Be advised: Bot farmers on PlayStation can kick you off the server

DragonRacer

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_Kevin

I know you two have your hands full with notifications today due to the art issue, but this video was just sent to me by a friend and it is ALARMING and needs to be witnessed.

As many know, bot farmers are an issue on both consoles, XBox and PlayStation. In this case, the video my friend sent me is from PlayStation North American server. You can recognize bots on our server because they will have a default-issued user name (pattern is always word_wordnumber, so a made-up example could be broken_glass8 or something to that effect), they will be low level, and their character name will be a smashed-up nonsense of letters that don't actually make a word or name at all. Often they are sorcerers using pets to assist when they are farming, say, mudcrabs. Usually, there is one "leader" who issues commands in Say chat to his controlled bot accounts (the actual ones farming). If you are close enough to them, you can sometimes see them issue commands or otherwise chat to each other in a non-English language (not naming the language in case that is viewed as racist or similar, but the bot farmers are generally not "local", from my experiences/encounters with them).

My friend was beating the bot farmers to nodes in Kenarthi's Roost, which disrupted their farming. Apparently, they got tired of this and LITERALLY CRASHED HIS GAME, kicking him to the character login screen by appearing to overload his chat box with whispers from all of the bot farmer accounts that were in the area. If you skip to the 2:30 mark on this video, you can see it in action. When he logged back in, they crashed him again.

This cannot possibly be acceptable, can it?

https://youtu.be/61n72roFNRE

Note to mods: Please keep this in General Discussion, at least for a hot minute. This is the subforum that gets the most traffic. The moment you move it somewhere else, it will not be seen.

EDIT: Corrected that it kicked him to the character login screen, not the main ESO title screen

Bobby_Digital81

After 9 years, I'm surprised that bots are still a thing on ESO. I've reported hundreds of these players that have the generic generated PSN name and like character names, but they just keeping making more. Hopefully, ZOS is working on something to deter them from ruining the game.

Lumenn

Good way to boot your friend and competing bots, of which we have plenty (I'm mostly Xbox na). As has been said before bots keep getting reported yet their presence is just getting stronger, bolder, and more advanced. Now they're booting customers who've paid for the game. Not a good rep to have zos. Can't really see that helping sales too much. @ZOS_Kevin @ZOS_GinaBruno

FluffWit

First things first it might be an idea to set yourself to offline so you can't be whispered if this is happening regularly.

The node bot farmers are gone from PC from what I've heard and they're gone from xbox from what I've seen- last I actually check was like 2 weeks ago. We still have level 3s farming nodes to sell the mats for real money but they aren't automated anymore.

Xbox also still has scrap farming bot trains though, I see them quite often in the usual spots.

In this case I watched the video and those aren't the kind of names I'd expect from bots- effort has been put into those IDs and gives the impression they're real players. Bot names tend to be stuff like "n35Sck27yu"- pretty much random strings of characters. Because they know they can get banned any minute and they like the names to be hard to read to make reporting harder.

In this case I suspect real players are responsible. Either ones who have a grudge against the farmer or ones who are financially linked to the bots.

DragonRacer

@FluffWit - As I explained in my OP, Sony has default username suggestions that all have the same pattern, like broken_scope7 or pretty_tulip9. Those are not names with thought, they are auto-generated and that’s what shows in my friend’s video.

The video largely shows just the bot ringleader as far as visually seeing him/her. The names shown in the whisper screen are NOT the character names (our bots also have gibberish character names like you describe). The names whispering him to crash him are PSN generically-made usernames. They are bots.

Lumenn

FluffWit wrote: »

First things first it might be an idea to set yourself to offline so you can't be whispered if this is happening regularly.

The node bot farmers are gone from PC from what I've heard and they're gone from xbox from what I've seen- last I actually check was like 2 weeks ago. We still have level 3s farming nodes to sell the mats for real money but they aren't automated anymore.

Xbox also still has scrap farming bot trains though, I see them quite often in the usual spots.

In this case I watched the video and those aren't the kind of names I'd expect from bots- effort has been put into those IDs and gives the impression they're real players. Bot names tend to be stuff like "n35Sck27yu"- pretty much random strings of characters. Because they know they can get banned any minute and they like the names to be hard to read to make reporting harder.

In this case I suspect real players are responsible. Either ones who have a grudge against the farmer or ones who are financially linked to the bots.

Xbox na still has node bots, not just scrap. Seen today, yesterday, day before, etc. I can remember a few days some weeks ago that someone took a stab at clearing them out in some of the obvious newbie areas, (ken roost etc)then they were back. In areas like crag or even glen, auridon, etc they never left. I personally absolutely hate bots, but I'm not above watching their farming routes a few times and jumping ahead of them for a bit each day. They never respond, never deviate, despite watching me get each node right before them, they eat the meat and throw up(although now they can somehow still harvest through the puke animation) and some run on cycles (15-30 minute increments, then ghjkd1734443 ports/logs out and ghjkd1734444 takes over the same exact route some minutes later) still automated. Exact same route with exact same "missteps" (getting "stuck" on a log, or a pause in the exact same spots) every rotation. I'm not saying someone isn't looking at it, but the node bots are definitely still there.

Dr_Con

This is very concerning, but what's more concerning is the lack of control over these bots on Zenimax/Bethesda/Microsoft/Sony's behalf.

katanagirl1

@DragonRacer I’m curious about the Sony default username suggestions being a possibility. Are you also talking about default character names too? Whenever I create a new character there is just a blank text box so I don’t know how that would work.

Bobby_Digital81

Like @DragonRacer mentioned about the bot's character's name, "their character name will be a smashed-up nonsense of letters that don't actually make a word or name at all." Something like "gghdffvzz", as an example. Can easily find videos of other players reporting farm bots on PS/NA on Reddit, Youtube, etc, over the years and can see what the bots names are.

DragonRacer

katanagirl1 wrote: »

@DragonRacer I’m curious about the Sony default username suggestions being a possibility. Are you also talking about default character names too? Whenever I create a new character there is just a blank text box so I don’t know how that would work.

No, I am only very specifically talking about usernames. Not the character name within ESO, which are two entirely different things. There are no suggested character names. That is a blank box, as you said, upon character creation, where bot accounts choose something like aerhto3h5q3ogddvy and normal non-bot people, you know, actually try and make a real character name. My main toon's character name is Shuras.

My main Sony PlayStation account name is DragonRacer13. I have had that since PS3 days. When I got deep into playing Red Dead Online the past few years, I created a second PlayStation account. Because unlike with ESO, you cannot make multiple toons on Red Dead. My main account was a girl and the max number of horses you can own is 10. I created a second PlayStation account so that I could try out a male character (aka different outfit options) and acquire 10 different horses from my main account (different breeds, different coat colors, etc). When I tried to create a PSN user name I wanted, that name was already in use by another player so Sony "helpfully" suggested I could use "one of these other names instead" and it was about 3-4 generically-created names to pick from that is the same format of all bots, such as rusty_nail 7 or tulip_garden8 or summer_breeze5. They are ALL that same style of word, underscore, word, number.

Now, I have absolutely seen these types of generic auto-generated-by-Sony account names in game with big CP numbers and actually being real players. I assume them to be someone who either tried a user name like I did and, when it wasn't available, took whatever auto-generated account name they liked or maybe they didn't have an account name idea at all and rolled the dice and picked the auto-generated one they liked best. Not ALL generic PlayStation account names are bots, but ALL bots ARE generic PlayStation names. PlayStation users can literally see that I am speaking truth and knowledge by going to any starter zone littered with 10+ level 3 sorcerers farming mudcrabs in unison or the handful running mechanically from one blacksmithing node to the next, look at their generic auto-generated PSN account name, and their fkl058ugsrgs7 character name, and their behavior, and realize they are bots. That's literally the easiest way to tell a real bot train from one random player farming nodes with an actual thought-put-into-it PSN account name and in-game character name.

It's also why I'm a little annoyed about the XBox player earlier saying "those aren't bots, those names had thought put into them". Apologies, but you do not play on my platform. I have literally, in recent history, experienced being suggested a generic PSN account name when making that second account, so I know what they look like and know what they are. If anyone does not believe me or is confused about what I mean, I would be perfectly happy to start creating a new Sony PlayStation account, try to take my own username that I already have and know is already in use, and screenshot for you folks the "Sorry, that name is already taken, but here are some other names you could use!" screen where you can see these default auto-generated name styles. Let me know, and I'll do it today and upload a picture to prove the veracity of my words.

FantasticFreddie

This is equal parts hilarious and terrifying.

Like it's awful that bots can kick you, but it's hilarious you annoyed them enough for their handler to take notice.

[snip] around and find out I guess.


Hopefully zos can sort out how to prevent them.

[edited for profanity bypass]

SeaGtGruff

Report them and include any documentation you can-- chat transcripts, video, etc. Farming certainly isn't against the TOS, but whisper-spamming you to deliberately cause your game to crash should be.

Once they do it, switch to offline mode so they can't keep doing it. Then switch back to online mode when you're finished with your own farming.

DragonRacer

Okay, I went ahead and started a new account (did not finish it) on PlayStation so that you all can see what I am talking about regarding these generic auto-generated suggested user names (not ESO character names - two entirely different things). I do stand corrected in that the format can apparently be either an underscore OR a hyphen, but you can clearly see the obvious naming convention style:



In this case, I didn't even start trying to make a user name myself - Sony already had generic suggestions offered below.

Now, go look at the bot trains in starter zones on PS4 and PS5. And tell me what you see. Account names like these with character names of iffngthghoawro8

NordSwordnBoard

DragonRacer wrote: »

Okay, I went ahead and started a new account (did not finish it) on PlayStation so that you all can see what I am talking about regarding these generic auto-generated suggested user names (not ESO character names - two entirely different things). I do stand corrected in that the format can apparently be either an underscore OR a hyphen, but you can clearly see the obvious naming convention style:



In this case, I didn't even start trying to make a user name myself - Sony already had generic suggestions offered below.

Now, go look at the bot trains in starter zones on PS4 and PS5. And tell me what you see. Account names like these with character names of iffngthghoawro8

They got a thing for mothy bumpers

Lumenn

That's actually kinda sad, that you pay for a game in which you'd have to "go dark" and hide from bots just so they don't boot you from playing. As I said earlier, not a good rep to have, and can certainly hurt sales. Imagine if some content creators use that video to "review" the game.

Durian

ESO needs modern MMO social functionality like:

- allow whispers from friends only
- allow whispers from guild mates only.

And many more. Hopefully this is part of the fabled upcoming QoL update.

alternatelder

Years ago this chat spam crashing was discovered by people on console (at least on PS), just type a bunch of garbage and crash someone, many people started abusing it, sending walls of text to random people. I was sure they fixed it. Apparently having many people at once doing it can still trigger it, and this getting out will no doubt start a chain of that abusive behavior again.

Side note: I'd like to apply as a GM for Playstation, Zos. I will do it for free even.

SeaGtGruff

I would think that Sony would also consider this type of behavior to be against their TOS and that the offending players could be banned by Sony as well as by ZOS.

katanagirl1

Yeah I totally agree with you on the usernames, see that all the time in starter zones and Craglorn.

I was just curious if the same generic suggestions came up for character names. I guess the scripting for creating the bots just uses an autogenerated system and increments each one then, filling the text box that way.

Mayrael

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_Kevin
This is a very, very serious problem, comparable to poor game performance or maybe even more serious, because it is even more frustrating. I understand that the owners of those platforms also have to be involved (which can cause additional delays and problems), but just confirming that you are working on a solution to the problem would be appreciated.

DragonRacer

katanagirl1 wrote: »

Yeah I totally agree with you on the usernames, see that all the time in starter zones and Craglorn.

I was just curious if the same generic suggestions came up for character names. I guess the scripting for creating the bots just uses an autogenerated system and increments each one then, filling the text box that way.

Nah. Neither the game nor Sony provide any suggested auto-names for ESO characters within the game, just the console account name/user name. In ESO, you just get the blank box to fill in after making your character's looks. I suspect you're right in that the botters probably use some sort of script to just auto-generate their random smashed-up character names.

DragonRacer

Hmmm, I suppose this thread and alert will fall by the wayside now that we're all distracted by the new shinies from yesterday's Twitch stream.

A shame.