't be able to treat patients.

On a personal level, when it comes to cheap material, I would have of conflict of interests as I am a master crafter, I craft for frens and random people, so I am always looking for cheap material and I don't sell crafting material. I craft for free 9 out of 10 times, even for strangers and that remaining one time, I get some material back, I don't charge gold. I do my crafting writs on 8 toon daily without fail, other than my crafter, everyone craft level 1 stuff, so writs are self sustaining, I get 35k gold plus some survey, 2-3 golden material daily. It gives me like a million gold each month and that's my main source of income, I know it's too little but I am adding million gold in economy every month, which I generated I.e. not from selling stuff to other players.