[PS4] The one, who we all should know.

Trundik

Hello, friends. I play on PS4 server and long time a go noticed something wrong with its economy. You know price on tempered alloy is very low here, around 3700-4000 per unit in market. Why so? Answer is overproduction. Longer answer is because we have 100500 bots in our server, digging those nodes nonstop, except wednesday evening. THey produce tonns of tempered alloys, a lot more then players actually need. In result master of those bots forced to set lower price, and now its redicilously low globally(!). But let me highlight something.

Today i checked price on it in few towns found something interesting. One guild in Mornhold. In Wayrest we have two guilds trading this week. Sorry, here is not allowed to use exact names, but you could find out which 3 by yourself.

All 3 guilds have among others one same person trading and each market have around 800 tempered alloys slotted by this player in recent 3 days. I know this kind of picture isn't just this week phenomenon. Its always there at least for previous few months.

So, what you think could be a reason, why one person have total 2400 alloys slotted in market during 3 days, and two of this traders standing near each other? Overproduction? Just maybe... Just maybe this poor guy don't know where to put all those goods. I actually reported this guy few month a go with screenshots of his overproduction, because that time anonimous bot master was attacking me in some sort of spam. He was sending to me from his accounts no meaning messages like "gggg" in privat chat simultaneously ( i have video that ends right before crash). ZOS and PSN refused that time to do anything. There was enough accounts to crash my game, so i believe it proves that all (or most) of those bots is in one hands. I checked all those accounts i could see in chat window and found they have very similiar profiles (ids in one clishe, chinese language, same set of avatars). And i'm sure you will find chromium platings, slotted by this person too in all those guilds, if you check it by self. I cheked only one and there is 48 platings total slotted yesterday.

Maybe I could be wrong, but i think he is the one.

Sylvermynx

You need to remove the guild names and the player name from your post. Naming and shaming isn't allowed on the forum.

Trundik

Well, if i remove naming there will be no point in my message at all. But there is no shaming. I'm not sure that i'm right, but this is result of my own little investigation... And there is also no edit button i think

Sylvermynx

There's a gear icon next to the title bar of the post. Click that, then click Edit.

Sylvermynx

Now, that done, you should report this situation to Customer Support - in that ticket you can and should use the guild names and character name/ID. If there's a problem, CS will take care of it, but you won't be told what they did.

Trundik

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Now, that done, you should report this situation to Customer Support - in that ticket you can and should use the guild names and character name/ID. If there's a problem, CS will take care of it, but you won't be told what they did.

I know they will not. I already did all thats reports in past with screenshots, video, and that guy is still trading his cosmic amount of ore provided goods.

Sylvermynx

Well, report him/them again. You can't do anything about it by posting here....

Trundik

I wanna show that finding a bot user in our server is matter of 5 minutes checking markets in game, since we know one person uses a lot of bot accounts in same time. Its just matter of simple logic. If he have a lot of accounts farming, he should put all his refines somewhere. Voila, there he is showing drastically unusual amount of goods on sale.

Maybe if a lot of players report him. It will work, i don't know.

MidniteOwl1913

Trundik wrote: »

I wanna show that finding a bot user in our server is matter of 5 minutes checking markets in game, since we know one person uses a lot of bot accounts in same time. Its just matter of simple logic. If he have a lot of accounts farming, he should put all his refines somewhere. Voila, there he is showing drastically unusual amount of goods on sale.

Maybe if a lot of players report him. It will work, i don't know.

Personally, I don't think that ZOS cares much about bots. They are so very easy to spot and I too have noticed that many if not all have the same master. I think they are after jewelry mats which share nodes with blacksmithing mats. Those sell for quite a bit.

And it is irritating to me because there is no doubt in my mind that I would already have enough plating to gold my jewelry if not for the bots.

UntilValhalla13

I know I've personally reported a lot of bots over the years, but they're always there in the same places. Maybe zos likes having them because it makes their active player numbers look good on their spreadsheet.

Wolfpaw

With the constant pvp skill/armor sets balance swings I'm thankful for bot farmers. With no centralized trade/AH the monopoly of large trade guilds will keep the prices too high.

Parts of the ESO community have a life and no time to farm for weeks/months to gold out multiple toons to stay competitive every update.

NordSwordnBoard

You are not wrong, he is the one as you say. Alas, he is one of many, he is they, and they are not centralized. You cannot take skynet out with one dip in the lava pool, nor blot the sun from the sky to deny the machines their source of power.

Coexist with the machines, and you can buy mats without becoming a battery. Do not fight the tide with a bucket, use a submarine.

tldr: The bots are too profitable to stop, by the time they get bans they covered the cost of the banned accounts already.

LostHorizon1933

There once was a bot named gjvyjnnkhgl
Just a controller at the end of a cable
The nightblade did laugh—
Twisting Path in its path
And at mining it just was unable

DragonRacer

I am highly doubtful there is one particular person running the bot trains. But I would suspect there are several persons who each have their little assigned "armies".

The "worker bots" always have the same naming format, which is a random name assigned by PSN if you do not choose your own username or try to choose one that is already taken. It will suggest something like, say, afternoon_delight7 (not a real name - probably - just one I made up to illustrate naming convention format, ZOS mods). Where format is always word_wordnumeral. Usually, you will see one non-default user name in the middle of the mob of generic default usernames, so one can assume the non-default name is the "leader" of that bot train.

You will then notice this same type of default name format in sellers in all the capital city trading guilds and many of the chapter-capital trading guilds. Always the same format, always items like gold mats or nirncrux, always for less and less value than they used to sell for. I assume much of this bot-fueled in-game money either goes to these major trading guilds for higher and higher trader bids and/or some is siphoned off in some type of selling in-game gold for RL money exchange.

What's funny is two of my guildmates and I ran across a bot train last night that... actually talked to us. Which I've NEVER seen before. It was kinda creepy. They were farming mudcrabs in northern Alik'r Desert. There was one non-default PSN name who was clearly the bot leader and about 10+ sorcerer bots with default PSN names farming these crabs. We tried to disrupt them by stealing crab kills. Eventually, they all disappeared - likely logged off, maybe to try and change to an instance we weren't in.

Then they came back, minus the "leader" non-default PSN name person. It was at least some of the same bot train because I recognized one of the default names as having been there just moments before they'd all disappeared momentarily. The bots themselves were all nekkid Khajiit females (definitely not creepy at all *sigh*) standing in a row staring at their maps. Then they all got their staves out. Then they spoke two things in area chat, all 10+ bots, simultaneously in Chinese. First phrase was "Bian qu" which Google Translate says means "arranger". Then, as we stood there in front of the train, they all said "Ting hua", which apparently means "obey" - not sure if that was directed at US or not. Then they spoke IN ZONE CHAT for all the world to witness every single one of their bot usernames, telling us to "Step aside".

Like, really? Bot trains telling REAL players to "obey" and "step aside". Creepy as sin and wondering if I'm gonna be doxxed or DDOS'd now, frankly, for daring to disrupt their little farming party. I have two videos of the entire incident that I'll be uploading to my ZOS report, that I'd love to post here other than usernames are all clearly visible so I'm sure it would only serve to get this post yanked down.

Lumenn

DragonRacer wrote: »

I am highly doubtful there is one particular person running the bot trains. But I would suspect there are several persons who each have their little assigned "armies".

The "worker bots" always have the same naming format, which is a random name assigned by PSN if you do not choose your own username or try to choose one that is already taken. It will suggest something like, say, afternoon_delight7 (not a real name - probably - just one I made up to illustrate naming convention format, ZOS mods). Where format is always word_wordnumeral. Usually, you will see one non-default user name in the middle of the mob of generic default usernames, so one can assume the non-default name is the "leader" of that bot train.

You will then notice this same type of default name format in sellers in all the capital city trading guilds and many of the chapter-capital trading guilds. Always the same format, always items like gold mats or nirncrux, always for less and less value than they used to sell for. I assume much of this bot-fueled in-game money either goes to these major trading guilds for higher and higher trader bids and/or some is siphoned off in some type of selling in-game gold for RL money exchange.

What's funny is two of my guildmates and I ran across a bot train last night that... actually talked to us. Which I've NEVER seen before. It was kinda creepy. They were farming mudcrabs in northern Alik'r Desert. There was one non-default PSN name who was clearly the bot leader and about 10+ sorcerer bots with default PSN names farming these crabs. We tried to disrupt them by stealing crab kills. Eventually, they all disappeared - likely logged off, maybe to try and change to an instance we weren't in.

Then they came back, minus the "leader" non-default PSN name person. It was at least some of the same bot train because I recognized one of the default names as having been there just moments before they'd all disappeared momentarily. The bots themselves were all nekkid Khajiit females (definitely not creepy at all *sigh*) standing in a row staring at their maps. Then they all got their staves out. Then they spoke two things in area chat, all 10+ bots, simultaneously in Chinese. First phrase was "Bian qu" which Google Translate says means "arranger". Then, as we stood there in front of the train, they all said "Ting hua", which apparently means "obey" - not sure if that was directed at US or not. Then they spoke IN ZONE CHAT for all the world to witness every single one of their bot usernames, telling us to "Step aside".

Like, really? Bot trains telling REAL players to "obey" and "step aside". Creepy as sin and wondering if I'm gonna be doxxed or DDOS'd now, frankly, for daring to disrupt their little farming party. I have two videos of the entire incident that I'll be uploading to my ZOS report, that I'd love to post here other than usernames are all clearly visible so I'm sure it would only serve to get this post yanked down.

Yeah, saw a set of about 10 in grahtwood by the shrine a few weeks ago, Xbox na. Someone said(say)" w7@ are those BOTS." We went to look and sure enough, all similar garbled name but one # different. All in sync, all mount the brown horse and rode around the shrine a bit(in sync) All said "hi" in sync. Then ported out. I made a post asking how sophisticated their programing can get but for some reason it got buried quickly. Every time someone raised it back up a couple of people got really excited about every other topic until it drowned again. I suppose it just wasn't an interesting post 👀.

If the bots are still here after this long unfortunately I don't see them going anywhere. I've heard any number of reasons, from zos being unABLE to do anything to UNWILLING to do anything and all the reasons in-between and it's no good to speculate. Keep reporting them, I hope you make a dent(I honestly do. I think bots are foul and allow the ones willing to cheat to manipulate/gain control of the market) and good luck in your endeavors